Yeah, we voted for him!

  The tape-recorded saying was loaded into small, indiscrete sound-playing devices. 

  The flash of the gun brightened the perfect stillness.  The tall "robo-cop" parted way through the gun shooters in front of it.  It oriented its faceless "face" towards the sound.  A chunk of cement, falling, perforated by the machine gun fire.  It drew its hand up, like a marionette, then the fingers seemed to twirl something like a ticket counter.

  Someone tossed someone a monkey wrench.  Silently, sweatily, caught.

  "Stark raving mad.  On the eve of the Civil War, our Civil War.  The book said, it was a quote, guy said they went to sleep and woke up stark raving mad.  Pretty descriptive, I mean, intense, right?  That's" 

  "Hey! Can you two shut the fuck up?" 

  "I wasn't talking." The young woman got up, flat butt, and went toward the commando-type.  In the gray light before sunrise she ate a hard tack food bar.  "It could be like the arm.  Maybe." 

  "What arm?" 

  "Somewhere else in the world.  The arm had a guy's hand, hand had a fingerprint.  The fingerprint to start the tank, shoot the gun, launch the missile.  I mean, someone told me about it.  It got stolen." 

  We walked several miles before encountering anyone else.  Someone threw a handful of Bazooka at us from behind a car door, propped up by a small boulder.  Without speaking these were plucked off the ground, and put in a pile in front of the door.  The commando-type wiggled back to the knot of us. 

  "How'd they get our stuff?" He asked.  Together, or collectively, we recalled the battering ram that the robots had used to bust down doors like our law enforcement.  A bubble popping and a voice.  "It's not even stale." 

  "That was all on TV, right?" 

"What do you mean?"

  Us women were not really holed up as much as holding down the fort. 

  "This would be difficult for anyone." 

  The byte/bit of conversation stood out from the whispers of who was probably going to...

  "Okay.  Maybe we're thinking too linear-ly.  Is that a word?" 

  "I think I know what you mean." Someone offered. 

  "I mean, I get it.  It's not a criticism." 

  The lady of the farm/ranch came back inside with sixteen eggs.  Everyone assessed the haul on their own, then someone suggested that since there were thirty-four women and children, maybe we should make a casserole.  "Or, omelets?" 

  "My kids have their hearts set on flapjacks." 

  The lady of the farm began to take skillets and bowls and baking pans out of enormous cupboards that gave the home goods that incredibly shrinking woman feel. 

  "That's a principle.  That's a value.  Lemme see the next statement." The slightly older woman had her hair pulled into a bun and pens, pencils, even a piece of chalk were radiating out of the bun like a wagon wheel.  "She's just helping." 

  "'Cuz you're supposed to be doing this yourselves," a husband who'd snuck in for a piece of bacon palmed her stomach.  "We can," the young wife recited the timeless mantra.

  "WHAT ARE THEY ALL DOING IN THE BATHROOM together?!?" An irate-faced, red, puffy eyes, twisting angry mouth woman stood up as the hands of a child telling a secret fell away from her ear.  Everyone froze.  The smell of biscuits and muffins wafted from the oven.  "Has this place been swept?" A woman asked. 

"THAT MUCH STEAM'LL BLOW THE ANT HILLS." Was said

  not with panic despite the way the man hollered everything he said.  An audiologist lowered the sound-catching paddle and his eyes welled with tears.  "That's the voice." 

  "WHY'S HE SAD?" 

  "His type only gets credit for captures." Said a calm and positively bossy woman with a mantel of hair brushed back away from her face and pulled into a scrunchie.  "Let's not ask each other any more questions 'til we get back outside." 

  The mainframe of the metalworks beneath Knoxville was orgasmic.  Shaking and shuttering and sweating.  We'd come to see why. 

"There's a lot of trade in the stuff."

  Everyone else had stopped talking. 

  "Goat cheese?"  Lips literally smacked open and shut, parched.  A flask with core sample puddle water was handed round.  "On the Continental Divide?" A dried leathery hand reached for the flask.  Clenched then spasm'd and the brown water sploshed out in ghostly drops on the worn wooden floor.  Air travel size bottles of Vodka were quietly taken from a satchel.  Placed on the peeling paint table.  A head scarf was removed and placed atop the pistol in the sachel.  What skin was remaining, stretched taut over skull.  Bright eyes set on the bottles from hollows in the head. 

