Already old.

  Even the little kids who'd been used as bloodbags.  

  People were propped up on folding wooden chairs, not awake, not asleep.  "There's nothing left of them," a Red Cross nurse assured. 

  A pillow feather literally Elmer glued to a man's upper lip indicated still breathing.  

  Stop it.  The nurse harshed at a hysterical woman.  The woman did.  She visibly smoothed the turmoil of having lost everything but breath, the stuff of life itself, deeper and deeper into her body.  Past the hole in her midriff where the baby had been growing. 

  We'd been served our values, principles, points, and appendages in some cases on the fine dining luxury wares hoarded onto stranded at sea.  This after being thrown from planes, routed from cities, dragged from farmlands, gathered by the unmistakable and growing swirl of had enough.  The crucible of warfare.  We'd been fed the Constitution and enjoyed it.  Spat out broken bloody teeth and through eyes swollen shut with bruise and pus, renewed vows. 

  To life and liberty. 

  To each other. 

  To being AMERICA. 

  "Act dead," other nurses with a world of accents but little cupcake toothpick American flags in buttonholes giggled at our performance.  Snap, snap went the cameras.  Snap, snap went the hypnotist's fingers.  Snap, snap went the twigs under the foot of the enemy who dared to board.  Bullets in the shoulder curled the man's body like a parchment scroll as our own flag was unfurled from its umbrella stand rest.

The man did not want to hear

  about "the birth of autonomous warfare".  He ducked into a sunfilled room.  Window glass so thin the birds outside heralding the end of winter may as well have been inside. 

  An involuntary grunt-chuckle escaped his chest when people brought the happening to his attention.  "Isn't that an oxymoron?" He asked and his thinning lips curled into a snarl and a smile.  He looked at family and organization photographs around the room.  "I'll need to talk to some of my Army buddies before I have much to say."  It was a dismissed, but no one left. 

"I cannot tell you

  what to say.  Or, what you will see."  The in-charge admitting we are at that point.  

  The cubicled server rooms.  A faint hum buried in the projection of cool air. 

  Monitors and screens blipping and imaging.  

  Vehicle after vehicle exploded.

"It was quick and it was forever."

  Jesus judged the fig tree.  The same Jesus that was walking around in a chaotic world sheperding people who can and do wander off course.  Fall out of relationship with an Almighty who created this place, earth, with all it's mystery of "life". 

  This was a supernatural "miracle" or life-shifting happening.  Performed by a man and a God.  The awesomeness of that kind of power, nearly impossible "to explain" to people not really capable of "understanding"; not truly able to just automatically strategize for "souls" all by ourselves; especially without admitting we don't know everything, we do err, we need forgiveness.  Hard sometimes to have "faith", hard to believe.  Difficult to glimpse and grasp a notion of a big, all powerful something. 

"Mr. So-and-So, are you

  a political operative or are you a Christian Democrat?" The young woman was dressed in a well-pressed girl shirt and black pants.  She was not happy.  In college she'd studied law and journalism.  After school, in a flooding job market amidst housing and immigration crisis, she took some pro bono work.  The enforcement agents pretended not to listen. 

  "We were all friends."  Mr. So-and-So took off his glasses and pressed his hands onto sore points on his forehead and temples.  His suit coat was tight on his shoulders. 

  "Write it." The more experienced journalist at the conference table pressed a professionally manicured fingernail onto the table in front of the legal pad and tapped it. 

  Everyone in the room including the agents of enforcement had been blocked in not under arrest, post having been in the detention center to discuss testament, testimony.  A judiciary person had pre-warned, that Judge doesn't have time to deal with a bunch of people who have no idea what they are doing. 

  A kick under the table.  "Are you a victim?"  

  "I don't know what any of this is about anymore." And that was more true than people re-naming the same thing in as many ways as their "angles" or motivations required.  "At what point activism and other job?  Your journalism.  It's not what I learned is journalism.  I came here as a journalist and I am leaving as a journalist!"  The blinds in another conference room went up and people got up from that table.  "I'm sorry that we're all going through this." 

  "Why are you sorry?" 

  "I'm ashamed of my Country.  Sorry that people my age aren't, can't, do more." 

  "You are not who should be apologizing." 

  "It's not his fault either." 

  "Oh? A president's man are you?" 

  "Hardly a man.  And not any more a fan of him than I am of you." 

  The door was opened and left open.  Gradually everyone left the room.

  Shit or get off the pot.  The microtape recorder said over and over in the port-a-potty.  "No place to shit!" A man's voice was a muffled boom.  His briefcase pushed the door open and his toupè was crooked on his head as the door slammed behind him.  A shaved-headed woman from Brazil went next. 

  "Is this the one?" 

  Someone nodded. 

  Someone shook head, pathetic. 

  An Irish brogue called out, "I've never filed this way before.  But I feel greatly relieved." 

