“My tank is gonna shoot,” Steve Emmerich says as he pushes a toy tank forward. A gargling cannon noise explodes from his pre-pubescent mouth. His fingertip traces a shot from the tank barrel to a toy truck. He flips the truck over and dumps five plastic soldiers onto the floor.
“Yer soldiers never miss,” Michael Augustine says. “That’s unrealistic.”
“Of course they never miss. Why would I have them miss? That’s stupid.”
The front door creaks shut below them. Steve hears his mother’s muffled voice say something. Light, rapid footsteps launch up the stairs. Definitely not his mother. The footsteps turn toward his room.
“You guys’ll never believe what I saw on my way over,” says Albion Winfrey, a boy of about the same age, who enters the room and plops down next to them.…
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Mariya maintained a fierce, pubescent annoyance. Mum! Shut up—it’s important! Her phone absorbed her long brown hair and green eyes.
You just zone out, staring into that thing, her mother Sofiy said. Here we are—I am the one buying you pretty clothes—but you’re off in another world. Are you looking at a new blouse and skirt on that? Or is whoever you’re texting going to buy you clothes? Since I’m about to leave you to stare at that damn thing all day and night—you wouldn’t realize I’m gone for at least an hour.
The girl’s mother’s extended arms—draped with white, red, and black garments—slumped, and with them the clothes fell to the woman’s waist-side in the boutique’s dressing room.
It takes like two seconds, c’mon! Mariya said with gritted teeth, hunched over her phone.…
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I thought I saw my old co-worker standing in line to get coffee
He was one of my favorite people, but I knew that when
I quit my job I would never see him again
Aside for the occasional post on Facebook
I smiled at him on my last day and acted as if it wasn’t a big deal to me
But it was a huge loss.
I looked at the man again and realized
That they looked nothing alike
Except for the wrinkles in his forehead
He used to talk to me through the partition of our cubicle
And got very excited about the littlest things
He would share his voicemails with me
And no one else
He worked with old people
Delivering books to the homebound
Knowing that someday they would be dead
So he saved the voicemails for as long as he had the space to do so…
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You belong to a yellow nowhere, the sleepless life in
a broken world—All homeless, soldiers, bullies—Weak and strong,
all the same people in the wrong somewhere, a swirling
cloud—Now. Look, listen. Holes in the sky, crevasse in
the ground. In the yellow nowhere, the between of the
nothing, sleepless and living—Homeless, bully, soldier, whichever you are
now, you were, will be—Listen. Look. The hole in
the sky is a door, the swirling cloud a path,
and now, now, you can leave this wrong somewhere—Now.
Look. Listen. Decide—this is the only now you have.
– Laura Williams…
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Nothing Alice’s father did was unconsidered. The way he chose a piece of firewood provides an example. If he had two or more pieces to add to a fire in their woodstove, he would consider whether they needed maximum heat output immediately or later. Perhaps the rest of the family still slept, a frequent occurrence. Best not to waste heat now, better to make the fire hottest just before Alice and her sisters and their mom got out of bed. So, he would save the smaller and drier pieces until he heard the ladies stirring or thought they were about to come downstairs.
In the spring, he planted their corn—with beans, of course—working out from the center of a spiral, while the neighbors planted theirs in rows. …
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Sarah and I tottered to the parade. Thomas had to work and Mother said she “had to finish Mr. Donald’s shirts or we won’t eat tonight.” So we scuttered, hand in hand, down the dusty alleys to Central Street. The first to process were high-plumed soldiers dressed in Imperial Red. Then came trumpeters, drummers, and, finally, the Colonel, mounted on a white stallion. He towered over the crowd, glaring at us through beady eyes. All the children cheered. The adults were tense.
Then came painted clowns with bags of handouts. One strode over to Sarah and me. He handed Sarah a bright Flag-of-the-Empire and gave me a red tin soldier. I gazed at the little figurine: I had never had a real toy.
* * *
“What did you do today?”…
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The maze is a list,
a catalog of ships
left in a garden
& everybody knows
they don’t belong
& everybody knows
if they had been left
on water they would
take us to new places,
but here they are,
all terrible weight
& splinter, pain
& loss, a closed loop
that makes knowledge
another colony.
– Darren C. Demaree…
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