"Okay, now sort the piles by crime #456." A

  person in the small crane used for lifting body bags told the ground crew who'd already waited on investigators to archive, log, and report findings. 

  Most of the female bodies were re-piled into the domestic abuse category.  Friends and family stood nearby murmuring and wailing.

No one knew everyone

  was wired for sound. 

  A very frail WWII person who'd known about the Tribunal, like inside and out, explained to a friend that in reality, about "war criminals", a lot of them were just criminals anyway.  Criminals who needed a war.  Criminals who would not be "actors" and "operatives" if the war hadn't have been letting them run their courses. 

  "It doesn't mean there's no place for war," said a strategist immediately.  Looks burned him from every angle in the room.  "If conducted properly," the man said. 

 

"Those people are dead and this," a

  head shaking at the weight and volatility, "This, is, not a schoolyard." 

  Most of the living people near the pile of bodies were students and missionaries.  And one had been backhanded for calling the decidedly anti-human rights people with machine guns, (i)bullies(i). 

  "Nobody leave." 

  "I didn't think we were allowed." 

  "That too."  An Israeli man looked at photographs by journalists of other piles of bodies.

  There had in fact been decisions made.  Throughout spontaneous soccer games and at tables where porridge was the only option to "get something in your stomach", youth were courted.  Most were promptly wedded to machine guns and long knives.  Crates and crates of grenades and dynamite sat on the wharf beside rotting vegetables and donated used clothing.  News of the pirated AID never making it out of "humanitarian crisis" zone. 

  Mumbled warnings that "everything is political" made way through groups and orgs with other focuses besides "politics" like religion and education, but this seemed to create a vacuum in "action".  Within a short time span people were just people, some with weapons and some without. 

"Are you Americahn aliens?"

  "Do we look like little green men?" One woman passed a crate of olive oil along the wharf in a human chain. 

  "Sing us a few notes of a newer song!  We can't remember any music." 

  "Yeah that happened to us in the late seventies." 

  "You lived here?" 

  "Naw, New York." 

  "Same life everywhere.  All over the world." 

  Dried tomatos.  Lightly passed along. 

  "Sing we need an angel music." 

  Someone started humming.

"He was saying that why

  there's ultimately no peace possible is really between God and Satan." The woman flipped the shared dentures in and out of her mouth.  "We've had no denture glue either." 

  "I'll put that on the list of essentials needed."  The list was pretty serious since the carrier had been stalled at Sea for quite some time. 

  "That's what all this really seems like to me and my husband.  We got split up back on land in an operation and I ended up with our teeth.  A dentist visit was on our, what have people been calling it?" 

  "Bucket lists?" 

  "Yeah.  Like Lennon sang, (i)life is what happens while we're making plans." 

  "Right.  And we really are pretty tiny and fragile." 

  "Oh! Give these to the girls." She took a string of pearls tied in knots where the string had busted from a jumpsuit pocket.  "Maybe somebody'll have a lucky date.  Get married and go home." 

The man unfurled a roll of blue ribbon.

  He was standing between a gaggle of reportorial types and a line of buses.  "Okay, so as most of you know, I've always been more into politics than like crime and drugs." Someone boo'd.  The smells of breakfast mingled with bus exhaust. 

  He laid down the ribbon in the dewy grass. 

  "Did I leave anybody hanging on information or assignments?" 

  "What are you doing?" A woman asked.  Another took a picture of the ribbon. 

  "Everybody sure?" Nobody said anything.  "Once I cross this line I'll be a political operative and not an independent journalist anymore even though I can be reached if there's something I can do." 

  "For our sorry asses?" 

  Some of the younger guys started to get looks of ambition jostling. 

  "Anybody want to join me?"  More pictures being snapped was the response.  "Well alrightie then," the man stepped over the ribbon, and looked at everyone.  Then went into the highway restaurant.

"It's not what you think," a woman told a frantic

  looking child, small in a circus of flashbulbs and clicking sounds like cicada.  The child who couldn't speak at the time later said she was wondering, (i)Is that my real father?(i) 

  "Why is that woman handcuffed to that man?" A typist asked a beat reporter.  The reporter shook head just a little dazed himself, but fighting nervous at all the commotion.  Then he unfolded a roll of newspapers.  WAR CRIMINAL RECAPTURED was the headline on one of the less popular papers.  "Could be related to this." 

