"Everybody done playing everybody?"

  None of the new people answered.  Some were too weak; some, heads too scrambled from being leashed to mentors in the various arms of service. 

  "Good.  Because we don't do that.  We're the Forest Service people people." 

  Not one person quit the introductory training that year. 

"A pile of humpty dumptys?"

  "Yeah." 

  The artist woman's facial expression deflated into simplified.  She listened. 

  "Now everybody is disillusioned." 

  "So, the illusion is what's broken?!" 

  Young people still in shock looked at what the woman said like the words were physical things on the lawn. 

  "Some of us might be too." 

  "I get that, but no." 

  "What do you mean, no?" 

  "I don't accept that from you." She didn't point but met eyes.  "Or you.  Or you." She insisted across the space between seeing each other. 

"Stop running."

  People had guns drawn and everybody was "right". 

  The two's had tracked each other.  Some were to stay couples.  Others had grudges and grievances and were themselves being "tracked" by Feds and people charged with law enforcement. 

  To be sure a worn down service layer of America needed some "mental health" repair.  But a tanking economy, stretched shoe string budgets, fuck ups, and baggage was mucking up smooth process. 

  "Put some pants on," an Administrator volunteered on some time off to explain a number of processes to a number of people.  "How you gonna go overseas wit no passport idiot?" A rabidly hungry herself and having been being shirked of child support woman called out from a perimeter around service people who might give it another go around. 

  "Who dat?" Tired and still drunk called to thought-you-were-a-buddy.  Upper ranksmen stood ready to hold back all interested parties from fighting. 

  Dirty Feds-one-time and gov't workers with stolen information on people were kept behind a screen.  "As long as it takes to sort this out," a retiring-soon authority told loved ones about attending graduation. 

Back then/on that

  Peoples' journies trained and collided at times.  

  Some of the came in aheads waited.  Hid in fact.  Some in plain sight, some like crouching spiders.  There are times news gets ahead of a guard-railed cycle.  Flights were coming back to the Homeland from all over the world.  There were kinks in the censorship. 

  Enemies were chasing corporate types.  And an infiltrated-by-enemy community health care allowed topics about "mental health" to be PSA over the radio waves. 

  The connectors in our communications passed along critical information to service commanders.  Even as the radio told a generally discontent American popular that veterans are, many, "suicidal" the came in aheads had to ward off, combat "style" enemies stashed across the professional and residential field.  Or else it could have been more disappeared and even killed and staged as suicide. 

  Fortunately service people stay in war mode even during "cease fire" and other rhetoric used to help a general public survive and thrive. 

  By Mother's Day the land was really finding its voice.  Leafed trees and the songs of creatures awakening from winter. 

 

Not gonna lie...

  Some of us were at a loss for words. 

  If not for the few people who insisted on asking, what was it like? We might have lost our very existence in that you'll have to visualize it "space" of crossing while forging "the arch" from/to. 

  One closer-to-elderly brother stood near a just-getting-to-middle-age sister.  They'd had very different lives.  So the "beads on a string" that they did share, well, those were kept like beautiful things in a special box, and could be examined for relevant meaning.  The sister was having a moment.  After some time she said something like, 

  It feels like maybe that time we'd explained to those natives about how precious and precious, just precious those children were and how the roses were symbolizing that precious. 

  "And they hacked them with the machetè." 

  "Yes." 

  The cyborgs in frozen and slow walk mode were being loaded into a "paddy wagon". 

The "intervention" into

  the midst of mania had flatlined what at first seemed like the all. 

 

  Some people were in dumb shock.  Others, more tremors than whole human beings.  Incomprehensible sounds being uttered.  Rote gestures of bodies taken out of the context of routine. 

  "But they're alive," a short couple, young people, a guy and a girl, kept repeating.  This phrase caught on as a question amongst the warned: in rough shape.  That question predominated on one end of the park, while on the other; Who did this to you, him/her?  Where was this person found? 

  Teams of specialists mingled subtlely.  Lists of chemicals and compounds circulated in special folders.  Biological characteristics of matter plied into charts. 

