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Brooke

the bracelet.

The following text is completely and entirely authored by me, Brooke Arceneaux.
All content is original and Copyright, 2011. 

 

 

The Bracelet

By Brooke Arceneaux

Her heart began beating a little bit faster as she approached the old barracks. It was nothing like she had imagined. Alan had described the place in his letters so vividly, but this was not what she’d pictured. In his last letter to her, he'd described the towering mountains he could see from his window and how here, on the island, everything felt so wide open. She glanced down at the golden bracelet on her wrist, a gift from her husband long ago. She rarely wore the golden band. The memories it invoked were stronger when she wore it. Its eerie energy was disconcerting.  Even still, not a day had passed where she did not picture Alan sitting in his barracks room, writing that letter. And not a day had passed where she didn't also picture Alan, ducking for cover, fighting for his life, reaching out for something, someone, before his last breath was taken. Those images haunted her memory and broke her heart day after day. She hoped that here, in the place where he took his last breath, she would find closure. Of what kind she did not know. But she knew that coming here, finally, would bring her rest.

 After the bombings and devastation in ’41, she expected to find something grand erected there in memory of those lost. But there were no stone markers, nothing leading her path to the wall, not even a welcoming bench on which to sit and reflect. It was just a regular, unassuming building that looked like the rest of the giant, beige warehouses that lined the street there, all products of cookie-cutter, lowest-bidder construction. The chipping army-brown paint was standard. And the tall concrete block walls stood uniform and unyielding. After fifty-six years it still remained unchanged, preserved in order to remember. The brochure from the Hickam Tours office had said so. She supposed that their idea of remembrance was different than hers. As she drew closer to the north-facing wall, she could see the building’s one distinctive feature.  From the street they had been hard to make out with her aged vision and she had forgotten her bifocals back at the hotel. Now with a clearer view of the barrack’s outer wall, her stride slowed, each step more cumbersome than the last. Finally, she found herself standing just inches from the building staring in the face of both suffering and rest.  Breathing deep, she reached out her wrinkled, weathered hand and laid her fingers over the bullet hole.  

  

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