Neither One of Us

The following is an excerpt from a short story for my debut short story collection entitled, You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine

I miss her, with her breath I take, with every beat of my heart, from the pure depths of my soul. I stare at her picture each day, hoping that I can somehow will her back to life. In this picture, she is holding Isaiah, our son, who is eighteen months at the time, in her lap. I am sitting next to her, and Brianna, our four year old is standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder. We were dressed in our Sunday best, and were smiling thousand watt smiles, although my wife rarely smiled. Not because she was unhappy, but because she was a solider, and it was against her protocol as a soldier.

To say she was the love of my life is an understatement. She had been the only woman in my life from the time we met at the monkey bars in third grade. Like most girls at that age, she thought boys were gross, so I had to resort to pulling her long ponytails and being annoying to get her attention. In junior high, she still wasn’t convinced, so I resigned myself to be her buddy, her best friend. However, by our freshman year of high school, I had worn her down.

Unlike most girls who spent countless hours in the mirror, wore makeup, and were inseparable from clothes and shoes, Jennifer liked sports, took vocational classes, which focused on mechanics…