Presence Protocol: Answer to Maisie - by Cole Harlan

Mason arrives at an isolated training post with new issue on his back and one goal that is not in any manual: to earn the look his stepfather, Colonel Rhett, gives men who do not hesitate. His mother is overseas. His father is a pause on a live-fire lane Rhett still calls sloppy. The post is far enough from anyone who would ask why a private’s failures are being handled in quarters. Rhett does not shout. He opens a file that will never see a sergeant’s desk and calls it a presence protocol. Modified gear. A name that does not appear on the roster. Inspections that inventory a body the way other men inventory rifles. What begins as bearing becomes a curriculum: denial, service, carriage, the desk, the knock in the hallway that almost becomes a witness. Mason tells himself it is temporary. He tells himself that if he does it clean, Rhett will stop seeing a dead man’s leftover.