Patch of Dirt

  "Nobody owns it."  One girl announced vehemently. 

  "Actually that's not true.  We all do." Said a guy. 

  "No rocks.  No sticks." Said the leader. 

  "What are we doing out here?" 

  "Where's yours?" 

  "My what?" 

  "You're patch of dirt?" 

  "Wherever I stand or sit." 

  "The nerve." 

  "Get away from me." 

  "Do we have to do this exercise?" 

  Everyone had left their stuff in a pile at the mouth of the campsite. 

Looking for...

  Turned out I wasn't the only college-aged kid who'd crammed my head with a fury of the world, soaked up as much fleeting but it existed, and cherished the coming-togethers that had happened.  I took my frantic self to my mom's workshop where she'd produced painting, sculpture, and poetry.  She was midstream on raising a housefull of teens with our Dad, and so, somewhat annoyed that the one that should have "launched" was smoking cigarettes on her porch and clearly-to-her uncertain about "the future". 

  "What's your through-line?" She glanced at a pile of research notes and writing.  "My what?" She went off to make dinner. 

  The actual world did not crumble when she did. 

  In the morning all the paperwork was in folders and a box.  The ashtray was in the yard away from the windows.  "Your father hates that smell.  Those killed his mother.  Your nana."  A cloud of smoke being brushed away but not hidden or gone.  "Nothing's matching up." 

  "What's your through-line?" 

"Everybody done playing everybody?"

  None of the new people answered.  Some were too weak; some, heads too scrambled from being leashed to mentors in the various arms of service. 

  "Good.  Because we don't do that.  We're the Forest Service people people." 

  Not one person quit the introductory training that year. 

"A pile of humpty dumptys?"

  "Yeah." 

  The artist woman's facial expression deflated into simplified.  She listened. 

  "Now everybody is disillusioned." 

  "So, the illusion is what's broken?!" 

  Young people still in shock looked at what the woman said like the words were physical things on the lawn. 

  "Some of us might be too." 

  "I get that, but no." 

  "What do you mean, no?" 

  "I don't accept that from you." She didn't point but met eyes.  "Or you.  Or you." She insisted across the space between seeing each other. 

"Stop running."

  People had guns drawn and everybody was "right". 

  The two's had tracked each other.  Some were to stay couples.  Others had grudges and grievances and were themselves being "tracked" by Feds and people charged with law enforcement. 

  To be sure a worn down service layer of America needed some "mental health" repair.  But a tanking economy, stretched shoe string budgets, fuck ups, and baggage was mucking up smooth process. 

  "Put some pants on," an Administrator volunteered on some time off to explain a number of processes to a number of people.  "How you gonna go overseas wit no passport idiot?" A rabidly hungry herself and having been being shirked of child support woman called out from a perimeter around service people who might give it another go around. 

  "Who dat?" Tired and still drunk called to thought-you-were-a-buddy.  Upper ranksmen stood ready to hold back all interested parties from fighting. 

  Dirty Feds-one-time and gov't workers with stolen information on people were kept behind a screen.  "As long as it takes to sort this out," a retiring-soon authority told loved ones about attending graduation. 

Back then/on that

  Peoples' journies trained and collided at times.  

  Some of the came in aheads waited.  Hid in fact.  Some in plain sight, some like crouching spiders.  There are times news gets ahead of a guard-railed cycle.  Flights were coming back to the Homeland from all over the world.  There were kinks in the censorship. 

  Enemies were chasing corporate types.  And an infiltrated-by-enemy community health care allowed topics about "mental health" to be PSA over the radio waves. 

  The connectors in our communications passed along critical information to service commanders.  Even as the radio told a generally discontent American popular that veterans are, many, "suicidal" the came in aheads had to ward off, combat "style" enemies stashed across the professional and residential field.  Or else it could have been more disappeared and even killed and staged as suicide. 

  Fortunately service people stay in war mode even during "cease fire" and other rhetoric used to help a general public survive and thrive. 

  By Mother's Day the land was really finding its voice.  Leafed trees and the songs of creatures awakening from winter. 

 

Not gonna lie...

  Some of us were at a loss for words. 

  If not for the few people who insisted on asking, what was it like? We might have lost our very existence in that you'll have to visualize it "space" of crossing while forging "the arch" from/to. 

