"Okay, that's the quote unquote

  Party Boss in this neck of the woods.  Here's a water.  Oh, and those tickets to a poetry slam.  Have fun."  She closed the binder from the Academic Institution with the circled man amongst voters.  All gathered around gummy fruit. 

  A discussion on a public bus about sheep.  One of the church events we'd been sent to was a Catholic Mass.  It was, apparently, an Ordinary Time sermon as opposed to a Holiday celebration.  A reminder that currently living Christians were neither Jesus himself, nor the Apostles.  In the Bible Jesus himself cautions disciples that humans are similar to sheep in that they are more fragile than wolves and mostly prone to follow any old "shepherd". 

  "I wuntah sat there quietly and been told I'm a sheep." A black teenage girl said from a seat towards the front of the bus.  As we dismbarked at a neighborhood street corner to get food at a market before the vendor and restaurant zone camped around the event, people on the bus bah'd at us. 

  Inside the market National Guard people notified three of the five of us, you are needed back in the Capitol.  The binder was removed from locked luggage and inventoried together with digital photographs taken on the brief tour.  

  "None of you can travel together." 

  "I guess that's what 'independent journalism' means." 

  "Well, I've got a long walk to the airport."  We'd left vehicles and friends far away from the politically occupied territory. 

Click. "You're question is too sweet." Click.

  "Well, I'm NOT an interrogator.  Is this room soundproof?" 

  "It would be but now we're under constant surveillance!  Does that make you sweaty?" 

  "I'm wearing deodorant." 

  "Go! Take your questions to the other box.  And you two have a good road trip." 

  "Are we there yet?" 

  The next filter box would pit us against people who were "beautiful".  They'd managed to work personal care into part of their regiment.  "With a desire to be on TV, I'm sure." 

  "I'm more of a behind-the-scenes type if I'm a type at all." 

  A door closed in a nervous move not sounding like a nurse's shoe in a hallway of calmed neurotics.  The woman approached, lowered eyes.  "I'm sure I blew it.  I wanted to." 

  "Why?" 

  "I'm leaning in the direction of think tank." 

  "I don't even know what that is but it sounds like it would hurt my brain." 

  "What kind of question did they want?" 

  "I think they're seeking the perfect moderator." 

  "Let's just leave." 

  "That's not how to handle this." She looked at the list of allowed questions and pointed at two potentials.

"There's a reason for

  everything." A woman ahead of us in the processing explained.  "And if we can't know, there's a silver lining!"  A random person in line was told to hold out hands.  These were swabbed with something similar to an alcohol pad.  There proved to be gun powder on the skin.  "He had to fire a pistol." Someone else vouched. 

  He'd fired it the way a Colonial re-enactor had fired a musket to show us boy and girl scouts how to signal that the red coats were indeed coming.  

  "How can we counter terrorism without understanding what terrorism eesz?" An Indian man philosophized.  Part reinforcing we'd not actually done anything wrong in busting through a Klan block of the roads to D.C., part making good on a promise to at least listen to a "talk".  

  Potential "mentors" for next steps on career paths came from a labyrinth of double-doored rooms.  They looked at name tags.  A friend snickered.  Before we'd left home they'd even checked our teeth like we were horses. 

  "It's been quite a saga to get here.  Peacefully.  And not killing anyone on the roads." Our peer-group rep informed a sweatered man with a shirt pocket bulge of pens.  "We appreciate the effort." 

  "Taking a stand on anything in such clime has actually 

  The line of us started moving.  "My mentor is twenty-six years younger than me," a man hoarsely said into a woman's ear.  She handed him her pocketbook.  Took flats off feet and slightly shuffled along in nylons.  "They get numb.  It's not a forever mentor.  I mean maybe you two will hit it off.  But some of us are just here to get updates and some backstory." 

  Out of the building onto a sidewalk.  Clouds gray.  Into another building. 

  "A mass vetting of people willing to get shot at for Our Country?" The man's sweat was dripping out of him onto the walking belt. 

  The shootings in Virginia were not showing a clear pattern.  Civilians buying junk food and prices-soaring gas were on the TV in the weight-training room.  "The Humanities people need to get their files." 

  "Do we have them?" 

  "Supposedly.  The Censor Council needed to put Arts and Science in you guys' Department." 

  The man swiped a face towel from the handlebars of the treadmill.  Shut the brisk walk off.  "Let's check on the timing of the request!" 

"I am certain you are not supposed to

  be in there."  The woman on the sleeping mat did not rouse.  The tallest woman from the choir easily put a paperweight hand on the head of the child.  Pressed into place like a Pansy in a book.  "Release all weight," the older girl threatened. 

  "Let me hold the camel.  And I will tell you what I've seen today." 

  It's fur was just an iota less real than real camel hair.  Some of the older kids would say "It's real!" Just as a person snuggled the thing into a touchstone with an imaginary "place" away from the brutal sun and the cruelty of no water in a desert and the stiffening of everyone's feather-light into law and order.  The push and pull of mindhearts in play with "reality". 

It wasn't the first pop up

  nightclub shooting.  One person held a meaty hand over the blood  spurting out of "special friend's" neck. 

  A spread out mobile assistance line of people passed word of shots fired.  Medical supplies were discreetly fed back up the mountain. 

