"But this says New Orleans,"

  the young person looked at the filled out form, issued it seemed, by representatives of both the BoP and the BoT.  A kind of colonizing missionary group had also signed the slip of paper. 

  "You got a problem with this?" 

  "Well, this is Georgia.  I may not know much, but States are still States, right?" 

  A man shook the peanuts in his bottle of soda.  "What's BoT?" 

  "Board of Trade.  They have those all over the world.  Connected to Stock Markets.  You ever heard of those?" Another man was picking the peanuts out of his soda and organizing them on the back of the pickup truck.  "He doesn't know all your big words yet.  What's the objective here?  Today." 

  "Okay, so did you see the storyline in all the regional magazines about the state of the fishing industry in our country?" The man organizing the peanuts did a soda burp then said in a deep, rich voice STATE.  "Not like I've had time to read.  I slept the whole way back from ChiEurasia." 

  "Are you agitated and annoyed?" 

  "Not exactly aggravated.  Why?" 

  "Because there are hundreds of other writers who could document us on this peacekeeping ambassador thing-a-ma-jig." 

  "IGAHMO." 

  "What'd he just say?" 

  "Nobody ever knows what my cousin is ever saying." A young black man had lifted the brim of his straw hat and took a blade of grass from his mouth to say.  "Related?" 

  "Distantly." 

  "Get to the point here people.  Or I'll 

  "What? Shackle us? Make us dig more trench?" 

  The woman looked at the ground.  "I'll have to go on without you.  All." 

  A car behind the pick up truck started up.  People looked around at the leftover sultry night steaming off swampy trees. 

  "Want to ride with us Country bumpkins?" A woman in coveralls asked the woman visiting this neck of the woods region. 

"What do they think,"

  a parent who'd come from all-night Kinesset talks asked out loud, "They are going to a museum?" 

  A couple looked at the photographs of the soldiers in white gloves holding machine guns.  "So...no fingerprints?!"  The couple spoke sentences together.  One starting, one finishing. 

  "Where did you get those?" 

  Of course, no one could answer.  It was one of the topics more hintimated about than discussed with any degree of certainty.  Like, a next generation frantic to survive. 

  "A slave?" A son serving both militarily and as medical tech asked his mother.  She'd gone to great lengths to have his "case" reviewed to determine his fate.  "My status is slave?" 

  The mother nodded, "Mine.  For right now." 

  "Have you people lost your minds?" A lumpy with cancer older generation Israeli breathed shallow and shifted his heft in a massage chair.  "There's no getting out of this.  Ever." 

  A middle-aged daughter turned on heel and spoke in Hebrew.  "But it might be different for them."  The old man groaned.

"Record it as

  Asian On Asian.  I want to see who comes for the body." The grief-stricken faces of new friends made in a Grand Hotel kitchen bowed and involuntarily shook little nooo's this can't be real. 

  A whole Chinese female burnt to a crisp on a baking pan.

  The increasing violence seemed per "the news" the more security forces got closer to establishing buffer zones.  It wasn't helping that the worldwide leaderships' hands were tied on what they could and could not say, and, on how to act. 

  With this in that port and that thing up there, they strategized until decisions had to be made differently.  Enough of the world had "voted" to stop before annihilation. 

  Every kind of "paper" had to be held and lock-boxed from diplomatic suggestion notes to bankrolls, public and private.  "Take no action," was the word amongst a terrified humanity.  But the criminals were immune from such orders.

"So, you're telling me," he

  pointed at the table of overlayment, materials helping officials make sense of it all; "That tourism is our first line of defense?" The Governors of three of the sistering States' faces, blanched.  Attendants to State's business including all kinds of professionals erected the frame of an old medical check screen, and unrolled freezer paper and butcher paper over it.  This created a visibility privacy and allowed recorders to sit inside the little Parkway museum space.  And someone dug out some crayons. 

  "This can't be," people eye'd on the official scheduling of such emergency meetings.  An older T'see Ranger explained, "We're not Seaboard." 

  "That's right," a learning Forest Service person commented, "We're Interior here." 

  Men in uniform saluted full on Pine Tree salute as ranking Officials filed past a geological treasure trove to protect.  "I cannot let this be," an Army man said by way of as to why, "You called me on this." 

