"Salvation is of the Lord.

  "Salvation is of the Lord Jesus Christ." 

  St. Patrick winced as another person in fellowship with him was persecuted.  Not an "important" person, a woman who'd lost her family and didn't speak much.  But fire-baked bread and hummed.  

  Lindesfarne was being invaded again.  This time, the Moslems had followed some Vikings in on the tide. 

  Most of the manuscripts of English Word and Law had been stashed away in kingdoms and caves.  Others were spattered with blood and guts while being memorized.  While being explained.  Some of the monks quietly learned bits of others' language, gestured with gentle-strong hands in the air, on the floor, in shadow puppetry on the walls...this means this, that means this.

The babies were turning blue but

  mostly still alive! 

  "God's helping us!  Then we gotta spend the rest of our lives helping Him!  Everybody on board with that?" 

  The people in the seats left from some rows being ripped out in a "refurbish" were bandaged and chattering, borderline seizures.  "You stay calm."  They shook and nodded as they could.  "Find who can't keep eyes open and make them stay awake." 

  "Yes m'am California." A wink.  Had seen sexy before ambushed.  "Damn.  I'm a bloody mess again." 

  Before the communique of may not make it up, may not make it down went into a blur of static, the heart beat monitors had been reconnected.  Contorted to beat loud AND quiet, two, three, FOUR.  "I like a beat." Sneaking up behind a pilot with headphone thick focus on bush instructions proved poison darts had also been used.  It pulsed with the blood in the Officer's neck artery.  

"Did you really have a venereal disease?"

  The woman who looked like a lot of women at the camp poked a wooden spoon at the phone keyboard.  "Give me that!"  A camp leader typed in the question.  The question was translated into the woman's primary language.  Her eyes grew wide and she looked shocked.  Then started guffawing loudly and bitterly.  She grabbed at the skirts near her down there and started speaking wildly in Turkish.  It was brash against the serene backdrop of nature in America.  She pointed at several people as if her fingers were a gun.  And heaved imaginary VD at everyone looking at her.

  "Did ya guys sing last night?" 

  Some men and women rolled up sleeves to have blood taken. 

  "Where's the tent or whatevah ta donate?" 

  "Down that path to the big field." 

   It was big enough and flat enough for a medivac to come and go from.  

  "It's complicated." 

  "How so?  What the hell?" 

  "Some are saying it's people not obeying orders!  But that can't be addressed in the situation." 

  "What about the Kinesset decisions?" 

  "What about them?  How can they collectively decide stuff from shelters and," the woman's voice trailed off.  The young man had picked up a pot of boiled underwear and quickly moved towards the creek. 

"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.