I hated the corner. The rough white walls left cold patches on my cheeks as I pressed my nose into their joint. I would twiddle my little thumbs behind my back and stomp my chubby feet in protest.

BEEEEP    BEEEEP    BEEEEP

The timer on the microwave would sing of sweet freedom and I would burst from my prison. Long lost was the reprimanding from my mother about playing on the furniture. I was a paratrooper jumping into the battlefront on the ground below, and the couches were my airplane.

Consequences were simpler when I was younger. Watching TV past my bedtime would land me five minutes in the corner. A sloppy Wet Willy in my squealing little brother’s ear would get me eight minutes. Refusing to take out the trash -ten. Until one day my dad came home smelling sweet and looking green. When my mom announced that I had been calling my brother names, his cheeks flushed red and his eyes found me in their sights. Suddenly I was a paratrooper again, falling to the battlefield, but this time I could feel the gunshots. They stung across my shoulders, my thighs, my horribly exposed posterior. The next thing I remember, I was tracing violet-red welts that had risen on my skin and sobbing into my pillow.

I decided to talk less in later years, but I still couldn't escape the war. It would go on for a lifetime.  My comrades and I grew resigned and bitter, stuck fighting a battle with no way to win. I was forced into permanent retreat, scared to move, scared to breathe, scared to be noticed. Still every day came rains of drunken hellfire and after, the metallic silence of utter solitude. I stayed up most nights wondering why I had to fight in a war I didn't understand. Somehow I knew the problem lay far above me. Yet there I was: a little soldier plunged into the heat of battle, a martyr for a lost cause.

These days I don't talk about the war. It visits me in my dreams, in the cold sweat of my sheets on quiet nights. I can feel it in my bones, the sheer burning terror, but the memories refuse to be recalled. Sometimes I think I'm safer that way. My comrades stay silent too. Maybe they were too young to remember, or perhaps our scars tell the tale for us. Either way, like all veterans, it’s something I'm running from.