I met a man with a Y for a hand.
Addressed him timidly, "which war?"
An earnest reply: "the second."

He then went on.

His words were water, gently flooding my mind.

'O pliant paper sea, kindly permit those words to flow from me and into Thee!' For I fear I may drown, held under too long by the rapids I have become.
This is my stranger, the moments he shared:

'Father gone, too young to forgive.

The neighbor boy's '41 Buick leaves dust on his new bicycle.

Upon a cinder track, Father's fleeing footsteps spur him on,
For his is a sadness only speed can overcome.

I know not by what good grace he 'scaped savage Okinawa, with her Endless line of bayonets, but I do know this:

That cinder track, in devotion absolute, forgot its form, stretching from an Imperfect oval to a path at once straight and serpentine, leading you from foxhole to foxhole, past ambush and anguish.

No victory lap here; just heavy iron tread snapping shoots of bamboo spread for a finish line.

Silence and silence alone greets him as he collapses post-race, leaving three fingers to Okinawa and departing post-haste.'

I had all but succumbed to his tale, each new sentence a towering breaker Pummeling me into the darkness of my aquatic consciousness.
I reached out, finding a precious grasp extracting me from jealous eddies and Lonely currents.

Though our handshake held seven where ten should rightly go, it was yet more complete than any I have known.