 

Monk jam and cheese and

  me.  Of course they were expecting her.  A traveling companion took each gift out of a limpening daypack.  What had been a starkly sunny day was being overtaken by it.  People who cared about each other and humanity and the earth had made a spiderweb of communications about it.  Though to speak of its origins was tatamount to death sentence. 

  A man moved from between cars that seemed to have been sitting in place for a very long time.  Weathered.  The tires caving into concrete slab of a parking lot.  "We should go." 

  "Where?" 

  "Inside." 

  For three or five hours we read.  One window was okay to be left open a crack, the one pocketed in dead air. 

  "No sense saving it," was said of the gelatinous sweet in a jar.  We'd been given a third of a loaf of sourdough bread for our hike.  We ate silently as "the cloud of radiation" bristled all around us. 

  "You

  "Nancy 

  "You 

  Roused from a catnap between diplomatic rah-ows.  Bruisings really as the money trails trained debt and aid and war and all sides into one giant garbage can that hardcore, purist environmentalists wanted gone from the planet. 

  "Whaat," she sleepily growled. 

  "Turn up the speakers on that jet." 

  "Yes, yes I'm awake." 

  "Get your ass 

  "Plane 

  "Down here!" 

  "Okay, I'll get my plain ass down there." There hadn't been enough high security to go around so some of the jets bandied around up top.  While ground allies analyzed emissions and contrails and flow of luggage at airports.  With surface-to-air activity on the Continent and large swaths of population taking up cause it was better together and not government people as flaunting celebrity. 

  Husband and wife kissed casually as trained people measured everything about that type of transportation.

  "Thanks for coming Joan." At that the young reportorial writer burst into tears disguised as an asthma attack.  "That bad?"  Didion turned to other literary people.  "Did we fuck up?  Are we behind schedule?  What's this about?" A hand in a skirt pocket waved in the direction of walking away from.  "Soooooo STUPID.  I, I sneezecoughwheeze don't even know what a tarmac IS," ordered to FREEZE shouted after her. 

  "I'm ev'ry woman it's all in meeeee," a ringtone blared in the cavernous airport.

Everyone had guns drawn.

  "It's not fair," a large man was weeping and breathed heavy into the little microphone. 

  "Okay, okay," a mediator heard something and waved others over.  "Can you put it on speaker?" 

  "I tried," a woman's voice. 

  The timers had ticked down to the last seconds before people who'd volunteered not to be in or out had finished up in the Resource Center turned Campus.  So when a community leader was put on the also timed schedule of answering questions about the new exciting thing "this one" came up with and opened the leather portfolio... 

  "Is it a joke on us?"  People with guns turned and aimed at the person who'd promised to let them know. 

  "It dissolved." A person testing the piece of paper for DNA barely said aloud. 

  A diplomat crossing a courtyard fell to knees, briefcase falling on the ground, and a little dust devil breeze picking up a flurry of papers.  Instant weeping head in hands.

  "They couldn't

  "Wouldn't

  "Is this the Continent of Africa?" The airplane radio.

"I don't call a surge under gun-threat,

  medical duty." 

  "What happened here?" To a foot in a pool of blood beside a tank. 

  "Bled out because," 

  "Not your position to determine cause.  Next." 

  "Hands cut off so couldn't defend the border line." 

  "Report it to that Captain," handcuffed hands motioned which person.

Had had to Shelter In Place, so

  various people were "late" to the shadow-learning experience of a general assembly meeting. 

  Two people started to take off their coats in a foyer with a little coat closet that wouldn't open.  That was when each realized something about the other-not-enemy.  They'd been given souvenir pocket flags. 

  Outside a limo driver and a passenger started arguing. 

"Will you stop scream-whispering at eachother?"

  The frantic conversation in an absolute whisper continued. 

  "Please?"  The grownup in the position of child in a family not all together got off the cot and went to the fridge.

  "You've re-invented us guests as your family." 

  "What's that supposed to mean?" The wife turned and scream-whispered at the man.  The husband took the milk and put it back in the refrigerator.  "You are not family." 

  "Got you to stop fighting." 

  "We're not fighting." 

  "Heated discussion." 

  The husband got a glass and poured some milk.  "About what?" 

  Sighs.  "Should I be sorry I just asked that?" 

  Neither answered.  The husband poured two more glasses of milk.  Everybody sat at the table in the kitchen. 