  One closer-to-elderly brother stood near a just-getting-to-middle-age sister.  They'd had very different lives.  So the "beads on a string" that they did share, well, those were kept like beautiful things in a special box, and could be examined for relevant meaning.  The sister was having a moment.  After some time she said something like, 

  It feels like maybe that time we'd explained to those natives about how precious and precious, just precious those children were and how the roses were symbolizing that precious. 

  "And they hacked them with the machetè." 

  "Yes." 

  The cyborgs in frozen and slow walk mode were being loaded into a "paddy wagon". 

The "intervention" into

  the midst of mania had flatlined what at first seemed like the all. 

 

  Some people were in dumb shock.  Others, more tremors than whole human beings.  Incomprehensible sounds being uttered.  Rote gestures of bodies taken out of the context of routine. 

  "But they're alive," a short couple, young people, a guy and a girl, kept repeating.  This phrase caught on as a question amongst the warned: in rough shape.  That question predominated on one end of the park, while on the other; Who did this to you, him/her?  Where was this person found? 

  Teams of specialists mingled subtlely.  Lists of chemicals and compounds circulated in special folders.  Biological characteristics of matter plied into charts. 

  "Could it have been in the air?"  Some scientists had been velcro'd into special seating that could be picked up and carried farther afield.  

  Let's stay together.  

  "We'll need to be the arch." 

  "Wah, wah WHAT you mean?" 

  "It's all disjointed.  All the threads of story here." 

  "We cannot lose our collective memory." 

  Into the actual, literal mist not yet fully lifted off the park's surface. 

  "How was the conference?" 

  "Um, well the literary world is def beefing up the Science Fiction." 

  "We went to the, uh, Alien Fest." 

  "Is that?" 

  There were more than one cyborg.  And somebody who looked very familiar to a lot of the people in Central Park was opening flaps in the automatons, removing chips and drives, and changing the hardware between bots.  A dark figure had unscrolled a thick set of blueprints and was peering through a magnifying glass with a circus flashlight at the drawings.  Hands on each others' forearms and classic signaling agreed just watch.

  "Renaldo.  ¡Renaldo!  Get up.  We gotta go."  Groggy took the newspaper off his head and visibly tried to stay the vertigo by balancing an arm on the back of the bench and a foot on the ground. 

She'd smuggled them in.

  Another person had cleared the place of students and activists. 

  "It's a big rift." Was listed as REASON FOR VISIT. 

  "There's no talking," a tiny woman in a simple cotton dress admonished.  And the booming voices hushed near the entrance while still booming at the back of the portico.  "Why?" A man demanded to know.  The tiny woman looked way up at him and blew air out and clicked a sound that implied, I can see why, rift.  Her own voice boomed in a female tone, "It's a Reading Room." 

  "BUT IT'S LUNCH TIME." 

  "You told me to be like the Hopping Fountain," the smuggler said to someone sitting on a bench.  The line of men in suits was filing in.  "Past a rather gaudy statue of a woman sweeping."  Gaudy because it had been covered in brass-colored paint, not actual metal.  And the very act of sweeping with a broom was an act of humility, here captured in majestic sculpturing.  The artist and the model had not argued but discussed method, style, and manner of message.  Students gawked at the happening.  Remarked on the privilege of witnessing such "profound" and "deep" deliberations.  Then it was temporarily covered in a trash bag.  The very trash bag that had been filled with INPUT. 

        Sherry Candy Lane in 

               Huntington, NY 

  Committed to the struggle of keeping it real.  Balancing family and creativity.  Success and humility.  The secular world and religion. 

  Some of her artwork visualized the ephemeral.  Some the precious in "still life".  And some tried to capture the "stuff" of spiritual. 

  Whatever she produced her family loved it though some of us not too afraid to ask, what were you smoking? 

  Mom wasn't into any of that.  Her creativity was a blend of special gift from God and not giving up.  Over the years of stepping into her "workshop" in between "making the meat" and being the fairness meter, sounding board, glue in our group of eight, she built up her talent.  If a piece wasn't coming out right or as good as it could, she didn't throw it out.  She'd sit with it and work with it.  The push and pull of love. 

  She did the same with just about all of the people in her life. 

"Every knee will bow to Jesus NOT YOU!!!!"

