"There's a high level of shmooze,"

  a guy of our generation had snagged a bowl of nuts and chips.  "We'll stay in here," our Spokesperson announced.  Reaching for snacks turned into a tower of hands USA strong.

  Our parents' generation were on the razor thin sometimes line between deciding their own fates and being swept along in political tide.  

  "She's too moody," ice being rocked side to side in a cranberry and vodka drink. 

  "It won't be that," lawyers assured. 

  "Turn this way," a paparazzi ordered.  Drinks hastily put down.  "Let's have a tour of the grounds, shall we?!" Arm hooks and holding backs.  "Not really associated with them," an inner core of Republicanism.  "Must be lonely," the man with the starting to sag face seemed to look at the drinks left behind and see only a challenge to tying it all together...like people roped together on a plank. 

  Scatter.  Then in their line of fire, with the cameras, freeze.  Team Captain said to if we get caught.  "Why is your leg doing that?" A dismissive look to a surprised look screwing itself into feeling sad.  "It just drags and stops working times." Tallest boy butt-wiggled over.  "Okay, you freeze first." A nod, good plan if I 

  Can make it that far 

  You can, yeah? 

  Yah! Can, can 

  CAN, WE CAHN 

  LIKE TREES WE SCULPT but for the rage

  "Good day Mother," hand gesturing WTF?!  "DON'T" smacking helping hands away "Don't mind us, trees, our 

  "Director, oh director..." 

  It was then we knew something more about poverty's effects and the shape of a pocket 'round bout, where...

  Our tiny ship hadn't moved but we'd been around the world in a minute.  Talk if you can, we'd tell our guests, the lamed and frozen and "Yah ony cover'd in dis,""'Ee shmells," Ah, de winO, ticked off the list if LOST AND FOUND.  "When?" 

  Distractions so a peek at a working watch.  "When the lad's brother camed to claim him for me mother." 

  "Got it.  Children, children." 

  "Go wi daht one.  Wote dis book." 

  "Follow that RAINBOW!"  People closing curtains and tucking treasures away.  "Don't look." 

  The boy had trained.  For weeks.  And the day had arrived.  A nun in engineer boots and a white blazer and skirt blew the whistle.  Running in gunny sacks, the children hurled themselves down and down on the pitch.  Parents whooped and hollered along the sidelines.  Some threw down jackets and athletic bags and yelled to keep going, KEEP GOING.  Kids got out of the gunny sacks and asked about rules then returned and kept going.  Our mom and a brother had a strategy.  The race seemed to be in slow motion, set to the tune of Chariots of Fire.  "Now hop like a bunny!  Three more steps," she fibbed.  The brother had shut his eyes and was veering off course.  Too much excitement, once they shut he couldn't fit in opening them.  "DO OVER! DO OVER!"  Kids started screaming.

  Inside the school building, still no litmus paper.  "What other Science can we do?"  One kid patted down his mother's coat to find, Oh good we've got these! 

  "Maxi PADS!" 

  "Let's look at cotton under the microscope." 

  "Won't you be glad when the teachers return from Overseas?" A substitute-only woman poked her head into a classroom and asked.  "Oh, I will," the mom said politely before turning and growling everyone into their seats. 

  "Why aren't you using your thinking caps?" A short male teacher asked the room of people tasked with a re-set.  A grown up raised his hand, waited to be picked, then told, "Our heads have been all over the place." 

  "Oh, I heard.  Especially this head," he plonked the gelatinous bust still sitting on a Science table with a rubber-tipped chalkboard pointer.  Then he poked it.  He was drawn into "the art as science project" by the immovability of the object.  "Would you like to explain?" He asked a woman in a paint smeared male shirt.  "I can," was all she said.  He sighed.  "How about a presentation?" 

  "Well, I 

  "Sometime next week?" 

  A tweenage kid walked to her desk and got on one knee.  "Willya steel be home mum?" 

  She mumbled that she didn't know what to say before putting blank fresh sketchpads and charcoals in a soap dish into a sachel.  She started for the door.  "Where are you going?" The male teacher asked.  "Did I say something wrong?" The woman didn't turn around and said, "I must go.  I have to get ready." 

"What are they doing?"

  She wiped the lick of mud off his face with a tissue. 

  "Just 'cuz you get to pick which story doesn't mean you can just takeover MINE." 

  "Did you just raise your voice at me?" 

  "No ma'am."  

  She gave everyone who came over little wrapped chocolates. 

  A thwap on the coverall'd arm and chocolate-y grunt.  "Start talking." 

  "Well, since the hurricane and all," one girl started saying.  But she held a hand up.  Took a tape recorder from her greencoat pocket and asked, "You mean to tell me you people have been out here since the hurricane?" 

  People looked around. 

  "Not exactly." 

  "Most of us." 

  "Why?" 

  It really was complicated.  Between the layoffs and housing shortages and people with sick relatives the personal whys went on until she clicked the tape recorder off.  "Now what's the reason for this story?" 

  Nobody said anything. 

