Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" 96 words

The guys from the Mission came stinking of disinfectant and looking very bedraggled and embarrassed.

When morning came he stood over their bed holding a breadboard which had two breakfasts on it.

It was hot air perfumed with the soap and scented rubbing alcohol they used for bathing his father and with the powder they put on him afterward to fight off bedsores.

So on the vacant lot his father raised sweet corn and summer squash and cantaloupes and watermelons and cucumbers.

Would it not be better to have a friend maybe one of the people of the bakery write to the girl and explain to her that Jose had shot himself because of his love and now was cremated?

Where did they get that stuff about bombproof dugouts when a man in one of them could be hit so hard that the whole complicated business of his ears could be blown away leaving him deaf so deaf he couldn't hear his own heart beat?

There were willows near the edge of the water and sweet clover.

One guy thought a good way to do was to punch Jody Simmons right smack in the snoot.

If you've stolen it I'll turn you in as soon as I get these bandages off you thieving bastards you.

He had got a letter once saying Bill Harper had been killed at Belleau Wood.

But it turned out they ran two miles before they came to a canal maybe ten feet wide and mud-colored and beached on both sides with a solid mass of tumbleweeds.

He shaded his eyes against the first bright rays of the morning sun and looked off and he saw the high mountains of Colorado in the east and he saw the sun coming over them and he saw colors creeping down their sides and in the nearer distance he saw roll

Rockets and bombs and pinwheels and curves of fire and great white flares whirled through his head and sank into the soft wet part of his brain with a hissing sound.

Somebody ripped off a helmet and it hit the rat in its hindquarters.

The girls from the hash houses and the girls from the hotels and the guys swarming out of dirty little apartment bedrooms and music and dancing and smoke and somebody with a ukulele and have another and the feeling of being lonesome that everybody

Give us a bill of sale drawn up plainly so we know in advance what we're getting killed for and give us also a first mortgage on something as security so we can be sure after we've won your war that we've got the same kind of freedom we bargained f

So on the vacant lot his father raised sweet corn and summer squash and cantaloupes and watermelons and cucumbers.

Even a toenail is heavy compared to air.

He was quiet just like a storekeeper taking spring inventory and saying to himself 1 see I have no eyes better put that down in the order book.

Just a nice clean slice of the shell that somehow missed his jugular vein and his spine.

He could also feel a little tug at his forehead as if a cord had been tied around there halfway between his eye sockets and his hairline.

So on the vacant lot his father raised sweet corn and summer squash and cantaloupes and watermelons and cucumbers.

Instead Jody Simmons received through the mail a money order from Jose for nineteen dollars and eighty-seven cents which with his pay-check would pay for the pies .

Jody came zipping out of his office like a bumblebee.

If he could do this he might be able to kill himself because if the tubes which fed his lungs and stomach were of metal the weight of his body might plunge the metal into some vital organ.

Please mister give us a bill of sale on this freedom before we go out and get killed.

And then one day flip-flop and he'd be turned over.

At the top of the page was a tiny little engraved address on Fifth Avenue in New York.

He would never again breathe in the smell of a steak frying in his mother's kitchen or the dampness of spring in the air or the wonderful fragrance of sagebrush carried on the wind across a wide open plain.

Jody walked into the office and stared at the box like it might be a time bomb.

He's still got air and he's not struggling and he's got willow trees and he can think and he's not in pain.

He remembered the time he visited Jim Tift at the military hospital in Lille.

His father would get up at five or five-thirty in the mornings to go out and irrigate the garden.

Just a nice clean slice of the shell that somehow missed his jugular vein and his spine.

The idea gave him a funny prickling feeling.

He had been able to do this not only once but hundreds of times each night until his shoulders and biceps were hard as iron.

They had two arches one through the instep and another that crossed it rising delicately in the ball of her foot and fading away toward the heel.

The holes were covered with absorbent bandages because they had no muscles there to control themselves.

That night they had apple and vanilla cream and blueberry and peach.

They would put on their mackinaws and go outside into the snow and tramp down to the Elysium theatre.

The Mexicans were eating fried egg sandwiches all crusted over with red pepper.

The first snowfall was the most wonderful thing on earth.

There were bucking bronchos and steers to be bulldogged and bareback Indian races and trotting races.

So on the vacant lot his father raised sweet corn and summer squash and cantaloupes and watermelons and cucumbers.

He saw the tent rising ahead of him out of the mountainside like a small white cloud in the darkness.

Then you remember the party line going eighteen miles along Cole Creek Valley and only five customers?

If you went down in October you would find three or four heavy fruit cakes black and moist and filled with citron and nuts.

Sounds sounds sounds everywhere with the bell fading out and returning and him so sick and deaf he wanted to die.

He remembered stories of gangrene and of soldiers found with their wounds filled with maggots.

He'd heard it above the click-clickclick of the Battle Creek wrappers and the rattle of the belt conveyors and the howl of the rotary ovens upstairs and the rumble of steel route bins being hauled into place and the sputter of motors in the garage

I remember everything when I was courting you even the gander that used to rush and hiss at me when I took you in my arms.

If they are then you've got to make a whole new set of assumptions so don't get so cocky.

He remembered stories of gangrene and of soldiers found with their wounds filled with maggots.

The Ford grabbed for traction.

He had a great hedge of sunflowers around it.

They were steaming hot and you put butter inside them and it melted and then you put jam on them or apricot preserves with nuts in the syrup.

Howie stuck something in front of his face and turned his pocket flashlight on it.

He tried to shift his weight from side to side but the muscles in what was left of his thighs wouldn't flex properly and his shoulders were cut down so narrowly that they weren't any good either.

The poplars and cottonwoods had turned red and yellow.

At first they had lettuce and beans and peas and carrots and onions and beets and radishes.

A little germ like influenza carried off five maybe ten million people in a single winter.

There was nothing but a big long box that looked like a floral box lying on Jody's desk.

There were bucking bronchos and steers to be bulldogged and bareback Indian races and trotting races.

In back of the house in Shale City they had chickens and rabbits and he had some bantams for pets.

Yea though I walk through the valley of death I shall fear no evil for thy rod and thy buckler they comfort me.

One of them came from the turpentine country in Georgia.

He looked out across the rolling meadows of Grand Mesa eleven thousand feet in the sky and saw acres of columbines stirring in a cool August breeze and heard far off the roar of mountain streams.

He remembered how when he was a kid he read The Last Days of Pompeii and
awakened in the middle of a dark night crying in terror with his face suffocating in the pillow and thinking that the top of one of his Colorado mountains had blown off and th

She came back with a bowl filled with red geraniums.

Chunks of cartilage that didn't have anything except life so they grew on chemicals.

They were in a rowboat trolling with spinners.

Plenty guys had their hearing smashed from concussion.

He had one or two strangling dreams from them but he kept on thinking.

That night they had apple and vanilla cream and blueberry and peach.

The water was hot and it smelled of alkali but that didn't make any difference.

The mountain climber fell off the front stoop and fractured his skull and died by Thursday.

In the livestock pens there were steers that looked as square as an outhouse and pigs almost as big as cows and thoroughbred chickens.