Letters to Sugar

 I'm seeing him again, sugar. Dug into my foxhole with a week’s grime on my face and a fear of death like I’ve never known, I catch him marching through the thick jungle like there’s some parade all the rest of us are too husked to see. He’s easy to spot—what with that gum pop pink hair of his and that bleached skin like it was his skeleton that was on the outside. But he’s even easier to lose—I look to the sun then back to the jungle, and he’s disappeared with the blinking black spots on my vision. I'm thinking then that I should be grateful for him, his giving me of something to search for that ain’t a bobbing helmet with a red star patch.

I guess I am grateful. I’d rather those quiet moments where he’s humming Bugle Boy to me like he’s forgotten what war we’re in than the whirling and the gunning and the burning of smoke in my crybaby eyes. He says he’s trying to help, says it in his tinny voice. He says his name is Honey. He wears our uniform and leaves the helmet straps hanging like the rest of us, but he ain’t one of us. He thinks he’s living and breathing just like the rest of us, but he ain’t. That’s alright, though. I was never a judging man.

I miss you, sugar. I’ll say it every time. I like writing these letters, though Davey and Lou always make fun. Davey says I write too much, but I don’t think he writes enough. He has a stack of postcards in his pack, and when he thinks it's been long enough since the last letter home, he takes one and cuts it in half; uses one side for his momma, and the other for his lady. He’s funny.

Anyway, I’ll keep watching out for Honey, and I’ll keep your pitchur safe. 

And love, Khame.

Well, Davey went and died. Went out for a piss into the jungle because we’ve been stationed in an old village with no privacy. Lou heard him first, waking up to his screams. And then came gunfire from the trees, and we couldn’t hear Davey no more because everyone was shouting; foreign shouting from the treeline and our own cries as we left our dreamscapes and started shooting back. Then it was silent. Then the sun came up. 

The Cong retreated and left poor Davey. I came up on him with his foot stucked in a ground trap. I won’t tell you what it looked like, sugar. You don’t got the stomach for it. Most of these guys want to be with their God when they are dead, but I confess that I don’t know if Davey had religion, and if he did, which one he had. That made me think I should find religion fast, because now Chance of Death was next to me, complaining about the heat. Except that’s exactly what Pa did, and I can’t say whether or not Nirvana waited for him in death. It can’t look good to only think of religion when dying seems so near, like it is what always comes before, praying then like the tilling of the burial ground.

I hope Davey is where he’d like to be, at least. I'm gonna think that he got a bullet in the head and died quick. That’s what I said to Lou, who was quiet and running his fingers in the dirt, and who’s tears I wouldn’t have noticed if sundown wasn’t planting them full of orange light. I said to him: ‘Davey went quick,’ but I don’t think he believed me. He should try to. Years down the line, if I get there, I’ll forget I was lying, and when I recall Davey, I’ll think: ‘It’s sad that he went, but at least he went quick.’ But maybe some people can’t deal like I can. That’s what makes me a good soldier, sugar. So I’ll keep on dealing and writing and looking at your pitchur and wishing I were anywhere else. 

None of us wants to be here. But college wasn’t in our cards, and so we had no way to serve our great America that wasn’t here in the mud, eating dry tinned rations, and dying, but hopefully killing on the way out. I could’ve said I was a consheentshous objector. Said it was against my religion, even though me and Pa never were good Buddhist boys. But there wasn’t much else to do after his funeral except make a life for myself, so I thought: ‘Why not?’ 

I keep coming back to Pa, and his little Buddha statue on the pickup’s dashboard. He put a mini cowboy hat on it—a gift from some young girlfriend, I imagine, felting it in the grime of her trailer—and announced he was reading back the teachings. Bettering himself. I was ten, and even then I said, ‘Sure, Pa.’ 

That night Davey died, Honey slipped into my foxyhole with something bunched in his arms, smelling like burnt sugar. He pushed the bundle into my arms, and what it was is what I’m writing on right now. Davey’s stack of postcards! Honey must’ve snatched them from his bag before they took his belongings for shipping home. I thanked him so much, and he smiled and nodded, and in the past eight months, I had never felt happier than I did just then. Then, Honey put his cheek to the top of my head and his skinny arms around my neck, saying it was always nice to hold someone. It felt, then, that I was a worn dog, there with a made-up man lulling me and dead Davey’s postcards in my hand. I looked down, and anything left of the good feelings Honey brought fizzled out because on top of the stack was a card cut in half. And oh lord, sugar.