  "Are you nuts?  Fly me in that low again and I'll," the man thumbed himself like a cartoon character.  People started fishing into pockets for smoke and knives. 

  It would be moments that felt like hours before the fulcrum of the American see-saw of "freedom" was cemented into war.  

"You have such pretty little toes."

  His booming voice was hoarse from manning the parking lot of the auction.  But his eyes flickered, registering beauty.  The woman seemed even shorter to his tall.  She looked at her feet in sandals.  "Oh thank ya Mr.  Had 'em refreshed at the salon." 

  "Is it local?" 

  The pair worked through gay, straight; married, single;  sober, social drinking...all the how to navigate this conversation cues and pokes against the backdrop of actual backdrops being moved from place to place on the street.  The sun slid farther set and blazed an alleyway into a shaft of keeping on the sunnyside.  So they walked that way.  Both determined not to let "a turning point day" just end. 

  On the other side of the alleyway his friends raised eyebrows at the sight of him with someone.  The more cantankerous men quipped and belched.  "Thought you had more sense than that David." Young kids whapping each other with golf bag towels and removing packed for the thrift shop items from cardboard boxes for mangos stopped what they were doing.  They sidled over. 

  "You still adopting us Mr.? 

  The man looked at the sky, then the dirt of a road only partly asphalted.  The town couldn't just send someone at that time to repair tore up.  "It's runt." A girl in too-big-for-her clothes told of the street.  "Yes it is darling.  Lot of things around here need fixing." 

  The woman did the slightest throat clearing, then asked, "Are all these, uh, yours?"  The man blushed. 

  "Somes." 

  "I'm Nita!" A put-together girl called out. 

  "Alex.  Nice to meet you." A white tee-shirted boy stepped forward and held out a hand to shake.  The woman took her hands out of skirt pockets and shook the boy's hand.  "We've got no place to hang our hats.  You got a house?" 

  "I do." Some smiles alighted faces.  "But it's far away from here."  People stooped, shoulders slouched, at that news.  Everyone sat on the mixture of furniture and farm equipment rustled up by day's end. 

  "I already owe two mothers too much money to adopt any more of ya." The man said it like buttoning the top button of a shirt.  The story to that point a nothing new like no neck tie in the mirror's reflection.  "But we should stick together again tonight." One of the girls handed him a giant Tootsie Roll.  "Did you already lick it?" The man asked.  The girl showed still wrapped and giggled. 

  "It's like your grandmother said." 

  "What she tole ya?" 

  "God's gonnah trouble the water." 

  The person looked very feminine and startled at the same time.  Then withdrew into self for a long moment.  "I'm finding my warrior self." 

  "Hey, are you really African American and Native American?" 

  "Maybe two percent American.  Being honest." 

 Happy Anniversary! 

"Thanks Darvin."

  "It's David." 

  It did and didn't matter to the man that the young women didn't really know who all was just hanging out.  The smiling faces of customers for a third weekend in a row was what was the memory being made. 

  Despite enormous economic challenges and the States' mountain to ocean terrain and with the help of the new tool called the Internet, people everywhere were finding out things like Best BBQ In Town and hidden gems.  And that was breathing new life into "the same old, same old".

"Get local, be present, and..."

  We looked around at each other. 

  "Not much of a gene pool," someone quipped.  Said because it was Spring and she'd been left "in charge".  Of teenage girls. 

  A man without his row of front teeth in his mouth smiled broadly. 

  "Seriously?" She looked right at him. 

  He smiled bigger and nodded dramatically.  "Meat bingo champ baby." He assured. 

  "We're not hookers!" 

  The man guffawed.  "We'll see about that." 

  "I want a different pimp," one girl complained. 

  Finally, the secret boyfriends came back with the slightly stale cider donuts from a band road launch two nights before.  "A case of the Mondays," someone said finishing a soda.  Cut up tee shirt rags were thrown.

  "WHO TOLD THEM TO FINISH PAINTING BEFORE LUNCH?" 

  "She did Sir." 

  Another man's paint dripped off the roller as he turned, startled. 

  "THAT IS NOT HOW WE DO THINGS IN THE MAN-O-SPHERE!" 

  "They're from the PINK-O-SPHERE Sir.  They don't know any better." 

  "They will." 

Really life is mostly like

  having brothers who take a dump before eating and refuse to spray something better smelling. 

  "Why didn't you spray?" 

  "It's flower smell." 

  "Mom.  Can't you get something more manly?"