  Therefore ALL creatives are considered queers.  It was unreal that this was read aloud as directive.  Unreal, too, that the injured were just civilians and trapped in a bloody shoot out on a friggin' mountaintop. 

  "Tell me a story," the injured person said but with a gurgle.  A grandma crossing the mountain to pick up grandchildren ordered the athletic-looking person be propped up slightly and ten minutes knees up like this.  Others had already bled out. 

  One unsolved crime had led to a serious crime scene being overlooked.  One real commitment "to love" no matter what had floated through the drinking crowd like an ember in a haybarn.  "Was it a political statement?" An authority asked a person just staring at the dead toast maker, person, in a chair.  The killing had happened quickly.  The chaos of getting the hell out of here snarled all traffic in both directions. 

  "Think we'll look back and laugh about these days still?" The paling person nodded weakly.  Lifelong friends and neighbors in America share the sentiment of we have to try. 

 

  Special friend was older than us.  But not fogey.  All the way back to New York special friend didn't write us off.  Once when a spontaneous gathering of motorcyclists from both coasts suddenly bloomed as a sea of metal and edgy energy and we got sort of pinned in and called scrawny special friend totally stood up for us.  "So?  I'm scrawny too.  Whaddaya gonna do about it?" That prompted a buncha girls more her age to get tough and in silent movie fashion "the girlfriends" stilled the chaos long enough for kids my age to beat it. 

  Scram mous ah, one kid remained a kind of magical wizard of chaos and hate when he got tall enough to hang with the girlfriends and not be detected as one of us.  We'd hear adventure stories of "fighting almost broke out" and "cops din't even have to show up".  But the girlfriends weren't really sure what made such surfing in culture possible.  Even though most of them were real smart. 

  "HATE IS NOT A CRIME," the man stood almost taller than the doorframe of the restaurant.  And that was true, so his message had heft.  Especially to the "neo-nazis" not in their "uniforms".  His words were like ghost guns.  Crowding-in people seemed to be strengthened by the reminder.  Like getting enough hate onto the thin crust of civility could overwhelm the normal day.  Could seem a victory.  Just to exist, and by just existing could "shut them up!" People who didn't hate. 

  "It didn't seem to be political so much as just the opposite." 

  "The opposite of what?" The authority asked a person in nice clothes with a fine spray of human blood like spray paint across pants and shirt.  "We'd just come in to use the restroom," a woman explained. 

  "Is there video?" Another authority asked a server.  Apron stuffed with dinner cheques and pens.  Crossed arms and head shaking no.  Mouth saying, "I don't know.  I don't know." 

Poor Buddy the Bee

  "Why is the bee scrumpin' the roof father?" 

  The little little boy was a middle child in a gang of kids.  The father looked down at the boy.  The boy pointed above their heads where they were working on a pass-along team to repair damaged at great heights.  The Dad surveyed the situation and made a ticking sound with his mouth.  Debated age appropriate. 

  "Poor buddy." The father said of the bee.  "Gots pollen and no place to put it." 

  "Why?" 

  The Dad unfurled the boy's tiny hand full of putty.  "We filled up the holes with this stuff." 

  Other people in the early morning launch team area tiredly watched the conversation.  Until they heard the Foreman cometh.  "I SAID don't sweat the small stuff NOT NOT DO the small stuff.  Now we're holding up the whole world!" 

  Sighs.

They dragged the women away.

  The new bikinis were stained dark with dirt and ground cover vegetation. 

  From a place of depression and lack of self confidence the men had decided to be different.  And to be different from beaten down and runned over, bulldozed by surveillance and computers thinking for them, they'd processed the situation, and surmounted downtrodden by getting strong. 

  Without permission they started to re-claim theirs.  Most of the women were shocked.  One had the wherewithall to be a sort of spokesperson in the fluid situation.  "I see y'all have regressed to Neanderthal stage in your process Tom." The man grunted and pulled harder.  "You're giving me a wedgie." He sweatily re-gripped ankles and looked like a man pulling a plow.  She stayed rigid.  

  "In sickness and health.  And whatever this is," another woman called out.  Her breasts exposed to the dirt as she was face down in the pull and her bikini top was up under her armpits.  "Not sure this is what I had in mind for girl's day at the lake." 

  Other couples worked their ways from awkward capture into holding hands and becoming "one" in stealth.  Most worked silently to retrieve stashed survival kits and make way back to "real life".  Never again to be as simple as childhood had seemed to cared for children.  

  Decisions had been made between couples that made a casual goodbye impossible.  In a parking area a partnerless man asked to and took a few photographs.  "I can't unsee this and that." He had already explained, first exposure to therapy in a group setting.  "But this is how I'll think of us!" Weary smiles and Org tees. 

"Where did you take the public?"

  The Reporter had come from Atlanta after Minnesota.  Because of "missing money" in the Town's money pot, a new school building was put on hold.  The lease was also up on the container classrooms. 

  Several people would not back down on demanding accountabilty.  A new phrase that came from watering down "protests".  Nobody wanted to get arrested for having thoughts and opinions about the gone money. 

  As the paperwork that wasn't lit on fire was sorted to forensic a "papertrail" the labels on the outside of the pods would occasionally change.  Someone held up a black markered sign that read: 

          The Public 

  It had two corners missing because there'd been a heated debate about the "budget" as a "pie".