But love, Khame.

I'm thinking about you, sugar. I'm thinking about what to name a dog I’d like to have, and what sort of house we’d save up for. I’d like for some children, because we’ll make a fine Ma and Pa. I’ll keep calling you sugar, and you’ll like it so much. 

We’re moving back to base camp, which is on the longest stretch of beach. Walking back on different roads, though, and the bugs seem to be meaner. There’s not a single second where I ain’t scratching at some part of myself. But at least I got skin to scratch. 

This mugginess takes me to the too-long summers back home, when the heat simmered in the bayou that bordered our trailer. We were the last civilized bit before the wildness of the swamp, and all the critters and cratters that murked around in it. Some days—like crawfish days—I liked the heat and the sloughing through mud in my rubbers, because I knew at the end of it I would be holding a chilled soda can to my neck and sucking up our fresh bounty with Pa on the porch. Other days, it felt like there was a stifling corpse hand over the whole of my face, just as it feels now, and there was nothing I could do but wait for something so sweet as death to take me. 

It was on one of those days when death came close. Pa was out at work, and I had been out too; Miss Auntie Kiki had rolled out her honey-pop stand in front of the library, and it took me the whole of the afternoon to figure out how to snipe one without her catching and beating me, like she did usually. I was sitting smug and good on a lawn chair in the grass, licking sweat from the pop as it spilled onto my fingers and enjoying the ending day, when every muscle and seizing tendon in my body loosened in one swoop. There is a buzz of life you don’t know is in your head until it leaves you, and that fled me, too. 

The sun was getting gone, and still I was melting. I rolled from the chair to the ground and tried to thrash back some life, but whatever had squeezed out the firing in me now smushed me down like dough. I had done wrong earlier. I stole ice pops, and in some cruel twist of fate, now I was an ice pop liquefying into the dirt. But I didn’t want to die. Can’t you see, sugar? I didn’t want to die.

 Then, like an angel, there was the Buddha staring at me in my eyes, but actually it was Pa, who could never get the fat out of his cheeks. He got me up and drug me in, splashing water from the sink onto my face as I moaned on the cool floor. It was a heat stroke, and he had some capsules for it, so I was healed, though it didn’t feel like it. The whole time, he watched me without watching me, like I really had melted and was on the floor as a puddle in the shape of a boy. 

I only had the good sense to be shamed after I woke from my nap. I can still see Pa sat outside, the red-hot smear of his cigarette twirling into the newly-docked night. I watched him from the other side of the screen door. There was the sound of thick, grainy prayers I thought I forgot coming from a cassette recorder. I assumed he had forgotten them, too, because I struggled to remember the last time he played them for us. The deepness of the banded voices linked with the scratchy chirp of cicadas into an ugly song I liked. I fell back asleep listening to it, and so my dreams were of little monk bugs and Pa’s face—or maybe it was mine—among them. I had the same dream just last night. I should not have thought of him. That hollowness returns to me, so I sat down and wrote this letter. 

He’d never know that I’d enlist. I'm not sure what he’d think. I’m not sure if that really matters anymore.

I’d like to update you on Honey, but I haven’t seen him since the village. Sometimes I hear him humming in the tall grass all around us, but sometimes it turns out just to be the wind. 

With love, Khame.

I’ve got this awful habit of thinking, sugar. And they’re not thoughts, but hungry little beasties with fur like steel wool and they eat at my pink brain and whatever else is there, gnawing with a termite-like hunger, and it’s the worst when they find my ear holes, because they start this screeching that bleeds me without drawing any blood and I find that I am afraid and I am hurting and I can’t do nothing to stop it but try to shake them out one ear. 

So I need something to do. I have written you a thousand letters, sugar, and a thousand more I have left unfinished. Whenever there’s a bad row of firebombings or a death of one I knew, I begin to color you in. There is your skin and your hair, and the light in your eyes, and I am the drawn moth, and I ask you not to swat me away, thank you. Writing becomes not so much pen to paper, but instead a real, living conversation as you sit in front of me with long legs. It is getting harder to color you in, even as I stare so hard at your pitchur that I’m afraid my eyes will burst. The heat is getting to me, and I am melting. 

I found Honey at base camp. It was still dark when we arrived, so his hair was a beacon as it reflected the campfire where he sat. I couldn’t help but go to him. It was easier after all that time apart; I missed his company, though that fact burned me with shame. Please don’t think it betrayal. It’s only that I’ve always needed sweet things, and he answers me when you can’t.

