'Scar Tissue' by Melissa Flores Anderson

I drew the short stick and had to invite the gray-haired senior into my office for a chat. We took turns, with the elderly folks who stopped by the newsroom to pitch stories. Always something no one cared to read about, like how their grandchild won a school spelling seven states over. Never worth more than a couple sentences, but they’d use up as much time as we’d spend on reporting a front-page story. I expected the same as the man sat at the chair in my office. Bill Thompson, he said his name was. He placed a frayed folder on my desk.

“I’m hoping you can help,” he said.

He handed me yellowed paper, and as I read, I saw they were discharge papers from the U.S. Army. Decades before I was born. The same war as my grandfather.

“I was injured in battle, and never got my purple heart.”

Bill looked at me, his eyes small, his face open. He rolled up the sleeves of his plaid flannel shirt to show the scars across his bicep. I had scars on mine, too, that no one knew about. Self-inflicted.

“I’ll help,” I said. “I’ll start with the VA and see what we can do.”

I wrote about Bill, where he traveled through Europe, how he met his wife and moved to the same town I lived in now, the hardware store they owned until the big boxes opened, how he volunteered at the food pantry every week. When he got his purple heart, the picture ran on the front page. Even after he got his medal, he stopped by to chat every so often, until he died and I stood in the church and ran a finger along the raised lines on my arm.