(i)"GET OUT. ALL OF YOU." (i)

  One brother asked, "Should we be ashamed of ourselves?" 

  "Yes you should!"  Our mother barked.  "OUT!!!!" 

  The bathroom door closed behind her sort of muffling, "Let me see your wounds."  A quiet and then Dad almost crying, "And I can't poop." 

  The dog was missing.  Mom had had to take a cab from the airport in the City.  The house looked like a disaster zone.  Eight days of a breaking down routine and no normal end of day evidenced in stacks and patterns.  Not a clean dish to be found.  Four foot piles of laundry.  The family room floor, more snacks than carpet. 

  "YOU GIRLS SHOULD'VE HELPED!" Mom's voice floated out the window. 

  "We're NOT SLAVES!" One sister sassed back and then "ran away" to the Woods. 

  "HE CAN'T DO EVERYTHING (i)FOR(i) EVERYBODY!!" 

  "YOU CAN," a brother tossed a ball up in the air and caught it with the mitt. 

  "NO I CAN'T.  (i)GO PLAY!(i)" 

 

The two women were of the same build, so

sometimes they got called twins.  One night each got dropped off by their men--husband, boyfriend--and each hung dripping wet overcoats on pegs.  Got hair out of face, dried off shoes, and arrived at the door to a creative meet-and-greet at the same time.  Both stood side-by-side in front of the door, both waiting for someone to open it.  They acknowledged without talking why they were just standing there and one reached out, turned the knob and pushed.  (i)After you(i), an outstretched arm relayed. 

  The circle of metal chairs in that room were empty.  Musical pounding sounds were eminating from a dark hallway. 

  "Let's both go," one said to another.  "Oh, maybe I'll wait here." 

  "Is this the right night?" 

  "It's Wednesday right?" 

  A shrill shrilling sound crescendo'd through and up and over the beats.  Both women looked at each other.  "This is the Church basement right?" 

  "Correct." One woman smoothed her skirt. 

 "We better." 

  "Yeah."  They crept down the dark hallway towards another door.  Pushed it open only slightly and looked through the crack. 

  Candles and Christmas lights flashing.  The back of someone writhing some sort of dance.  Hands drumming.  Children petrified in place, looks of shock and horror. 

  Both women burst through the doorway almost getting stuck. 

  "HEY!  HEEEEEY!" 

  "What the?" 

  "STOP IT.  STOP THIS." One woman waved her arms.  One woman pointed and made big "x's" with arms like a crossing guard. 

  "THIS IS NOT CREATIVITY!" 

  "THIS IS VOOOODOOOO!!" 

  At that children started screaming.  One girl smacked a boy across the face, then pulled him by the sweatshirt, out of the room, down the hallway. A boy smacked a screaming girl in the face, picked her up like a caveman or a fireman and carried her to the doorway.  Put her down, came back for more screaming kids.  Not wanting to get smacked, some ducked and rolled and crawled.  The boy pushed the women who had come in out of the room.  Pulled the door shut.  "GET A CHAIR!!! GET A CHAIN!!!!  GET A PRIEST!!!!!" He hollered. 

  One woman pulled him and the other woman down the hallway bumping into children with heads in hands and trying to wipe "it" off and people pulled each other into a human chain.  Plowed through the circle of metal chairs. 

  It wasn't too long after that cultural experience that one brother got grounded for throwing water on people in a restaurant.  "(i)Stop it.(i)"  Our mother sternly warned with a tray of fried clams in her hands.  "You're not allowed to put Holy Water on strangers.  Not everybody wants to be saved!  And anyway, they would go to Church if they wanted to.  This is Public America." 

  "Says (i)propeetious(i) on the door." 

  "(i)Pro-pri-etor(i)," our Dad said and quickly moved past correcting his son.  "Means somebody owns this fine establishment." Dad poured red sauce into paper dip cups for everyone.  The brother put a lemon rind over his front teeth so Mom did too.  "Can you imagine if this was a freeloader place?" Dad goes on and on down sidebar trails when he's hungry.  "I'd have to send all of you out there to use the shared boat and wait for you to go to the shared beach and fight for some clams." He squeezed a lemon wedge, spraying some of us, and took a savory bite.  "This is sooooo much better," he sank into his clams. 

The (i)Come As You Are(i) had Continent hopped.

  The lights were off in the basement of St. Patrick's Church when all manner of people wandered in, mostly out of curiosity. 

  "My husband doesn't know I'm here," said a Tina to a Joan.  The Joan squeezed the woman's arm gently trying to transfer (i)strength(i) and (i)trust(i).  The Tina winced and sharply pulled back her arm.  Tears of pained shot up behind thickly mascara'd eyelashes, but the woman bit a lip and willed those away. 

  "These are stale," a white woman in a long tweed skirt had put a bite-out cookie and the crumbled bite back onto the plate of oatmeal treats and was headed for a trash bin when a man in matching tweed pants rushed her and made the save.  He tossed the touched cookie and whirled back towards the table.  "Not stale mother.  Just made.  But you," he turned back to the woman and put a limpish hand under her chin, tilting her face up towards his, "Smile," he commanded.  She did.  "You've forgotten to put your teeth in mother." The smile turned into a gummy grin then and a slightly secretive tone of voice.  "Easier to suck on this," she brought a flask to her mouth and tilted a quick slug. 