But, tonight, he was not answering me. Wouldn’t even look at me. I peered around his dolly cheek and found that hollowness I know well, and it got me, because I never knew Honey to be hollow when he was always so whole, whole worlds away at times, but whole all the same. He was not meant to dawdle in emptiness, is what I am saying. It scared me, because how deep were we when even pretend men started wishing for better times? I looked at the sand, its tousled skin. I knew that I was running out of Davey’s postcards. I had written to you too many times. There was a clock, ticking, and I was scared of how I would be once it hit midnight.  I looked back up, and it was red eyes on me, neon and ill. And fearful, greatly fearful. Honey said, ‘There’s war tomorrow,’ like we haven’t been in one all this time, and it was simply showing at the movies. ‘Bad, blissful war,’ he continued. ‘Please. Just one more time.’

I knew how he meant. I went forward and held him, feeling skin and learning muscle and finding the precious bones of his fingers. Still, I would not call him real, but as I collapsed into him as I thought he would collapse into me, I knew him to be as real as you, sugar. 

He thanked me, thanked me. Then went sorry, sorry. A soupy rolling came to my stomach, and I wrenched myself away and threw. Honey patted my back and hummed as I pressed my forehead into the sand. The baby dunes around me cupped my ears so all noise was an acre away, and Honey had given me a warm sweetness so far from illness that I could barely believe my health was racketing away.

 I hadn’t a clue how, but I began to meditate. And I supposed that maybe Nirvana wasn’t so far away, as long as my head was in the sand. 

Still with love, Khame

Been stuck in a medical tent for the past day. Honey set up a game of solitaire over my legs, thinking he was funny. When the medic saw me—unaware, he balanced his clipboard on Honey’s head—I grabbed his wrist and told him it was malaria. He wriggled away and said it was likely a bad bug. I hated him for a second, but then he gave me a lemon drop as he left, and so he is a fine one. Honey gossiped to me as he played, telling me that Mac’s serving time had just been reset because of the injury that put him out to a hospital back home, and that our commander had a secret chest of whiskey in his tent. I nodded along, grateful for the stream of words, but I could tell that Honey wasn’t interested, really. He’d look over his shoulder, then back at me, then to the cards, constantly circling his head. I suppose he thought I wouldn’t be able to catch the fear that remained in him if he kept moving and talking.

‘What’s scaring you?’ I asked softly, because he looked to me like a child close to crying.

He went still and focused on a dot of space far to the left of me. Finally, he murmured, ‘You can’t hear them, but I can.’ I asked who. He said, ‘The dying ones.’ I leaned forward and—because there would never be a better time—asked, ‘How much do you know about dying, then?’

He seemed miffed, but only for a second, because then great waves of sadness made his features go lax. ‘I can recognize it as surely as anyone, and even surer where others can’t. Because of all these little wars and all these little boys I’ve shepherded to the better place, I think.’ 

That settled on me like silt settling on a creekbed. ‘And you’re shepherding me,’ I said, because I felt I knew, and it did not scare me as much as I thought it would. I had escaped death once, but if it were back again to take me with knotty fingers and hair like washed away blood, I would let it. It was the way of things, and I understood—truly, then—that we both needed someone to hold. I thought of Pa, you, and the Buddha. Davey, even, and all the blank letters he didn’t know he left me. I must have said goodbye, somewhere in the haze of it.

But Honey shook his head and put a hand on my wrist. ‘No,’ he said, so simply. Then, I was the child close to crying, because even death refused to take me. ‘I was,’ he continued. An oldness swept over his face; he wasn’t young and bleary any longer, but still and clear-eyed. ‘When I come around, most soldiers think me a bad man. They try to fight me off. But not you. Someone was doing my job for me, loosening your lid, getting you easy and willing.’  Wordlessly, he plucked your pitchur from my breast pocket and placed it beneath the king on his solitaire spread.

You sit sideways on a stool, your long legs stretched out and hooked together by the ankle. You are so pretty pinning up your curls, but you’re also ditzy, because your bra strap is falling and you haven’t seemed to notice, there surrounded by a dozen slithering limbs vying for your attention, naked bodies like plucked swans trying to fly. You, at the center of it all, like the single dot of space at the end of a long road, letting me run to you, then taking me into you.