  "Pick your poison.  Pick your poison.  What's yer poison girlie?" The variety of liquor bottles ranged from airplane serving size to jugs labeled with homemade piles of bones and fat heads with tongues sticking out.  "We're sticking with the milk," a familiar face smiled and his hand reached a six pack of milk in glass bottles up onto the plywood box containing audio speakers.  "Everything's getting bigger the closer we get to the hangars." 

  "Not you guys.  As whatever I am in this moment, I refuse to let you go Overseas." 

  "You look like a farm boy in those rolled up jeans." 

  "We were obliged to do some local advertising." 

  "Political?" 

  He opened a milk and downed the actual nutrition.  Milk mustache.  "You're wearing jeans too," he stated factually.  "Someone give you the spoiler alert?" 

  "I don't know what that is." 

  "Must be why they picked you and," he looked around the barn area, "Them," he pointed with the empty bottle of milk.  "For what?" 

  "To go west young people.  Or north or wherever 'Braska is." 

  "But..."

  "No."

"But, you gave me the pens."

  Our Dad had spent the whole ten days of us kids being grounded working, and, being fed and sat like Mr. Cleaver in his recliner with slippers and newspaper in the evenings.  His slippers were gigantic, fuzzy affairs with large bear claw appendages that flopped around when he stomped to the bathroom. 

  It was true that he'd gifted me each pen on a birthday or milestone event at school.  But it was also true that he'd conducted a red-faced, lip twisting, almost sweaty raid of every nook and cranny where the precious treasures might be stashed.  Our mother stood apart from him, arms crossed, not really looking at any of us, and covering a couldn't-help-but laugh in her shoulder acting as if her nose itched. 

  "How could you?" He'd hoisted the growing number of pens found into the air.  "WE DON'T need you to write about OUR LIVES.  WE'RE LIVING IT!!!!!!!" 

  A deafening silence followed.  For a full five days.  That was how I fell in with some Asians.  Two of us were both ten. 

  "Pandas don't have pens but they still exist." A big Asian brother told us girls.  A slender hand started to reach towards a face swollen with tears but re-directed itself to a box of tissues.  His sister clutched the box.  Heavy sighs. 

  I sat on the medium-hard plastic packaging the sofa.  Mrs. Asian's decor was very ivory in color with dramatic splashes and jags of deep, dark colors.  An ebony-colored vase which looked almost squashed, like it was standing up almost flat had a spray of greenish leaves sticking up out of it.  Eucalyptis, the girl named the dried out plant my eyes fell on.  An ornate deeply red wooden sitting chair.  The dragons on the arms and legs dumb-eyed.  Mouths wide open.  Soft-edged pieces of jade shades; stone chess pieces on a yellowing bumpy board.  Paper lanterns on a snarled up yarn string.  No patience, the little girl explained.  She and I were the same size, different-looking human features.  But we knew each other as pandas.  

  We'd found each other as such in the woods.  We'd each hidden our bicycles.  Stashed food and pencil bags.  There'd been no paper at my school.  And slipped out of wordly cares by imagining the woods like a still, shimmering pool of water.  We'd glanced at each other feeling tree bark, scooping catepillars into hands, moving crispy leaves to find lady bugs, and finding bigger and bigger leaves.  We just did this.  Without talking because we didn't speak the same language.  She'd shown me in the Atlas:  Cambodia.  

  The teacher having a hard time with all the rules about Catholic school, like us kids, gave me two panda stickers and I gave one to my panda friend.  She opened a big metal desk's top drawer and put the sticker next to the neat row of twisting pencils and click pens.  A feather had jumped up when she opened the drawer.  She tried to smooth it back in place but it kept sticking to her finger.  Then the back of her hand.  She shook it.  It floated and she pointed it into place.  Grown ups were coming so she closed the drawer quickly and opened a square in the wall.  We sat Indian-style in the square.  We saw legs and heard lots of talking in the "peephole".  Then they went out the front door.  And we just did our giggling in silence.  Like a silent movie.

"I do not know if I shall wear purple."

  Right away someone half-heartedly groaned and tsk'd, so someone else clucked.  Some people got up to leave.  Couldn't handle another argument session.  "That is NOT what this is," a stand-up-straight young black woman assured.  "People can disagree without it being an argument." The room fell silent externally. 

  Our agers were taking a beating.  Terrible things were happening "in reality" while money and other resources were being applied to "a public face" in media necessary to survive a "mainstream" that could navigate enemies on all sides. 

  "To whom and when and where?" Puffy-faced girls had pre-agreed as mission.  This was a roomful of stories and experience.  All the people in the room were committed to truth.  The weight of collision of "worlds" was something crushing if we could not rise above impact "somehow". 

  As word of "war" filtered into the general population's minds and life-processing, there were those who were using that as permission to war against neighbor.  Causes were motivating people to extremes. 

  Someone had put RoundUp in pet's drinking water.  Someone had put abortion drugs in peoples' food.  Someone had used old war materials to sicken new people.  Someone had raped someone.  Someone had chained people into a cellar and lit a fire! 

