"We couldn't have

  been more transparent." A woman with oozy gauze on her scalp narrowed her eyes and determined. 

  "Maybe that was the issue," wheezed an elderly gentleman.  He'd just barely lived through World War II and had given the brunch crowd an earful of history from the perspective of just being caught up in it.  At first, no one knew the Germans were out to eradicate Judaism.  No one knew that war was going to touch and mostly decimate the whole world.  Things just changed. 

  As battles and actions played out in "theatres" and across the established points of modern civilization, people carried on however they could. 

  "They took it as confrontation.  Letting a bunch of women speak their minds from inside a Sharia Law zone, how dare someone." 

  "Do you have survivor's guilt Marie?" 

  The woman let another woman gently pat her remaining hair.  Someone retrieved a hair buzz tool from a knapsack.  "There are at least a couple spots that need a stitch or two."  Marie ground the bit of orange peel to a pulp of chew in a mouth mulling grist in all that had happened thus far. 

  "How's your head dear?" 

  Stifling a puke, Marie answered, "Better than this woman's." Her gloved hands worked to remove the coated in blood and dirt garb from the body.  The body had been dragged from a pile of bodies.  In the silence others photographed the scene.  A coroner's report form had been photcopied by the dozens and permanent markers were used to label on the skin and bones archiving information.  "And better than this guy's," she pulled a man's head from a plastic garbage bag and despite the man's look of horror laid it to rest in a body bag.  "Something's missing here," a man quipped as he took notes, photographed, video'd the head in the body bag and then zipped it up.  Marie was pondering a stack of hands and feet.  Zooming in with a still shot camera on the bottom of a foot.  "Caned."  Her notes a scrawly jumble of twitch notes to remind in a long journey of conversations.  "What's missing darling?"  Her feet wrapped in cotton tee shirts padded to the man.  "Our good morning." She blinked herself into the moment.  "Few and far between now.  Three or four days stubble," she guessed of the man's face.  "Have you guys been up the hill?" There was only one scrubby piece of higher ground jutting from the miles of sand.  This, people ascended with backs covered, to gaze at horizon.  Most had a paltry offering for description of where in the hell are we, and, "good news".  

"When that happened,

  opinion only of course, it like broke us," the man started choking on a biscuit without butter.  His wife smacked him on the back.  He suppressed the chokecough.  "SAY SOMETHING!" 

  The man took tiny breaths in separate from coughing out and put up the wait, wait finger while patting his mouth with the cloth napkin.  And giggling.  "We're going to use those napkins as diapers," she announced.  "Oh, are you expecting?" They both nodded emphatically.  The tears in the man's eyes from all the excitement. 

  "Broke us out of our units and into a crazy mixed up group.  Nobody really knew who was what or what was going on.  But nobody and I do mean nobody went out the back of the complex.  Towards the border." 

  "We saw some." 

  "Some what?" 

  "Guys.  It's not that we can't talk about stuff but some of what was going on is like ongoing issues." Everyone fell into a comfortable silence.  Nobody touched the poured wine.  The bottles of water, storebought locally, were the beverage of choice.  "A lot of us there, stayed in." Water bottles were spontaneously raised, God bless America. 

"The dagger stabs in the Shoji screens,"

  Twentieth-century women listened to the gory, gaudy, medieval details.  Eyes widening, closing against the awful, the impossible, breaths drawing in stemming shrieks.  "And this was in this, this..." 

  A skinny finger was raised. 

  "Some democracy huh?" 

  "It was in a Republic, thank God, our God, that we all got thrown into the slammer!  Just married but accused of..." 

  A different skinny finger was raised. 

  "Seems symbolic doesn't it.  Like we're the chattel at auction." 

  "Girlfriend." 

The curanderismo's accent was

  thicker than the bramble in the mountains back home.  Except when she/he said God and the Virgin Mother.  We were all seated in every inch of the housing.  Hundreds of people.  Paper plate after paper plate of tomatillos, the finger food of tacos, appetizer size rice and beans wrapped in steamed shells, flour and white corn, inside corn husks.  People took folded clothes out of "the next guy's pillow butt" and donned appropriate outfit for the day.  Tank tops and cyclist shorts, jeans, and 

  "Why aren't you out of your uniform?" The USO leader-on-site looked the person up and down.  Construction boots, cinnamon colored parachute pants, formal green jacket, and pink shirt.  Someone low-talked, That's the cultural attachè for this leg.  "M'am made me corn fitters m'am." The person handed the maple syrup dripping treats to the woman clearly shorter not in stillettos. 