  "And yet, he was the very reason we were still existing." The shrink scrawled notes.  Seen on a computer video screen. "Real time, democracy in action, embodying the Republic, living legacy.  Most of the others were dead, but not all were really dead." 

  "And it came down to that?" 

  "Yes.  But only because we are America not the world.  And he couldn't not be himself." 

  "The truth will set you free?" 

  "The truth will set you free." 

  It was total chaos on every monitor in the room where the actress and director had come to observe a new kind of news.  The very notion of 24/7 had proven to be the revelations.  "Someone should get out there," one of the bosses said as if in prison on the moon.  "For what?" A person glued to a particular monitor with six screens on one asked.  The boss of the bosses held out a master remote and clicked the room dark.  His voice was still gravel from assuming the mantel of leadership/ownership.  "It's time.  For a meeting.  Bring the coffeepot." 

"He's my Dad."

  Each person in the room not only acknowledged who the legacy-keeper in the room was, but also bullet-pointed association.  

  This was after rigorous training in parallel career paths.  And it was while the Armed Forces performed their own sort of vetting. 

  And all this was after she'd decided not to leave her family including her husband.  "You've tarnished our re 

  "Legacy.  Is what we are meeting about in this room Hill, ary." 

  "Why?  What does it matter?" 

  "Well, the United States of America always leaves a legacy.  There, here 

  "And policy.  Also that." 

"Hell yeah, they rushed the room."

  The mother kept patting the baby's bottom. 

  "What's happening?" 

  "We need someone to interpret." 

  "But they were speaking Englush." 

  The photographic facts were hauling in behind narrative which had almost jeopardized "saving the world". 

  Oh man. 

  Is this the fiasco? 

  "Cut the tape.  Cut the 

  "DO NOT." 

  "Just gimme the low down." 

  "I will.  I will show you to the elevator." And they walked that way while the young man sent to git the info confessed that he had not come up that way.  The elevator doors opened.  "There's more coming up the stairs!" An impeccable professional beamed a permasmile unless. 

  "Okay.  Okay.  Now I know what's going on." The mama recounted in brief style the salient points of the thread of news having to do with "the blue dress" and the anger and outrage forming around:  Then I was kind of afraid.  To apply. 

  "Pretend there's a glass box around you, uh, us."  And, it wasn't all that hard to do since the people enacting "the drama" in front of us weren't us.  We knew who they were, and we knew about their different "masks" as "actors", and we knew that most of us had been putting our best foot forward!  

  But like a spool of thread on a sewing machine and us getting settled into "roles" and possibly "careers" as the point of "the truth" the automation/animation of group took over.

A crowd had gathered.

 The mix of peacekeepers and people in plain clothes had devolved in "its middle" from its crisp line at one end, near the ships, and at the other end, a garden of wildflowers into a noisy, bubbly, mix.  

  "Was it on orders?????" 

  As the smoke and dust began to settle into the same sort of mix as the all-around desert oasis mirage-like quality, it was little people, some walking on thighs, one walking on hands, that manipulated the blown off arm and attached machine gun away from the road.  The soldier in front of the tanks coming had walked over a landmined spot.  And just kept walking.  Without the arm and the attached machine gun.  Blood splattered onto the seated and lying about and clapping and yawning alike. 

  Mouths yelling but no sound in the sound of all sounds put together. 

Voting nightmares.

  See God. 

  Showed me Matthew 20. 

  And it feels like parents sending kids to college.  Us aging people often overworry.  That may not be the most helpful. 

  Grad school '97

  As just white Christians we were at a loss to re-program the programming that seemed pretty much literally bulldozed. 

  Hate the Corporations NOT the people, a funky sweatered more artistic Academic from one type of degree's residency had stayed to pass the torch of occupying campus to the M.A. people. 

  One of the first incidents of strong whole school umbrella safety needed happened outside the only meeting room with table, chairs, and "a sofa".  Quite overlooked as an item of value somehow indicating preferential treatment.

Already old.

  Even the little kids who'd been used as bloodbags.  

  People were propped up on folding wooden chairs, not awake, not asleep.  "There's nothing left of them," a Red Cross nurse assured. 

  A pillow feather literally Elmer glued to a man's upper lip indicated still breathing.  

  Stop it.  The nurse harshed at a hysterical woman.  The woman did.  She visibly smoothed the turmoil of having lost everything but breath, the stuff of life itself, deeper and deeper into her body.  Past the hole in her midriff where the baby had been growing. 

