The Republican Committee of Historical Reparations was run by a bunch of cowards, Ivan had decided for what seemed like the tenth time that week alone, and Wednesday had barely started.

For all their corporate talk of rebuilding the country after the war, all their mushy solidarity and all the cheap propaganda they wallpapered their campaign with, there was a lot of it missing from the package they delivered. Whatever it was they had been doing for him up until that point, it felt like little more than a small business owner’s treatment of a vagrant who keeps falling asleep at his store front.

The hardships of physical pain and financial instability were bad enough as they were, but at least he knew this sort of burden wasn’t any heavier on him than it was on anyone else. It was the feeling of betrayal, however, and the sense of abandonment that it brought with it, that stung the worst. Living as a second class citizen in a country he helped build was the sort of fate he never imagined that awaited him away from home.

Life after the days in the frontline had felt like little else besides switching one hell for another. While the civil war had the aspect of a whirlwind of fire and brimstone, the reward of liberty through means of bravery was more akin to a surprise birthday party that turns out to be a funeral.

The road back home felt rockier than usual that day, in more ways than just one. As with every time he’d taken that road, it felt more bitter and lonely than every other time before. Future seemed to have little in store for him besides the promise of an ever-growing discontent, a misery that crawled a step further every visit it inflicted. And so once more, under the quietly wretched tree shade of that road, he wondered in his own crude terms how many of such visits he still had within himself to endure before the rotten foundations of sanity caved in.

The pickup truck roared and tumbled as he pressed his way along the dirt road that led up to the creek. The chilly afternoon wind ruffled the copper-colored masses of leaves that filtered whichever sunlight found its way within the eerie uneventfulness that filled Weaver Parish Road in its ominous daytime. Across the few naked branches that started to form before winter, thin beams of light crept in, giving the darker shades of autumn the aspect of an omen to whatever untold secrets they hid.

The knuckles on Ivan’s right hand bulged white on top of the wheel as he drank a bottle of lukewarm beer, barely keeping his eyes on the road as he leaned his head back. He always kept an emergency six pack of Huxley Light behind his seat, next to the toolbox, usually so he could start drinking before getting home whenever he was in a rush to black out.

He had been asked about it by cops on more than one occasion, but state patrol around that region was just a bunch of pushovers and nothing had ever been done about it. Very little had ever been done about next to nothing when it came to Ivan’s self-sabotaging lifestyle, in fact.

Pulling the handbrake like he was trying to steal the lever and take it home, he could feel the truck shaking one last time, like an oil tanker that cruises past the point of tension in its anchor’s rusty chain. Turning off the engine and tearing off the keys in a single brash motion, he kicked the door open as soon as he unlocked it.

Every inanimate object looked like an obstacle to him, a piece of scrap to be bashed against another like he was a caveman from the post-civilization era of mankind, grunting in some atavic form of male frustration as he shoved trash out of his path.

Slamming his work boots against the gravely mud of his driveway, he hung his head back as he drank the last few drops of the warm beer, shutting the door with his elbow. The noise of the roaring engine had woken up the dog, who was watching the entire scene with its neck and ears raised, and after hearing the door slam started to bark in startled anger while yanking its chain.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP”, Ivan screeched from across the driveway, hurling the empty bottle against the wooden beam by the end of the porch, seeing it shatter as the poor mongrel cowered back inside its doghouse.

He stormed his way up the porch like he was trying to scare rodents living under the crawlspace, each step loud as a hammer blow. Almost shoving his front door off its hinges, he barged into his living room with the fierce clumsiness of a man overtaken by marital jealousy, the bloodshot fixation of trailing your wife’s lover to the house you live in. He stepped across the stale air and into the kitchen, where he knew his faithful stockpile of beer awaited him with the loyalty all others seemed to lack.

Opening the fridge in similarly crude fashion, a rush of adrenaline drove him as he yanked the door wide open. There, smack dab in the middle of an empty, greasy shelf, a halfway-ravaged six pack waited for him. He snatched it out with one hand and pulled a can off its plastic ring with the other, promptly cracking it open while hurling the foam inside his mouth, the just about slightly refrigerated liquid washing its way inside like a sewage pipe.