  She clicked the recorder back on after checking to see if and how much tape was left.  "This is," stated her name, rank, and serial number, "In a Godforsaken swamp, near some damn dams, and..." Click.  "Okay.  Have a good day.  Good time.  Doing whatever it is you all are doing." She pocketed the tape recorder and started to walk back to the little car.  When she got there she opened the door and shut it.  Then said, "Just know you all are on surveillance." 

  A person hiding out from being a writer went towards the car.  "Her wheel is stuck n the mud guys!" Other people also moved towards the vehicle.  When there were seven or eight people someone said, "We've uncovered peat moss." Hand gestures had people surround the car, pick it up, and move it out of the mud hole.  She ignored that.  "So?" 

  Hand gestures also told, another person in the car, but people had started to go back to dregging the river.  Person sat up and got out.  "We can do the story or I can make a phone call and have you all arrested." 

  "There no signal," someone said. 

  The second person flipped open a phone.  "Did you pay your bill?  Mine's fine." 

  A man rested his butt on the hood of the car.  "Don't get it dirty," the first woman said.  He wiped a finger down a gaiter and scooped mud onto it, then wiggled a muddy line across the hood. "I guess I might could give you some details for your story.  What I won't do is get arrested again because everybody's got their PC panties on too tight." 

  "Okay.  You guys have fun talking.  We're outtah here!" One woman shot a hand into the air and two-snapped.  Some of the people literally formed a line behind her and they started walking towards the main road.  "What about our stuff?" One was heard asking.  "Just donations.  We'll get more." 

  "See this muddy line," the man said.  "This is the river."  He rubbed his temples.  "Got a map?" 

  "Somebody check in the glove box." 

  "Officially Army Corps of Engineers needs to know why some water flowed outwards from this area even before getting to the dam zone." 

"Where's the bus?"

  "Just act like you're in high school." 

  The first shift server slammed the dishwasher tub of mugs down on the bartop. 

  "That's what all the cougars do."  Three shots in a row and not quite "fat" fingers in all three.  A five dollar bill in the one on the far right.  He took it to the server.  She plucked the fiver.  "Maybe you'll get some sleep tonight.  Our gang's clearing out." Both vogued and did their secret handshake before the man walked backwards towards the swinging doors.

 

"Why is she here?"

  The voice was on the speakers up front even though the person asking the question was in a tiny supply closet. 

  "Not because I need to be rehabilitated," one of the Visitors told the speakers.  "It doesn't work that way," a desk person flopped a pencil onto the clipboard'd SUPPLIES LIST.  "Just go talk to her." 

  "Still mad at me?" 

  "Maybe."  She used a broomstick to push a box of toilet paper closer to the edge of a high shelf.  Four hands caught it as it fell. 

  "Remember like two summers ago 

  "No 

  "When you said 

  "No 

  "You said and I know you are always true to your word 

  "What'd I say?" 

  "You said we could call on you when we really needed you." 

  "Not whenever." 

  Three rolls of toilet paper out.  "I'm at work.  Put this back up there."  She exited the closet.

"DON'T SHOOT!!"

  "Someone threw the foot." 

  The foot went sailing through the air and 

  "Give me that.  That is not factual." 

  "Sort of." 

  "We'll meet up with you later," an Army person dubbed Queen of the Female Element pulled the hatch on the transporter closed.  "Do we have to?" Someone asked.  "Log these," she flopped a baggie of bullet casings onto a little metal table.  It clanked an absurd beat seeming to match up with the change in mood.  

  "Not sure why you're surprised Sir." 

  The senior advisor pushed the newspapers away from directly in front of him.  "They said to give them something." 

  "Not sure whoever they are meant actual toys." 

  "What else could we have given them?" 

  "Sir, I'd like you to meet someone." 

  "I'm not ready.  It's too soon." 

  "Not like that.  This person is different.  Has been griping about having been through Vietnam and now not stuck with, but 

  "Stuck with 

  "Feeling like," he looked at a file, then read, "We can't expect things to go exactly as in World War II." 

  The man humphed.  "This is a far cry from that level of conventional and orderly." 

  "See.  That's the start of a conversation I think we all need to have.  Can I bring her in?" 

  He picked up a newspaper and stared at the exploded bag of toys on the street beside dead bodies.

"How did the dame get so bruised?"

  The ice-melting slipped some shrinking cubes out of a sandwich bag.  People dove to clean up the mess.  "That was my last good shirt," an everybody's Dad said of wiping and wiping at the ice water on the gymnasium floor.  "Why is this locker room floor like the court floor?" 

  "They're new.  The lockers." 

  A man with a towel hanging over his shoulders sat on a no-back bench like it was a horse.  "My dad's generation lost this place once."  He sighed like the weight in his body was shifting.  "Oh my God, they did?" A young boy and girl started and finished the question together.  The man raised his obviously tired eyes and looked in each face. 

  "When it's a war, we can lose everything," the mom-in-law-to-be put her arms around the boy and beckoned the girl to come get hugged too.  She sat where her Dad's lap would be but for the bench. 