  A young red bearded priest peeked through a crack in a door far across the basement.  He was in the ready-room where people would work with Sister Rose to prepare Thanksgiving boxes of donated food.  "Oh that lush," he folded a (i)Come As You Are(i) flyer neatly in half and then crumpled it into a ball.  This he squeezed in very sweaty hands before tossing it up at the wall and missing a miniature Basketball hoop.  "Not my day," he griped to another priest.  "And where are the creative people?! We won't stand a devil's chance at retention without (i)them(i)." The older priest put a hand on the younger's shoulder and forced him gently down into a metal folding chair.

"The struggle is real." A guy kept

  repeating.  It was below freezing weather.  A combination of factors had many, many people taking turns on the inside and outside.  All of humanity in the motions of push and pull like hot gases streaming from a smokestack but mingling with maelstrom cloud. 

  Managers who'd been caught in between cogs caught catnaps in webby spots and rest areas.  The impossible churn of capitalism failing ground the public-interacting businesses to a halt.  But in the Americas the spirit of free will and survival was refusing to bend a knee to the dictates of any other kind of governance besides Constitution and free market. 

  Stores were mostly sold out of produced means of warmth.  Someone had come from ice fishing with a box of handwarmers.  The spent wrappers were "ironically" dropped into an empty freezer on top of a pair of cut off hands.  The people who'd grown up in various states of play between civility and brutality looked from one to another upon discovery of someone's hands in an otherwise empty freezer.  Not everyone was able, at first, to cling fast and hold onto that sanity in shared witnessing. 

 Happy Autumn

"Sir we have to act."

  The fevered pitch of figuring-outs the last pieces of puzzle which included hot war at Sea and intrigue amongst Countrymen vying for resources swarmed at the man told at breakfast by his mother, (i)whatever it is, you can do it(i).  There'd been no time to argue that every other man in his family did not express that sentiment. 

  Like the fifteen foot waves, "life" had become swells of interactions, designations, and letting go's of the intensely powerful (i)projections(i) onto the man's authentic self. He looked at the Seaspray'd horizon and squinted.  (i)Enemy detected(i). 

  "They think we're on a 'suicide mission'," a pimply faced kid had seen news. 

  "Would I be here with you if that was true?" The man tracked and held the younger man's eyes. The kid did not know like not knowing a lot of things.  His eyes wavered from the man's.  "Look at me.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion.  That is (i)not(i) what we're doing here.  This is a battle." 

  The kid stared at the man. 

  "The rest of you take your positions." 

  "Sir, yes Sir." 

"They are going to kill the cow!"

  "ITSAH BOOL." A sweaty, urine smelling man with half a pencil thin moustache bent towards the little knot of children and corrected. 

  The stadium was a pulsing mass of cheers and boos, the whole thing groaning and moving the dust it sat in. 

  "(i)WHY????(i)" 

  "Come this way.  Close your eyes.  Come this way." A lady was straightening kids collars mostly half tucked inside the tops of handmade sweaters.  "Follow them," littler kids were told of the bigger boys.  Everybody did until the leaders got (i)mezmorized(i). 

"It's not that we don't fu-mess up,

  it's that we keep (i)redeeming(i) ourselves," a little brother told an older brother.  The husbands had come from a thick cloud of rubble and debris dust.  Previews of all of us old and gray. 

  One wife took a wet cloth out of a plastic bag and wiped a man's lips.  They kissed like no tomorrow.  Another furtively approached one of the men and spoke low and shy.  "All those people, this morning, were outside the neighbor's place because," her voice trembled and the tears came.  The man put down a shovel and held the woman close.  "Our neighbor died," he told everyone.  "He was old." 

  "Letting you know I'm not dead," the text read.  People at the Wailing Wall were in the shade with the sun above, out of reach. 

  "No, they're not dead.  But America is so far away, I (i)grieve(i) them." 

"Well, that's how a lot of people are," the curls

of the woman's hair were smashed down in some parts and flopping as she spoke.  "If it's not an argument, they don't know what to do." 

  "Other people are too weary to fight about anything else now." 

  "We just woke up.  (i)My GOD(i)." 

  "I think it's a good sign.  I mean you're talking about people who have a shredded sense of humanity.  Better to fill in on the wrestling rope and vie for some kind of government than to do nothing." 

  "I'm sick of listening to it." 

  "So shut it out.  Let's make latka." 

"We gotta go."

  "WHY?" 

  A disjoined army of Assistants was "breaking camp". 

  "Short or long answer?" 

  "Both." 

  "In a nutshell, the locus of power is imploding.  Happens every transition." 

  "Like an election?" 

  A slight nod so as not to out self as "political".  "And before," eyes looked down at solid earth, "More battling." 

  "BECAUSE if you are not going to be Academic about it, I cannot let you use it." 

  The boyman's shiney with Aloe face ran its courses between leprechaun and gleaming-good knight.  "Then (i)I will(i)," he controlled his voice emotions. 

  "What do you mean? Stay?" 

  "It's a nice enough town." 

  "I guess it would be an act of resistance for people to actually care about each other." 

  "Especially in this (i)eye for an eye(i) clime and everyone with useless input." 

  The girls wound their way through debris used as minefield training.

"Keep moving Spaceman."

  The guy snarled and grimaced, the burnt skin on his face like a taut drum.  "You're stupid." 

  "No you are." 

  "You're so stupid..." 

  "As I was saying before that thing fell out of the sky, was that, is that the Catholic religion is a good compromise as far as the divide between literal and interpretation on the Bible." 

  "What was the reading?" 

  The beep-beep of a tow truck to gather the slightly crashed spacey, human transport, ball almost drowned out the man.  People repeated the verses of Scripture that were the manna of the moment.  (i)Romans 13:11-14 and on into Chapter 14(i). 

  "Very civil of you.  Can we go now? There's tornados!"