  We'd been served our values, principles, points, and appendages in some cases on the fine dining luxury wares hoarded onto stranded at sea.  This after being thrown from planes, routed from cities, dragged from farmlands, gathered by the unmistakable and growing swirl of had enough.  The crucible of warfare.  We'd been fed the Constitution and enjoyed it.  Spat out broken bloody teeth and through eyes swollen shut with bruise and pus, renewed vows. 

  To life and liberty. 

  To each other. 

  To being AMERICA. 

  "Act dead," other nurses with a world of accents but little cupcake toothpick American flags in buttonholes giggled at our performance.  Snap, snap went the cameras.  Snap, snap went the hypnotist's fingers.  Snap, snap went the twigs under the foot of the enemy who dared to board.  Bullets in the shoulder curled the man's body like a parchment scroll as our own flag was unfurled from its umbrella stand rest.

The man did not want to hear

  about "the birth of autonomous warfare".  He ducked into a sunfilled room.  Window glass so thin the birds outside heralding the end of winter may as well have been inside. 

  An involuntary grunt-chuckle escaped his chest when people brought the happening to his attention.  "Isn't that an oxymoron?" He asked and his thinning lips curled into a snarl and a smile.  He looked at family and organization photographs around the room.  "I'll need to talk to some of my Army buddies before I have much to say."  It was a dismissed, but no one left. 

"I cannot tell you

  what to say.  Or, what you will see."  The in-charge admitting we are at that point.  

  The cubicled server rooms.  A faint hum buried in the projection of cool air. 

  Monitors and screens blipping and imaging.  

  Vehicle after vehicle exploded.

"It was quick and it was forever."

  Jesus judged the fig tree.  The same Jesus that was walking around in a chaotic world sheperding people who can and do wander off course.  Fall out of relationship with an Almighty who created this place, earth, with all it's mystery of "life". 

  This was a supernatural "miracle" or life-shifting happening.  Performed by a man and a God.  The awesomeness of that kind of power, nearly impossible "to explain" to people not really capable of "understanding"; not truly able to just automatically strategize for "souls" all by ourselves; especially without admitting we don't know everything, we do err, we need forgiveness.  Hard sometimes to have "faith", hard to believe.  Difficult to glimpse and grasp a notion of a big, all powerful something. 

"Mr. So-and-So, are you

  a political operative or are you a Christian Democrat?" The young woman was dressed in a well-pressed girl shirt and black pants.  She was not happy.  In college she'd studied law and journalism.  After school, in a flooding job market amidst housing and immigration crisis, she took some pro bono work.  The enforcement agents pretended not to listen. 

  "We were all friends."  Mr. So-and-So took off his glasses and pressed his hands onto sore points on his forehead and temples.  His suit coat was tight on his shoulders. 

  "Write it." The more experienced journalist at the conference table pressed a professionally manicured fingernail onto the table in front of the legal pad and tapped it. 

  Everyone in the room including the agents of enforcement had been blocked in not under arrest, post having been in the detention center to discuss testament, testimony.  A judiciary person had pre-warned, that Judge doesn't have time to deal with a bunch of people who have no idea what they are doing. 

  A kick under the table.  "Are you a victim?"  

  "I don't know what any of this is about anymore." And that was more true than people re-naming the same thing in as many ways as their "angles" or motivations required.  "At what point activism and other job?  Your journalism.  It's not what I learned is journalism.  I came here as a journalist and I am leaving as a journalist!"  The blinds in another conference room went up and people got up from that table.  "I'm sorry that we're all going through this." 

  "Why are you sorry?" 

  "I'm ashamed of my Country.  Sorry that people my age aren't, can't, do more." 

  "You are not who should be apologizing." 

  "It's not his fault either." 

  "Oh? A president's man are you?" 

  "Hardly a man.  And not any more a fan of him than I am of you." 

  The door was opened and left open.  Gradually everyone left the room.

  Shit or get off the pot.  The microtape recorder said over and over in the port-a-potty.  "No place to shit!" A man's voice was a muffled boom.  His briefcase pushed the door open and his toupè was crooked on his head as the door slammed behind him.  A shaved-headed woman from Brazil went next. 

  "Is this the one?" 

  Someone nodded. 

  Someone shook head, pathetic. 