  "We'll see you at the restaurant," a showered, shaved, and dress-casual clothed man came from the shower area and said to the family. 

  "That's what happened in Germany to the Jews," he got out to scrape the windshield.  "What do you mean?" Blended with the roaring defrosting sound.  "Put the cigarette out before I get back in." 

  "Technically, they lost." 

  "I'd say.  We went to the museum in Philadelphia." 

  "I've been studying." He blew the horn.  "Goats.  At home.  They stand around anything warm." 

  "They lost...their democracy." 

  "Yes.  And then the Republic was up for grabs!" 

  The fog was stranding off and up from freshly plowed slush mounds.  "First, they lost their property rights and then themselves as property." 

  "Did it have to do with taxes?" 

  "In a way.  Tax base."  The curb outside the restaurant was being shoveled.  "We could've walked." 

  "Couldn't leave my property on their property.  Can't afford another ticket." 

  "Thanks," to a door being opened and a hand to help over the garbage in snow ice mounds.

"Because you stole the foot."

  The gigantic swirl of undoing in the midst of having to do sounded, at first, like quiet ambulances and soft shoes giving little squeaks of changing direction. 

  At first the person in the jalaba wimpered.  Then began to laugh maniacally.  "Another gone over the edge," a nurse told two male orderlies.  "I'll put it back sister." The laughing echo'd down the real hospital hallway.  The center where the tents had been joined to form administration suddenly had a rush of people coming in. 

  "Who were you chasing?" A security personnel asked the writer who'd come to help however I can.  Then she'd been accused of breaking the lock on one of the body part freezers.  Had recognized eyes, a faint scar on a hand.  Had answered questions from all nations involved in the decisions to disband as both medical reds.  And withstood accusations of being the thief who should be stoned this minute. 

  The woman dropped her eyes to the floor in front of the real thief. 

  "Is this truth?" A friend-to-all asked.  Another young woman rushed forward and ripped the black garment off.  The foot was tucked into a waistband of pants like a gun. 

  The tallest nurse grabbed the garment, ordered hands up, and yelled for a photographer.  "It needs to be a military photographer," an administrative director advised. 

"Why you huddle widt my Viktor?"

  Everyone jumped up and stretched and scattered themselves around the room.  "I gotta cawl my Chief Correspondent." 

  Outside, someone choking on a hardboiled egg.  A president giving the heimlich.  "I toll you not to pop those like candy!"  Pissed at more setbacks.  So smacking on back harder than necessary once the slimey egg projectiled out. 

  "Because." 

  "Because why?" 

  "Long or short?" 

  "Both.  But quick the Russians are waking up." 

  "We had seventeen frozen urethras. 

  "What's that?" 

  "PENISes!" 

  "Ouch." 

  "That means you girls need to stick with those guys." 

  "Yeah, okay but 

  "No buts, no sorries 

  "But these homefield girls think they own their team captains." 

  "Okay, there she is, let me get her." 

  Thank you everyone.  "Is this you?" 

  "It's me." 

  "What is your temperature there?" 

  The little thermometer blew in the wind as a basic fact reading started the work day.

Blaring "Mr. Wendell" we

  pulled our social justice defense line to the South while like-minded professionals from isolated parishes pushed north.  We had much to discuss having been carved into regions by a layer of corporate language seeming to have dissected American unity. 

  A brilliant sun shone on a garden that was kept lush and almost giant by carekeepers who had shunned the Miracle Gro ban.  "You can do that? Ban back?" 

  "Any side effects?" Science-oriented team reps hit the just getting ungroggy in time for brunch crowd with a barage of questions about the splendid setting. 

  Some went straight for the food.  Omelets and biscuits and, "Our biscuits are like their," an eyeroll north, "Cupcakes.  Well, at least around here." 

  A team of nutritionists smacked, lightly, hands away from a buffet feast being photographed while the authors of the food revealed recipe secrets.  Labels were typed out by organizing types.  And little magazine-worthy photo blurbs were instantly printed to stand beside gorgeous, simply gorgeous items in "the spread". 

  People milled about. 

  Concerns, issues, and updates were groundcover level of noise as people got their bevvie on.  "Beverage of choice?" A black-tie event server asked each person wandering over to a non-prominently placed "wet bar".  "Do we all have to hire servants for our professional presentations?" 

  "Not at all," a lady with a sundress over her blue jeans and garden boots fixed her lipstick in an antique with broken mirror furniture piece.  "I could fix that," someone said.  "Not right now.  Let's eat.  And by the way that's my daughter and her boyfriend serving today." Someone made a note to ask for an interview.  "Her Daddy is hellbent on keeping them mostly apart until wedding day." Little ahs.  One voice boomed from further back in the foyer, "Mine is too!  This kid's wearing a chastity belt." She thumbed at a teenager who turned neon red and visibly shrank about three feet.  "Is he here?" She grew taller than mom and asked down at her.  "Who?" 

  "My 

  Silverware on champagne flutes sounded a mass exodus to the lawn.

"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.