Nineteen [five sentence fiction]

This week was reader's choice...any topic from last year. So I'm extending the choice to my readers. Pick your favorite and post in comments.

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STORY 1

It was twenty yesterday, she knew, she had counted them. Twenty pink, wiggly little digits; ten on her hands and ten on her toes. She was only five and loved to count. But today she was confused, she only counted nineteen? Then she remembered the accident and started to cry.

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STORY 2

The sound hurt his ears, so close, so loud, so insistent. Bang, bang, bang to a count of nineteen. The quiet descended like a blanket, soft and tender, cloaking him in comfort. Then bang, bang, bang to a count of nineteen. He thought back to yesterday when the MRI appointment was made, no one told him to bring his MP3 player.

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STORY 3

It was so long ago. His draft notice arrived a week after he turned eighteen and he headed off to Vietnam. He watched friends kill and he watched friends be killed. The war didn't end soon enough. He came home at nineteen but he never knew it, he was in a box.

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STORY 4 {not sure this really qualifies as a story}

Sixteen, so sweet and virginal. Seventeen, just on the cusp of adulthood. Eighteen, an adult ready to face the world. But nineteen was different. Nineteen meant leaving behind the teen years, the joy of childhood and facing the terrors ahead that eighteen had barely introduced to you.

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Watch for Five Sentence Fiction every Tuesday.