  An Irish brogue called out, "I've never filed this way before.  But I feel greatly relieved." 

  "Pick your poison.  Pick your poison.  What's yer poison girlie?" The variety of liquor bottles ranged from airplane serving size to jugs labeled with homemade piles of bones and fat heads with tongues sticking out.  "We're sticking with the milk," a familiar face smiled and his hand reached a six pack of milk in glass bottles up onto the plywood box containing audio speakers.  "Everything's getting bigger the closer we get to the hangars." 

  "Not you guys.  As whatever I am in this moment, I refuse to let you go Overseas." 

  "You look like a farm boy in those rolled up jeans." 

  "We were obliged to do some local advertising." 

  "Political?" 

  He opened a milk and downed the actual nutrition.  Milk mustache.  "You're wearing jeans too," he stated factually.  "Someone give you the spoiler alert?" 

  "I don't know what that is." 

  "Must be why they picked you and," he looked around the barn area, "Them," he pointed with the empty bottle of milk.  "For what?" 

  "To go west young people.  Or north or wherever 'Braska is." 

  "But..."

  "No."

"But, you gave me the pens."

  Our Dad had spent the whole ten days of us kids being grounded working, and, being fed and sat like Mr. Cleaver in his recliner with slippers and newspaper in the evenings.  His slippers were gigantic, fuzzy affairs with large bear claw appendages that flopped around when he stomped to the bathroom. 

  It was true that he'd gifted me each pen on a birthday or milestone event at school.  But it was also true that he'd conducted a red-faced, lip twisting, almost sweaty raid of every nook and cranny where the precious treasures might be stashed.  Our mother stood apart from him, arms crossed, not really looking at any of us, and covering a couldn't-help-but laugh in her shoulder acting as if her nose itched. 

  "How could you?" He'd hoisted the growing number of pens found into the air.  "WE DON'T need you to write about OUR LIVES.  WE'RE LIVING IT!!!!!!!" 

  A deafening silence followed.  For a full five days.  That was how I fell in with some Asians.  Two of us were both ten. 

  "Pandas don't have pens but they still exist." A big Asian brother told us girls.  A slender hand started to reach towards a face swollen with tears but re-directed itself to a box of tissues.  His sister clutched the box.  Heavy sighs. 

  I sat on the medium-hard plastic packaging the sofa.  Mrs. Asian's decor was very ivory in color with dramatic splashes and jags of deep, dark colors.  An ebony-colored vase which looked almost squashed, like it was standing up almost flat had a spray of greenish leaves sticking up out of it.  Eucalyptis, the girl named the dried out plant my eyes fell on.  An ornate deeply red wooden sitting chair.  The dragons on the arms and legs dumb-eyed.  Mouths wide open.  Soft-edged pieces of jade shades; stone chess pieces on a yellowing bumpy board.  Paper lanterns on a snarled up yarn string.  No patience, the little girl explained.  She and I were the same size, different-looking human features.  But we knew each other as pandas.  

  We'd found each other as such in the woods.  We'd each hidden our bicycles.  Stashed food and pencil bags.  There'd been no paper at my school.  And slipped out of wordly cares by imagining the woods like a still, shimmering pool of water.  We'd glanced at each other feeling tree bark, scooping catepillars into hands, moving crispy leaves to find lady bugs, and finding bigger and bigger leaves.  We just did this.  Without talking because we didn't speak the same language.  She'd shown me in the Atlas:  Cambodia.  

  The teacher having a hard time with all the rules about Catholic school, like us kids, gave me two panda stickers and I gave one to my panda friend.  She opened a big metal desk's top drawer and put the sticker next to the neat row of twisting pencils and click pens.  A feather had jumped up when she opened the drawer.  She tried to smooth it back in place but it kept sticking to her finger.  Then the back of her hand.  She shook it.  It floated and she pointed it into place.  Grown ups were coming so she closed the drawer quickly and opened a square in the wall.  We sat Indian-style in the square.  We saw legs and heard lots of talking in the "peephole".  Then they went out the front door.  And we just did our giggling in silence.  Like a silent movie.

"I do not know if I shall wear purple."

  Right away someone half-heartedly groaned and tsk'd, so someone else clucked.  Some people got up to leave.  Couldn't handle another argument session.  "That is NOT what this is," a stand-up-straight young black woman assured.  "People can disagree without it being an argument." The room fell silent externally. 