  "Could it have been in the air?"  Some scientists had been velcro'd into special seating that could be picked up and carried farther afield.  

  Let's stay together.  

  "We'll need to be the arch." 

  "Wah, wah WHAT you mean?" 

  "It's all disjointed.  All the threads of story here." 

  "We cannot lose our collective memory." 

  Into the actual, literal mist not yet fully lifted off the park's surface. 

  "How was the conference?" 

  "Um, well the literary world is def beefing up the Science Fiction." 

  "We went to the, uh, Alien Fest." 

  "Is that?" 

  There were more than one cyborg.  And somebody who looked very familiar to a lot of the people in Central Park was opening flaps in the automatons, removing chips and drives, and changing the hardware between bots.  A dark figure had unscrolled a thick set of blueprints and was peering through a magnifying glass with a circus flashlight at the drawings.  Hands on each others' forearms and classic signaling agreed just watch.

  "Renaldo.  ¡Renaldo!  Get up.  We gotta go."  Groggy took the newspaper off his head and visibly tried to stay the vertigo by balancing an arm on the back of the bench and a foot on the ground. 

She'd smuggled them in.

  Another person had cleared the place of students and activists. 

  "It's a big rift." Was listed as REASON FOR VISIT. 

  "There's no talking," a tiny woman in a simple cotton dress admonished.  And the booming voices hushed near the entrance while still booming at the back of the portico.  "Why?" A man demanded to know.  The tiny woman looked way up at him and blew air out and clicked a sound that implied, I can see why, rift.  Her own voice boomed in a female tone, "It's a Reading Room." 

  "BUT IT'S LUNCH TIME." 

  "You told me to be like the Hopping Fountain," the smuggler said to someone sitting on a bench.  The line of men in suits was filing in.  "Past a rather gaudy statue of a woman sweeping."  Gaudy because it had been covered in brass-colored paint, not actual metal.  And the very act of sweeping with a broom was an act of humility, here captured in majestic sculpturing.  The artist and the model had not argued but discussed method, style, and manner of message.  Students gawked at the happening.  Remarked on the privilege of witnessing such "profound" and "deep" deliberations.  Then it was temporarily covered in a trash bag.  The very trash bag that had been filled with INPUT. 

        Sherry Candy Lane in 

               Huntington, NY 

  Committed to the struggle of keeping it real.  Balancing family and creativity.  Success and humility.  The secular world and religion. 

  Some of her artwork visualized the ephemeral.  Some the precious in "still life".  And some tried to capture the "stuff" of spiritual. 

  Whatever she produced her family loved it though some of us not too afraid to ask, what were you smoking? 

  Mom wasn't into any of that.  Her creativity was a blend of special gift from God and not giving up.  Over the years of stepping into her "workshop" in between "making the meat" and being the fairness meter, sounding board, glue in our group of eight, she built up her talent.  If a piece wasn't coming out right or as good as it could, she didn't throw it out.  She'd sit with it and work with it.  The push and pull of love. 

  She did the same with just about all of the people in her life. 

"Every knee will bow to Jesus NOT YOU!!!!"

  "And yet, he was the very reason we were still existing." The shrink scrawled notes.  Seen on a computer video screen. "Real time, democracy in action, embodying the Republic, living legacy.  Most of the others were dead, but not all were really dead." 

  "And it came down to that?" 

  "Yes.  But only because we are America not the world.  And he couldn't not be himself." 

  "The truth will set you free?" 

  "The truth will set you free." 

  It was total chaos on every monitor in the room where the actress and director had come to observe a new kind of news.  The very notion of 24/7 had proven to be the revelations.  "Someone should get out there," one of the bosses said as if in prison on the moon.  "For what?" A person glued to a particular monitor with six screens on one asked.  The boss of the bosses held out a master remote and clicked the room dark.  His voice was still gravel from assuming the mantel of leadership/ownership.  "It's time.  For a meeting.  Bring the coffeepot."