I collapsed into a deep hollow, and I wasn’t crying but shrieking, and then you reached out through the paper and stroked my cheek, and all the beasties woke and hammered around in my skull and there was Pa and then me, wringing my hands alone in the trailer, and then there was the recruiter asking what I had planned for the future, anyway, and he was right, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he? It was the night before I went off to basic training that I flipped through the skins magazine. I saw you, decided, cut you out and folded you up, and slipped you into my pocket. You were always with me, even when I was deployed and found my mortality was a fairy man with pink hair and white skin, winking at me through a whole crowd of my kind: boys who could die, easy. You were sweetness I couldn’t taste anywhere else, and I got sick on you.

Then, Honey kissed my forehead, dragged me from the cot, and danced us out onto the shore, which I could only tell by a sudden chill on my skin. There were a thousand cracks in my skull, so I closed my eyes against the head pain. Water started lapping at my boots. Into the ocean, then, and all I could do was bend my head into his shoulder. Honey said, ‘I only wanted a friend, but it won’t do for you to be a friend of mine. Not where I’m going. Oh, I’m so sorry, Khame. So very, very sorry.’ 

I blubbered that I was sorry, too, for acting like a baby. 

‘It’s alright. You’re just as scared as I am tired,’ he said. ‘And I am so tired.’ The sea level was up to my shoulders, now, and I opened my eyes to see him kicking hard to keep his face above the dark water. ‘Tired of the way of things, I guess, and just tired, too.’ Slivers of moonlight ran along the edges of the turning tide, weakly lighting our way. I wondered how far he would take us. I then wondered if I could find the strength within myself to swim back to shore.

  ‘I’ll ask of you only one more thing.’ 

I nodded.

‘It’ll be hard for you to do, but you have to.’

I swallowed seawater and coughed, then nodded. I swore I would do anything, as long as he didn’t leave me to rot. Or, if it was rotting we would be doing, I would be okay with that, just as long as I wasn’t doing it alone.

Honey, his face like a porcelain doll’s in waves of black velvet, said: ‘Push me out to sea.’

I held tighter to his shoulders and weakened my kicking. ‘I won’t. I won’t.’ He sneered, and his teeth were yellow. He clawed at my neck, dunked my head in the water once, twice, then brought me back up, and I found that I was gasping for air.

‘You don’t feel that?’ His tinny voice made his words sound like metal cans sliding against each other, brash and harsh and untaken by the growing wind. ‘Cool breath in your nose and mouth! Cool breath like ice pops on hot days! I’m not asking this of you, I’m telling you. Push me out to sea,’ he repeated. His voice softened, his hands trembling where they pushed at my fat cheeks. ‘I’m too scared to do it myself.’

I breathed and then breathed and then breathed. Honey was right, sugar. I’ve never tasted anything so good in my whole life. The last thing I said before I let go was Thank you.

… 

I’ve gone past thinking of you, sugar, and our fake future. I’ve gone past thinking of Pa, too, though there wasn’t much to think about except that I loved him and still miss him, and will never stop loving and missing him. And, of course, there was always the truth of Honey. When I let him go, I watched him drift away until his pink hair disappeared behind a wave. 

Now, I’ve been thinking of the Buddha, and also of Nirvana. I should’ve been a better little buddhist boy. I should’ve actually been a buddhist boy, and not a boy who saw religion sometimes in the icons Pa put up, and through Pa’s path of enlightenment that he never—I don’t think—achieved. He bumbled drunk along that path, so I never thought of it as a straight way to go. But he really tried, so I’m thinking of it now.

I don’t want to be here anymore, and it’s not just because I don’t want to die. That’s a whole other thing I’ve been figuring out—that it’s living I want to do, anyway I make it. I could be looking for enlightenment, or just someone to share breath with. Right now, I want to go home, even when there isn’t a soul waiting for me. Before I burn your pitchur and all these mock letters, I’d like to thank you, too. I suppose you won’t exist once I forget about you, but I’m not sure how I could go forgetting any time soon. I promise I won’t. I’ll remember you sweetly, like sugar and honey.  

Khame. 

Dear Honey,

I made it home. It’s peach season in Louisiana, so I had my first one in a long time. I forgot how sweet they were, and how they would make my teeth ache.

I am writing from the porch and watching wind and sunlight move through the trees. I’ve dug up Pa’s collection of the scriptures and have started reading them, but I ain’t sure if they’re for me. I'm not worried, though. I’ll find something, now that I’ve started looking. 

Love, Khame. 

Bernadette Lehel ‘26

I was inspired mainly by my sister, who had been very interested in depicting war and it's effects in her chosen media: visual art. However, I also wanted to flip it on its head at least a little bit, which is where the idea of Honey came from.