prompt: syrup, title: the real stuff in misc. flash fiction

“Gimmie the real stuff,” the old man said each and every time he ate there, “not the fake crap they gave us in ‘Nam.” Whenever he was in that diner, he ordered the pancakes and eggs and whenever he ordered it, which again was each and every time he was there, he said that phrase exactly. If the wait staff were in training or the servers were feeling particular charitable, she or he would ask him to elaborate on the matter, and he’d suddenly shine like the goddamned sun.

“Army wouldn’t give us the real stuff,” he’d grouse, grabbing the other pitcher of maple syrup from that server, “they were too cheap, we didn’t matter at all, not our lives and not our bellies either, it was sugar beet sauce mixed in with wood chips, not the real stuff, that good stuff.” It didn’t matter that the particular diner only served real maple, each and every one of the pitchers filled up with honest Vermont, he always had to go for the second, like he was putting one over on someone. “That good stuff,” he’d repeat as he poured it over the pancake stack, “damn right.”

The terrible breakfasts were far from the worst part of his time serving in Vietnam, of course, but complaining about the food was at least more socially acceptable than the things he’d repeat over and over to family and friends, unrelenting, slowly pushing all of them away. The heroin needles filled with their own syrup cut with god-knows-what, probably far worse than oak dust. Holding some relatively new friend in your arms as he bled out for reasons only Henry Kissinger seemed to understand. Syphilitic hookers, rot-gut whiskey and the bombs, the explosions, the cacophony that kept you up at night until you fully acclimated to it and then could no longer sleep without it.

That’s the truly terrifying thing about being human, we are so astonishing adaptable. We can get used to nearly anything, just because we have to, but that adaptation can linger for the rest of our lives, even if we get back to what we once thought “normal”. Get through bombs in your dreams and they might be there for the rest of your life. The very tools that push us through the worst of traumas can be the very maladaptation that drives us mad on down the line. Can leave us worse than death sometimes, like the lonely man in the booth repeating the hell that was his path, as if it were some funny charming story, because it makes the bombs stop for some little while. Even if it pushes every non-transactional interaction away from you for the rest of your days.

“Gimmie the real stuff” as a loop the man was stuck in, repeating like an overheating machine gun, until the day he died. Not all prisoners of war get stuck in bamboo cages. Others are left to waste away in the prisons of their heads instead.