  Our agers were taking a beating.  Terrible things were happening "in reality" while money and other resources were being applied to "a public face" in media necessary to survive a "mainstream" that could navigate enemies on all sides. 

  "To whom and when and where?" Puffy-faced girls had pre-agreed as mission.  This was a roomful of stories and experience.  All the people in the room were committed to truth.  The weight of collision of "worlds" was something crushing if we could not rise above impact "somehow". 

  As word of "war" filtered into the general population's minds and life-processing, there were those who were using that as permission to war against neighbor.  Causes were motivating people to extremes. 

  Someone had put RoundUp in pet's drinking water.  Someone had put abortion drugs in peoples' food.  Someone had used old war materials to sicken new people.  Someone had raped someone.  Someone had chained people into a cellar and lit a fire! 

  We were poisoning ourselves into toxic environment and writing that off as well, it is a war. 

A lot of the fighting got

  compressed into smaller debates in wider swaths of pro- and anti- Americanism. 

  Some of wanting a future took to studying the -ism part, as if, maybe that contained "the energy" and maybe it wasn't either love or hate that was the motivation.

I didn't know much.

  I never do really.  Usually having arrived "a day late and a dollar short", or, from the library, or, with the propensity to philosophize (squirm) and ethicate (this is why, we should or shouldn't) but everybody else saying shut up.  It's just the way of it. 

  I don't like fighting although I had to learn the hard way, a time or two, that standing to not cave on "taking a stand" and being caught in an avalanche is not all that smart either. 

  My mom managed the retelling of a Dad "joke" to my paled face and let go of it.  Only to her of course.  There were still many years of having to put on a face, buck up, and "walk the line" in a very public way to come.  The joke was planned to be not all that funny.  And it was about a decent old farmer who'd outlived his kin (probably because of eating right) and he would eat his tuna fish lunch everyday with a little picture of Jesus leaned up against the salt and pepper shaker.  "So what happened?" Mom kind of sighed a little, partly responsible for encouraging college, and mostly the same mom who was always there at the end of the day in her and Dad's home no matter what was happening in the world.  "Guy dies.  Goes to Heaven.  Is milling about up there when Jesus approaches him with tuna and bread and a big tomato." 

  "That's it?" 

  "Pretty much.  Dad added this whole part about Jesus and the guy acknowledging there are a lot more people down there in that mess than up here having lunch.  Here are your people!" 

  It seemed really feasible.  Very plausible.  Yet, so had Academia with it's critically thinking about the mess and it being kind of okay to not always have perfect answers. 

  "So what happened?" 

  Sigh.  "The whole stupid thing turned into a riot." 

  The silence of a reasonable and slightly older person putting youth on the scales of truth.  "We even brought a Bible!"  Mom's mouth squishing together quiet not judgment.  "It got ripped in half!" 

  "By satanic gang people?" 

  She waited. 

  "Oh.  Did I mention them?" 

  She sighed and stooped some. 

  "Actually, that was by these two guys who were just debating God and oil.  They were really getting deep about the Old Testament God being pretty harsh and clear and sometimes wars happening.  And how God, like one day or in his BIG plan, decided to send Jesus as ambassador of God's new plan for humanity." Mom fell into a more relaxed mode of listening to story.  "Well, the one guy really flat out denied that Jesus even came down here and went through all that torture to give lousy people a message from God.  So the other guy kind of hit him in the face with the Bible by way of saying, and he did say, It's all right in here.  You can read it for yourself.  If you can read." 

  Other kids in the family opened the door to the garage and closed it letting us talk.  "Guy starts to walk away." 

  "Which guy?" 

  "The guy who was in charge of the Hall where some old Army buddies were going to have a get-together with a bunch of us fresh faces.  But, see, there was a lot of different groups in the city for like all these festivals and concerts and stuff." 

  "So you girls went off campus?" 

  "Yeah.  We did." 

  My mother unloosened a portable phone from a bathrobe pocket full of tissues.  I didn't ask if she was sick.  I let the terrible weight of us disappointing and scaring them crush my spirit.  Whatever other reprimands would come could not be as devestating.  She stood and I realized she had her Church clothes on under the bathrobe.  She called a friend's mom.  "They're home." Her cold hand pressed a loose though hairsprayed curl springing from the top of my head back down.