About Ghosts of Christmas Future

by Ariel Graham
29 pages / 10400 words
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc, epub and Sony Reader pdf

Aaron and Jason were separated by half the world while Aaron served a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Even after his return to the states, they're still worlds apart as Aaron battles mood swings and rages from injuries sustained during his service and Jason struggles to learn how to love the stranger the military sent home to him.

A stay at a quiet B&B over Christmas, a gift from friends, offers them the chance to relax and reconnect, but also sends them into the Sierra Nevada mountains just as a blizzard hits. Aaron's PTSD causes him to panic and he takes a wrong turn, getting them lost and then stuck in the snow. Now Jason needs to work with the new Aaron, and Aaron needs to access buried memories of survival skills to get them through the night. If either of them fail they might just lose everything.
 

Sample

They'd made up that night. Aaron had spent a long, long time in the tub, getting warm or getting clean, and Jason had taken the journal, the battered leather blank book Aaron had given him in Denver and gone into the living room, curling into his favorite big chair despite the summer heat and the chair's cloistering warmth. A little of Aaron's cold had rubbed off.

He'd carried the journal every day since Aaron handed it to him. He'd never had the courage to so much as open the cover. He was afraid he couldn't understand what someone who had been to war understood. He was afraid of being left behind.

He was afraid of finding the other Aaron inside its covers.

That night, alone in the living room while Aaron soaked and Reno's purple summer evening stretched long and thin, he sat with the book on his lap until at last, convinced Aaron wouldn't come out too soon and surprise him, he opened the cover of the battered book.

For Jason, it read on the flyleaf.

And then he read. The accounting of days he'd wanted while Aaron was gone, the Facebook and email and blog that didn't exist, all of it was here, a secret history, a love letter between the two of them, Aaron's heart pouring onto the page.

Every day, Aaron found the courage to go on because of Jason. He numbered the days, starting with his first day in Afghanistan, and the entries looked like field notes, or diary entries, every one, starting with Day One when he'd written, "Camp cook must be protected at all costs. Eggs taste like eggs. Who knew?" And Jason, who had known where Aaron was every second he was away, who'd never stopped figuring out what part of getting there, what day of the year-long and then longer deployment, smiled numbly before he saw the next line.

"Jason thought for the day: the way he still wraps a towel around his waist after showers. As if I don't know every inch. I love that."

Jason's eyes suddenly prickled and the living room around him blurred. He looked up, out at the back yard full of morning glories along the fence, and desert sunlight and everything he understood from his life, and understood just how foreign Aaron's life had been — and probably remained.

"Day 2. Never mind. Shoot the cook. Fixed tires today. In the army now! Well, not technically. Jason thought for the day: The way he looks at me when he first wakes up."

And so on, for all the four hundred plus days that came, even when the entries were no more than a line or two. The Jason thought for the day shorthanded down to Jason Today, but there was something, every day, something unique and different and important to Aaron.

He flipped ahead, to the day in June when Aaron had been injured. Apparently he'd written early that day, before he went out after the stranded Humvee and almost died. That day it just read, "Jason today: he really can't barbecue." And there was a smiley face that took away any sting.

The next day there was no entry, only the Jason Today: "Will not die without seeing the love in his eyes again."