The Vortex - A Flash Fiction Story

The Vortex

by Jim Hauenstein

Hearing Margarette scream,

Kenneth Lawenski jumps off the leisure chair he was plastered to and begins heading towards the bathroom door.

Before his wife's terrifying cries pierced the warm, humid Florida air, he is fixated, in a trance, about War.

He's back in a firefight.

Back in the jungles of Vietnam.

The flashback is triggered by an explosion which sees half of Kenneth and Margarette's home disappear.

Kenneth at first doesn't realize what is happening.

The explosion sent his mind reeling back to the Quang Nam Province,
specifically the city of Da Nang, Vietnam.

It was less than two months prior,

in October of Nineteen-Sixty-Five.

Ken was living in a hooch, or Quonset hut with his pregnant Vietnamese, sometimes housekeeper, sometimes girlfriend.

Fighting the Viet Cong and his demons.

He's wondering how the Marine Corp
could have dropped him off,
on November 2^nd.

In a San Francisco Airport.

When only three days before he was in a firefight,
late at night, against a bunch of rabid Viet Cong, with an M14 rifle.

Nothing made sense anymore.

At home, or in his mind.

He was called a murderer.

A killer of babies.

Long haired freaky people, complete strangers, wearing army uniforms with sewn on flowers, and words like love and peace,

would come up to him, telling him, “Peace Man,” while holding up the World War Two Victory Sign with their fingers.

He wanted to break those fingers.

The American People were disgusted with drafted Soldiers like him who were just doing their jobs.

Disgusted with the United States Armed Forces for fighting a war where clearly the objective was not to win,

but to perpetuate War for the sake of Big Business.

He thought about Nguyet.

The girl he left behind.

Someone who obviously cared for him.

She would be having his child soon.

Before being discharged,

he went to the Navy's JAG unit where he knew a guy and had his Will made out so Nguyet and their child would receive his Pension and Life Insurance Policy if by chance he never made it out of there alive.

Even now, being back in the States, he made sure it was iron clad, where those two would benefit from his death, and not his wife of seven years.

He was sure he loved Margarette, or at one time had loved her.

But how could she know what it is like living in constant denial of your own mortality.

With all the death that surrounds a person in the jungles of Vietnam.

  Margarette's cries finally breaks his reverie.

Kenneth is on his feet, gripping the bathroom door handle, as the wood around it disintegrates.

Before his eyes, standing on what was once his hallway,

looking down, he sees a whirlpool of mud and water.

His wife, sits in their bathtub, as it goes around and around.

Margarette can't stop screaming, while holding onto the sides of the tub, circling, falling deeper into the vortex of a sink hole.

Ken isn't panicking.
What is death to him.

For the last two years in Vietnam, death was a constant companion.

It was the only friend that had made it home with him.

At first, he thinks there is nothing he can do for Margarette.

But the panic she is experiencing brings back that old flame into his heart.

He can't let her die alone.

He couldn't let her die alone.

The next time the porcelain makeshift boat floats by, Kenneth jumps into it, immediately grabbing his wife, yelling, “Kiss me. Kiss me now!”

He pulls her face to his, pressing their lips together, forcing Margarette to stop her piercing cries.

Holding each other, like the young lovers they once were.

Both, close their eyes.

Tears run down Kenneth's face for the first time in years.
He is finally feeling something inside his heart.

An emotion he hasn't felt since before Vietnam.

This is Jim Hauenstein,

And,

That's my newest Flash Fiction Story and I'm sticking to it!

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