  "I don't need fritters.  I need y'all's passports." 

  "Long story short?" 

  The woman took a deep smelldrag of the fritters.  "There may not be time." 

  "Oh, there's time now." 

  "Do I need to call a meeting?" 

  A man had sleuthsmelled his way after the first fritters.  "Not unless you shit, shower, and shave first." He plucked a syrupy fritter from the sagging plate.  "And maybe dress like an Arabian King." 

  The person backed up against a wall of the covered breezeway and slid into resting position.  One leg slightly resting on the other.  "Ret ta go." 

A flurry of flowing fabrics and

  another wrestling to the death over "rights" and "tradition". 

  Shocked looks.  Eyes re-sunken into deep, dark places inside.  

  Clumps of hair, blood, bits of teeth.  The floor was a vast ocean of the remaining reality in regards women.

  "So much for women's moobment." 

  An organizer of the meeting/discussion was collapsed in a corner of the room.  She'd been beaten with ancient flogging sticks so recently, her body failed to move, move, move towards an exit.  Others cradling.  Most covering heads with scarred and bruised arms and mangled hands.  The kicking had stopped almost as suddenly as it had started. 

  "They should have killed us." Was the first thing said out loud. 

  "They did not."  Another woman forced herself into the present. 

  "Don't go home." 

  "There is no where." 

  "Go no where then." 

  Outside, the city seemed the same as it had three hours before.

"It was from mine."

  A human admitted. 

  Fuck 

  The "terminator" legs, in a pair of soldier's boots, in the bottom half of a "funhouse" mirror. 

  "Be CAREFUL!" A consultant to a legal team warned, then threw the smoke grenade. 

  The "witch doctor" had a labyrinth of housing.  Brownsville.  Consultants often saying without saying, watch your own back.  It's that way out past "front lines" and in places where things are converging.  Things like culture and general population.  Or, Catholics being the last humanitarians, technically, as "objectivity" imploded. 

  We need the facts.  Already driven out of "civilization" some non-legally bound "witnesses" of facts unfolding turned into steady vigils on the part of just regular people. 

  "Perspective" and "narrative" was weaponized as soon as "the humanities people" argued both as way to prop up an imploded objectivity.  The truth at the core of truth however it would be labeled in the future was proving to be brutal violence eliminating first history, then the present.  English Law was based on The Book?!  Do away with both.  But the articles cleared out of the impromptu "temple" of "sumo wrestlers" couldn't get "the American" out of any of them. 

250! We're working on it.

 

"What's the message?"

  The boyman had been guarding family and friends.  He barked the question. 

  "I've been staying with those girls y'all met at school." 

  "A hundred years ago." 

  "Well, the message is they still care about you guys." 

  The girl, barely a woman herself, crossed the field.  She approached what looked like a brushpile.  Started removing leafy branches.  The biplane's windows were misted. 

(i)She'd thrown a towel over that one's head(i)

  Being honest, it was hard to distinguish features in the dimly lit, grease smokey room.  

  A person in a tu-tu (ballerina's skirt) whacked, lightly, one of the sexy women with a fly swatter.  A hand launched at the thing attacking back, grabbed it, and got up from the stool.  Shuffled and placed it on an imaginery table.  It fell on the floor. 

  A transition-trainer between old world and new world military actors picked it up and lightly whacked a boy in a uniform.  "OW!" The trainer chin-tapped a shoulder walkie.  "I found him."  The boy's mouth hung open and drool dripped from a numbed bottom lip. 

Eyes asked why. 

  "Because you let that one into your head." The trainer took a modified TV remote out of khakis.  Pointed at a dozen or so things in the data center.  Most everything shut down but for the grease smoke.  The trainer whacked the Alice's Restaurant type waitress bent over the fry pan on the behind with the palmed remote.  "Battery's dying." Trainer looked around at the human audience of two.  "That one's so the Fire people can test the fabric and heat." 

  "That's a lie?" 

  Grunts hacked out something like or what needs to be said. 

  "That's the gunner in the next action." 

  "O'er there o' 

  Ssssssh

  The boy's emotional brain winced pain to the eyes and the crying started again.  In the tu-tu tribed up.  "Why cry?" 

  Blubbering, snot fest, reaching for breath, cantankerous sounds.  The tribal translator stood from kneeling forehead to forehead.  "Was that this boy's Jennifer?" 

  "These are not the badly phrased or called frankensteins." 

  Those had been mowed down and had body parts and organs thieved.  And promptly been evacuated.  Months of days and hours and minutes and seconds before. 

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.