  We were poisoning ourselves into toxic environment and writing that off as well, it is a war. 

A lot of the fighting got

  compressed into smaller debates in wider swaths of pro- and anti- Americanism. 

  Some of wanting a future took to studying the -ism part, as if, maybe that contained "the energy" and maybe it wasn't either love or hate that was the motivation.

I didn't know much.

  I never do really.  Usually having arrived "a day late and a dollar short", or, from the library, or, with the propensity to philosophize (squirm) and ethicate (this is why, we should or shouldn't) but everybody else saying shut up.  It's just the way of it. 

  I don't like fighting although I had to learn the hard way, a time or two, that standing to not cave on "taking a stand" and being caught in an avalanche is not all that smart either. 

  My mom managed the retelling of a Dad "joke" to my paled face and let go of it.  Only to her of course.  There were still many years of having to put on a face, buck up, and "walk the line" in a very public way to come.  The joke was planned to be not all that funny.  And it was about a decent old farmer who'd outlived his kin (probably because of eating right) and he would eat his tuna fish lunch everyday with a little picture of Jesus leaned up against the salt and pepper shaker.  "So what happened?" Mom kind of sighed a little, partly responsible for encouraging college, and mostly the same mom who was always there at the end of the day in her and Dad's home no matter what was happening in the world.  "Guy dies.  Goes to Heaven.  Is milling about up there when Jesus approaches him with tuna and bread and a big tomato." 

  "That's it?" 

  "Pretty much.  Dad added this whole part about Jesus and the guy acknowledging there are a lot more people down there in that mess than up here having lunch.  Here are your people!" 

  It seemed really feasible.  Very plausible.  Yet, so had Academia with it's critically thinking about the mess and it being kind of okay to not always have perfect answers. 

  "So what happened?" 

  Sigh.  "The whole stupid thing turned into a riot." 

  The silence of a reasonable and slightly older person putting youth on the scales of truth.  "We even brought a Bible!"  Mom's mouth squishing together quiet not judgment.  "It got ripped in half!" 

  "By satanic gang people?" 

  She waited. 

  "Oh.  Did I mention them?" 

  She sighed and stooped some. 

  "Actually, that was by these two guys who were just debating God and oil.  They were really getting deep about the Old Testament God being pretty harsh and clear and sometimes wars happening.  And how God, like one day or in his BIG plan, decided to send Jesus as ambassador of God's new plan for humanity." Mom fell into a more relaxed mode of listening to story.  "Well, the one guy really flat out denied that Jesus even came down here and went through all that torture to give lousy people a message from God.  So the other guy kind of hit him in the face with the Bible by way of saying, and he did say, It's all right in here.  You can read it for yourself.  If you can read." 

  Other kids in the family opened the door to the garage and closed it letting us talk.  "Guy starts to walk away." 

  "Which guy?" 

  "The guy who was in charge of the Hall where some old Army buddies were going to have a get-together with a bunch of us fresh faces.  But, see, there was a lot of different groups in the city for like all these festivals and concerts and stuff." 

  "So you girls went off campus?" 

  "Yeah.  We did." 

  My mother unloosened a portable phone from a bathrobe pocket full of tissues.  I didn't ask if she was sick.  I let the terrible weight of us disappointing and scaring them crush my spirit.  Whatever other reprimands would come could not be as devestating.  She stood and I realized she had her Church clothes on under the bathrobe.  She called a friend's mom.  "They're home." Her cold hand pressed a loose though hairsprayed curl springing from the top of my head back down. 

Humans as endangered species was

  met with curious looks at each other.  It was also a "rights" step-up from collateral damage. 

She'd done it.

  Our mother had challenged a neighborhood "orphan" to get out of that outfit.  She'd literally changed her clothes and declared herself a little mama.  It was a start.  The orphan outfit had been taking on too much weight and was dragging her down.  Especially as we swam around as mermaids. 

  Because most of us already had mothers nobody was all that excited about her new outfit.  A meeting was called.  But each place she went had been cleared of kids before the meeting time.  She bust through the leaf and branch covered piece of tin roof "hiding" the tank spot in the woods. 

  One kid jumped and let out a weird-sounding noise.  Other cammoflouged people and dogs fluttered at the edges of the spot.  "What are you doing here?" A voice she pretended not to recognize called out. 

  "This is where the meeting is right?!" 

  A branch being ripped from a tree trunk made a snapping sound.  "Not here whatever it's about." A kid pitched the branch in the path before her.  She left. 

  Our station wagon rolled to a STOP at the STOP sign.  The slew of suction cup bullets/projectiles mostly pelted the vehicle.  But a few with notes attached stuck.  Most everybody in the car had gasped and ducked but not the oldest brother.  "There's a note." He announced.  "What's it say?"  In his changing to lower tone voice he said, AIDS.