A Son’s Letter from Ft. Breach (1862) - @LadyHazmat - Flash Frenzy

This week's challenge was a prompt of a shark bursting from a brick wall. 



A Son’s Letter from Ft. Breach (1862)

My Dear Mother,

Once more I resume my pen to write you a few lines, it was with pleasure that I learned that you had had such a pleasant time at the salt water.

I write not to tell you of an act of bravery performed by myself but of an act of defiance. It is best you hear of it from your loving son than from Gen. McLean’s emissaries. The young man delivering this note was finely paid so feel no need to further reimburse him. If he requests more, he reveals himself to be the duplicitous sneak I suspected him to be. Alas, in my situation, I could find no other willing party to transit this letter.

To explain the charges against me. . . More hard fighting had been going on across the Virginia shores, there we escape again and again while others fall. Receiving a light head injury from a fall after a row with some yellow livered sympathizers I was placed on powder room duty. Was alone with our entire heavy artillery while my brothers-in-arms marched South.

I had taken to the comfort of a large bottle of whiskey in my solitude at the fort. Always a curious sort, you know this from my childhood travails, I set to discover what would and would not fit into our largest cannon “Northern Glory.” Many things did not fit, but one unusual item did. The masthead remaining from a sunken merchant vessel. A trophy of sorts from an afternoon of shelling the ships on the ocean.

The large wooden shark fit finely into Northern Glory. It is to my great dissatisfaction and current state of court martial that I found out the cannon was primed with powder. My lit cigarette provided the ash that provided the unwelcome flame and the wooden beast breached the fort wall quite easily.

I ask for nothing else than to remember me kindly to all inquiring family and friends, from your son,

James