Ivan absolutely hated that taste. It was the insipid, thoroughly industrialized taste of what his life had become, wretched and pointlessly bland. It was also, for all intents and purposes, the taste of his favorite beer. Just like television, which he hated maybe even more than alcohol, it was still something he’d spend more time in the company of than basically anything else, including sleep. Hating it instead of fully embracing its company felt almost like misplaced energy.

Still, he absolutely hated that taste. When you drink in a mere state of compulsion, Ivan had come to find out, you develop a particular brand of hate for your drink of choice. A similar shift in perspective to growing to despise someone close enough for you to move in with, a parallel that some days felt more noticeable than he was able to endure.

Crushing the now emptied can on a single, hate-driven death grip, he tossed the crumpled piece of aluminium across the kitchen almost in the same motion as he tore off the second can from its plastic leash, promptly opening it and pouring its content down his organism like someone who tries to bust open a padlock with a vial of acid.

Not a single step of that entire process felt organic anymore, it was all a slow succession of repetitive motions with a single purpose in mind. Wasn’t any different from the factory, the drills, the incursions; pretty much anything else in his life he was only doing because he had no other choice. There was no pleasure involved, just purpose. Maybe the absence of any, but who was he to tell the difference?

The frustration of how long it was taking for him to get as drunk as he needed was revealing itself to be his latest nuisance. The amount and frequency with which he downed entire six packs in the span of an hour or two on a daily basis would eventually play its part in building up his natural resistance to the only reason he still had to keep doing it.

Just as quickly as it had been approached, the half-six pack was now gone, made into crumpled metal and fuel for his brain furnace, and still he wasn’t nearly as drunk as he hoped he’d be at that point, which made him irrationally angry to yet another degree.

He was dead set on letting his anger drive his every action at this point. For a minute he considered raiding one of the many six packs he had piled up inside the kitchen closet, but he had already more than his fill of seeking deliverance through rat piss. Huxley was a decent gas station takeout on a slow day, but it wasn’t going to do the trick. “Time to break out the wedding gifts”, he thought, unamused.

Ivan’s liquor cabinet was one of his few prized possessions at that stage of his life, a veritable accomplishment for a life in which not much was still prized to begin with. It had a modest but still enviable variety of booze collected throughout the years, from local blends of liquor to strong, borderline homebrew brands of vodka from the old country’s small town distilleries. Almost every bottle had little more than a thin belt left, and he kept holding onto them as if to prove a point. But at that moment, it wasn’t the variety of his collection that he was looking to enjoy.

Weaver Creek Bourbon, with its imposing three-word name and incidentally minimalistic label, was his go-to whenever he needed to get his senses knocked out of him like a home invader who made the mistake of breaking into his brain. The strong scent of a nine-hour shift of unclogging fuel pumps was already the kick he needed. In the midst of so much discontent, at least having a brand of alcohol your body hadn’t developed a complete resistance to was a silver lining worth of note.

There was a faint memory of a brief moment of rejoice as he opened the cabinet and saw the bottle of bourbon staring back at him, stoic and broad-chested, ready to make a killing. There was also somewhat of a memory of the smell, that piercing, alchemical smell, thick enough to be cut with a knife. The memory of the fiery sensation galloping down the interior of his ribcage after the first and maybe the second swigs was a much more lively one, unsurprisingly, and in the end it was the one that managed to last.

After that, naturally, that’s when it started to grow hazy. Anything from that point on felt more like a faint memory of another memory, one he probably wasn’t even sure was his. The dark shapes in the dim light of his kitchen, then of his living room, then the creases and stains of the floorboard seen up close. Each part of it felt like an indistinguishable piece of a whole, different doses of a mixture long boiled and spoon-swirled inside a cackling bog hag’s cauldron.

The loss of senses and that final slip on the grip of reality slowly but surely gave place to the peace of numbness, the bliss of sleep. And just as the memories of his final moments of conscience did blend into one another like one solid mass of perceptions that both began and ended on the next, so did his memories of the trenches. And just as sleep finally took the place of suffering, soon one mass of memories took the place of another, and he was back in the hazy debris dust that enveloped the uniformed body standing inside his boots as they touched ground.