  After considering how to frame a little bit if the big picture, the wife revealed that both their almost grown children had started University but changes had them both not at school now.  "Well, one's doing night school and ambulance driving." 

"It's just not what we planned for them.  For any of us," the Dad said. 

  "God has plans too," the guest said.  "Thank you for the milk.  I'll get more before we go tomorrow." They all sat with their own thoughts of the word tomorrow. 

  "I've never taught before," one young lady said to another.  "So," she gulped the coffee, "I am kind of nervous."  A slightly older man was about to speak when a ruckus broke out at the end of the hallway. 

  "Pull everyone off of everyone else." Other teachers headed that way reciting plan.  With everyone standing as individuals, straightening hair and pulling sweaters back into good shape the students were asked, "Who wants to go first?" 

  Nobody.  Folders were straightened.  Shoelaces tied.  "We'll just stand here then." People fidgeted backpacks on shoulders.  Finally one tall girl said to the seventeen people, "Your friends are terrorizing my friends." 

  "Who are you telling?" 

  She looked out the window, then announced, "I'm late for class." She walked down the hall and entered a classroom.  Others glanced out the window at a limousine parked on the street.  Also went to class.

  "That's not what I'm saying." A guy sat sideways in a breakroom chair. 

  "What are you saying?!  Because it sounds, er, ah like you're suggesting communism." 

  "It's not communism to control yourself." 

  "I AM in control of myself.  But nothing else."  Other workers came into the breakroom.  Most had no lunch.  Someone ate a piece of bread in two bites. 

  "I think it's," the guy took forms out of a jacket pocket.  The woman sat facing him.  Put a hand on his flattening the creases in the forms.  "What is it?"  The guy looked in her eyes and didn't turn away.  She removed her hand, reached into a cargo pocket and offered a pen.  He shook his head no.  From the other cargo pocket she pulled out a soda.  "Share?" 

  "Bad for our teeth." 

  "What is it about?" 

  "My sister said kids at school are calling each other racists and," he took a folded notebook page out of a shirt pocket, "And this," he showed the word.  "Zygote?  Their calling each other zygotes?" The guy looked at the word under his thumb.  "No.  This one," he moved his thumb up an alphabetized list of words.  "Xenophobia" 

  "I don't even know that one."  

  Together they finished the soda.  "Let's go find a dictionary." 

  "I saw a bookshop!"

"I HAD to!" Somebody yelped.

  Standing around a mee-thane firepit.  People were a mixture of dread and terrible excitement.  Of course, like an American State suddenly having 10,000 new criminal cases it meant there'd be a "window". 

  "Stepped on my foot," a Scientist said to a Researcher.  "Stole my thunder," a fiction writer said to a general writer. 

  "Ate my crableg," griped a Veteran outdoorsman who'd practically been forced to eat beans-and-weenies in a can to the point of bored and...And what??  His sober-buddy pressed.  "Makes him wander off portside." 

  "You're sketches suck." One man gently ix-nayed an attempt to travel on.

  Hold it...hold it steady fellOOws.  The World War II torpedo was ensnared in a large fishing net and being dragged alongside a surplus submarine used for movies and maritime museum happenings. 

  "It looks rusty in sphots," a scuba diver didn't unleash from mask and Oxygen but teeth-clamp'd told.  "Give someone else a turn bloke!" Shorts and hairy legs with a whistle hollered.  Must've been this one, a serious painter said of a tossed sketch showing a submarine just barely emerging from behind a glacier finger. 

"I called her."

 "I called him." 

  "I called them." 

  There have always been times when the group psyche itself has been attacked.  Lexington, Pearl Harbor, 9112001, in the streets the world over. 

  "What'd they say?"  A daughter asked.  The man could not speak. 

  All phone calls were being recorded, so others listened.  There were dead bodies from the main village to the hotel.  "Hundreds?" 

  "Hundreds.  It's been verified." 

  "What'd she say?" 

  "She's still saying.  I'll put her on speaker phone.  Calling it like a break from reality of situation...triggered the reaction...response...loyalties...training...heat of the moment...irresponsibility of whoever let it get out of control in her opinion.  People kept eating breakfast, taking vitamins, checking snack boxes, tying shoelaces.

  "He said you'll have to take his place."