T.R. Hendricks

The PCS His sedan cruises along Interstate 10, heading towards Tucson. Somewhere out his driver side window is the Mexico border, while the good old USofA stretches for miles to the north on his passenger side. He’s surrounded by the serene beauty of the New Mexico desert, not a single man made structure in sight save for the hardball road he is on and the occasional exit sign. The tan and burnt orange soil is interspersed by patches of scrub brush and short, prickly bushes.…

The clock under the cage says it’s 2:21 p.m. and the neon orange second hand just keeps winding. Any minute now. On the schedule practice starts at 2:30, but Coach is always a few minutes early. The damn drill sergeant tries to squeeze every last minute out of the day, even though their practices are already three hours or more. Jesse isn’t feeling it today. As they straighten and bend back down into their stretch, he’s in a sour mood, brought on by soreness, self-imposed…

The stone walls reverberate with the thrum of the crowd just above the gate tunnel he stands in. They are already in a frenzy with anticipation, the first eleven combatants having been introduced. Up ahead the twelfth and final contestant argues with the tournament organizers, but Artinaz cannot hear what is being said over the roar in the arena. He looks up from his mop, (he always had to come down here to mop up after the participants entered, in case any fluids got left…

The command post is packed with the junior leadership teams from both Bravo companies. That’s how the higher ups had decided to match them for the duration of the transition period, by their phonetic alphabet designators. So Alpha Company of this battalion matched with Alpha of that battalion, and so on and so forth, until the entire 1st Cavalry Division and 3rd Infantry Division had counterparts with which they would learn from over the next four weeks. Four weeks. Incredibly close and impossibly far. Now…

Stay Under the Overhang 1981. His Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme backfires as it pulls into the employee lot outside of the Control Building. Upon graduating the academy, he (along with practically every other male graduate) was assigned to the Housing Detention for Men, shortened to HDM by both employees and occupants of the building. Finished in 1933, it is the eldest of the jails on New York City’s own Australia, Riker’s Island. Happy that the car managed to make the journey from his native Massapequa, a…

Lazy bastards, every last one of them. Lazy and unseasoned, even though their bluster would have you believe that they are the Aesir themselves, walking in the realm of Midgard. Fools, young fools full of piss and nothing more. The old man sighs at the younger men’s latest outburst of whining. True, the sun is already beating down on them despite the early morning hour, and the unseasonable heat refuses to abate even though it is late September, but still. He remembers a time when…

Terse refused his fate. He refused to believe that he was destined to be the smallest, to never reach above the rest. He felt it in his entire being, his existence was meant for something greater than the culmination of the cycles he had spent on this vast plain up to this point. Terse yearned for answers, for the end of the mystery that lay beyond the great ridge and pit that divided his world from…well from whatever was on the other side of those…

Elizabeth, Liz to everyone but her Uncle Rodrigo, clutches her father’s hand tightly. Consumed by boundless curiosity, her eyes dart all around town as they progress through her daddy’s errands. The air is hot, stale, and as always, dusty. There aren’t any paved roads in town, although she has seen a few in her short life further north, when her daddy had to bring the family along for work that lasted a few weeks. Liz hates the dust, orange and encompassing, it gets into every…

A man is on his knees, sitting back on his heels. Is he even still a man? Somewhere far off he believes he is, once upon a time he knew he was. Now, in this moment, he’s not so sure. There isn’t much to corroborate. It is dark around him, cloudy, with a violent swirling that obscures everything beyond, like being inside a sandstorm. Yet, nothing pelts him, the wind isn’t roaring. There is just silence, strange and disconcerting given what his eyes present. It…