  "I better call her Literary Agent." 

  "And a lawyer, no?" 

"We'll take this one, it's the fastest."

  Scrambled people had put together everything they had on "the issue", boarded a jet, and filed off as the most professional looking set in the world.  A small army of Trump University graduates, service people founding fields of discipline, and the paying attention to current events before, during, and after "legal action".  The "crem de la crem" of not totally bogged in a system perpetually grinding into gridlock as people "partied up" to battle for the hill. 

  A tall man placed a small stack of bills on an old oak table in front of the dismissed man.  He held surveillance camera stills and a mini tape in his hand like cards in a cardgame.  The dismissed man in the crumpled suit started blubbering. 

  A scream ripped through the saturated air. 

  The bodies of the dead people had had their throats slit. 

  "Nobody here knows where these bodies came from," said a man who was taking peoples' jackets and suitcoats to cover up the dried bloody and stiff sitting dead people. 

  "We'll start canvassing," said a policeman in a sweater that he'd thrown on in a hurry over his white teeshirt.  "We'll start with the neighbors." 

  "Wait.  Just hold on a minute." The town adminstrator's temple veins were pounding his pulse.  "I'm not sure anybody should go out there." 

The symbol had been carefully placed like a mineret.

  Some people moved from space to space, donning interchangeable sandals, and dresscasual pants.  Others cowered. 

  A Town Administrator wondered out loud at the options.  "Vandalism charges?" 

  "Who to charge?" A mom who'd started a Cupcake Club and who was filling in for the real Secretary kept playing devil's advocate so the man could "get his head around" what seemed like a dream or an hallucination.  This strategy blocked the ongoing shock questions like (i)how can this be happening(i)? 

  "What does it mean?" The TA asked the person who still had internet and who was scrolling through hundreds of images that came up under search: symbols. 

  "Maybe it's a brand." 

  "Of like cereal or something.  Come on people." 

  "Where did they all come from?" 

  "Your airport was one of the ones flights got diverted to." 

  "Well, where's the commander guy?" 

  "He fainted.  The heat and the stench." 

  "Well then who is that?" 

  People crept from under desks to peek out the window.  A man in a suit was approaching one of the men near the symbol.  The man was framing the Courthouse with a cardboard square.  "Are you the Representative here?" 

  "Well, I'm not the Senator, but" 

  "Dismissed." 

  The "commander guy" was revived with a bucket of melting ice.  Pushed outside. 

  The man with the cardboard square framed him then realized something.  He pocketed the square like a golf score card.  "Long time no see brother." 

  The commander guy blinked through the water dripping down his face.  The man in the sandals said, "Checkmate".

  "This is that Senator in D.C."  Other senators also picked up the fundraising phones and all heard a southern accented man squawking.  "What were y'all thinking?  Of course I understand but, this is SERIOUS!  They literally shuttered the International Criminal Court and now they can't find more than half of the criminals!" 

  "I might know.  I might know.  I might know what to do." He hung up and everyone else did too.  They looked at him.

"Hey, who's in charge here?"

  The man asked it like this group we'd stumbled upon had gone through the same process as our group. 

  "See, I wouldn't have opened with that.  Not my style," said the wounded alpha. 

  "God, obligations.  And we're a civil bunch, so I guess the Law." The woman in a Leave It To Beaver cooking apron explained.  Right away a man on a bunk bed said, "She's always been so obedient." 

  "You see it differently?" Asked an anthropology-background person amongst us. 

  The man yawned and scratched at the red bug bites on a leg.  "What led you people here?" 

  "Bad weather." Someone replied.

"Maybe you're addicted to entropy." The

  woman was trying to assess (i)something's wrong(i) and had started with the people in the vicinity.  "What would make you think that?" 

  "You talk about it a lot." 

  "It has to do with my working thesis." 

  "Which is?" 

  "Well, I don't have a neat statement about a world like this one." 

  "Is this about the world? Or is this about you?" 

  "Probably both.  I mean look, they all acted as a group to tell you something is wrong, but I don't see a group here now." 

  "Do you feel blamed?" 

  "For the something wrong? No." 

  "You can go." 

  Campus had emptied like the leaves from the trees.