An Aggravatingly Vague Micro Fiction Exercise

So this is a 500-word story which was produced out of the prompt to "write something you've always wanted to write, have planned to write about, or utterly failed at writing." Surprisingly, with that broad of a scope, I put together a story I'm pretty proud of. Tell me what you think.

180 Links

When my father left to sit under the ocean for six months, my mother made a paper chain. Each link, she said, represented one day that he was gone. She hung the chain in the kitchen. It draped from hooks along the tops of the walls, stretching around the room twice, a kaleidoscope of pink and orange and white. Every night, before she put my sister and me to bed, my mother cut off one link. One less day, she would tell me, and then fold the piece of construction paper neatly. She kept all of them in a manila folder.

When there were twenty links gone, we got a picture from him, and a letter. The letter was for my mother, the picture for us. In it, my father stood in uniform, standing with two other men. All of them were grinning at the camera. He was growing a moustache. The night that we clipped off the fifty-ninth link, my sister accidentally ripped off a corner of the picture. My mother looked at it, holding the orange piece of paper. She didn’t say anything.

We broke the ninetieth link on a Saturday night; we celebrated with a trip to the movies and McDonald’s food. That night, I fell asleep to the sound of my mother crying to herself in the kitchen.

I got into a fight with another boy when there were fifty-five links left. He had laughed at me for putting my father’s picture in my back pocket and looking at it on the playground during recess. The boy tried to pull the picture out of my hands. He looked surprised, for some reason, when I punched him in the mouth.

When there were twenty links left, my father called us. He was in Japan, he said. The food was strange, and the city beautiful. He told us he missed us very much. He said some other things, but they were buried in static. His voice sounded strange, an echo down a long pipe.

My father’s submarine pulled back into port in Groton on July 10th. My grandparents and my aunt came to Connecticut to welcome my father back. Our family was there to meet the ship three hours early. We stood out on the pier in the summer heat, watching the river for the tugboats guiding my father’s ship down the river. Throngs of people waited in the parking lot and by the entrance to the pier. We all baked on the concrete, grinning.

They let the enlisted men off first, my mother said. My father was an officer, we’d have to wait just a bit longer.

I remember looking up at the submarine’s periscopes when she said that - the white spires jutting abruptly out of the huge black conning tower. One of them moved, scanning back and forth. I wondered if my father was controlling it – if he was watching us, smiling at the sight of our faces until it was his turn to leave.