Turning it inside out.

  The man said he'd been called all kinds of bad things.  And, that "Cherokee" people grasp that and recycle the vibe.  Called "something else" as voters on national TV, for example, he'd taken it in and considered it an honor.  

  Like the remaining Forest surrounding the storytellers in a world of bulldozing.  An honor to experience the place, the gathering of people, all kinds, humans amongst trees not chopped down, not replaced.  Honored.  Honored by existing.  Not an equality of existence, but existing nonetheless.  Surviving through time.  Enduring. 

  "I've seen the light." 

  "Did he try to convert cha honey?" 

  "The Rabbi?" 

  "Pull it in," the young woman in the cammo pants told the youth.  Someone stirred the campfire.  She'd stepped up onto the elusive "bridge" everyone was talking about in whispers.  Someone made a cup of coffee for a woman who looked really young but already had grandchildren.  She'd sat in her home for several days and been politiked.  Her daughter was furious that she'd given away every last stitch of food and drink.  Acting like a host.  The daughter didn't spit, but made the sound. 

  Cars rolled into the alley of tents.  Grown children made way to family and friends. 

  "I've seen D." 

  "What'd he say?" 

  "Not much.  But I could tell, he's proud of us." The someday world class white man politician/diplomat looked at dark faces dancing in the firelight.  "All of us." 

  "He seemed interested in everybody having their own story.  Seems to think that's the truth about America," a blonde woman still in a rafting life vest also interpreted.  "Did you go rafting?" 

  "Naw.  But this makes me feel safe." 

  "How could you not feel safe?  You run with all those patriots, don't you?" 

  People sat up straight.  Covered flesh with towels and one man covered his groin area with a skillet.  

  The young woman in the cammo pants stepped closer to the fire so her voice would carry.  "The bridge is all around us." Eyes widened and narrowed, looked around at the silent giant trees.  "When we leave here each as ourselves, we make the bridges by walking them." 

  "We do," agreed a derby-wearing man.  "We do," said a pair of youths sitting near him.

"Why would there be the smell.of death?"

  A hurricane had wiped out many of the paved passageways through the forest.  Details had gone into emergency mode.  There were also world renowned experts in Science and Survival privvy to meetings/discussions with American law enforcement of every ilk. 

  "Cuud be elk." A tall leathery man with no small amount of experience in hunting and gaming decided from inside his pick up truck.  A detective from a big city turned to a Survival Medicine Doctor, "Why might it be elk?" 

  A southern-drawl said, "Fucking and fighting.  Whole herd, this'n time of year." 

  "Not sure my elk would agree with that assessment." Said a man in a woolen vest.  "Mine's a family." He gestured a pluck but those are hanging on your chest to a woman with binocs. 

  "You three stay safe out there," a grandma had cautioned a young couple and visiting relative.  "Ma, it's up the hill they said." The phone voice got loud.  "Have you seen where you are ON A MAP!?  Prolly not a small hill little one."  

  Birds in the woods started up a telling-song: snakes! 

Happy Fourth!

 

 T'see visit 2026

"Now give it back,"

  The woman said firmly for the second time. 

  "Is this part of the show or whatever this is?" An astoundingly natural beauty of a young woman asked her husband.  A fifth couple at the table had hands on the table, each twisting and pulling at their wedding rings, quite stuck on over the hill worker fingers.  "Why'd you put on so much weight?" The wife asked the man crammed into a son's tuxedo.  "The war and everything," he answered.  "Can't you come up with a romantic reason?" The man grabbed the woman's hand and pushed and pushed the ring back onto her finger from almost got it. 

  "Please.  You're upseting my vife," a man in a bowling shirt started to stand.  The pistol was turned towards him.  The thieving actor shook the pillowcase at him.  "I'll take your guns too," the pistol indicated a bulge above the man's hip.  "Food is love?" The tuxedo'd man asked nonchalantly.  

"He's into the good news,

  bad news, first, these days." 

  His wife buckled her briefcase. 

  "And you have to let him tell you if it's good or bad news," the other "babysitter" told. 

  "I don't have to do anything." 

  "Okay." 

  "That's okay." 

  "You two sound just like him.  Here," she dug into her purse, "Take these and go re-find your selves." 

  Two passes to a mystery show at Dollywood.  Our mouths fell open. 

"What are you, a fucking queer?!"

  The wild-eyed boy shouted up at the uniformed people on the large transport truck.  No one brandished their weapons.  "You want me to waste this terd?" One guy asked his superior.  The young but mature and professional man looked at the dashboard and gathered his thoughts.  "It's okay," he assured.  Then he grabbed the megaphone.  "Yeah!  Consider me a faggot.  And an Oriental.  And a BLACK person.  And a handicapped woman.  YOU CAN'T KILL ME!" 

  The radio crackled.  This is Will.  You losing it brother?  

  The man pressed the walkie and megaphone buttons and started singing, I'm every person, it's all in me.  A couple others started singing too.  

  "Do we go?" 

  "Task right now is to keep this road open." 

  It was the middle of the night.  Coffee thermos empty, drank and pissed out.  On point and charged with task people all over East Coast regions listening.  

  "Feels like we're holding space for the daylight." 

  A voice from the weeds by the side of the road.  "Sir.  Sir.  Can I approach?"  The man sat up.  "Is someone talking to me?" The weeds answered, "I need to ask you something." 

  Grabbing a flashlight and checking for back up tucked away, the man asked, "You think the weeds will burst into flames?" No answer.  "Stay here." 

  The flashlight reached across the road and spied eyes in paint and leaves on helmet.  Gestures had the person step into the road, silently go through an identification process, and then the man asked, "Your question." 

  "What do you think we should do about the Jews?"  The man yelped, ouch.  "In what context?" He wiggled a pack of cigarettes from a pocket, offered.  The offer was declined with a free hand palm no thanks.  He put the cigarettes away. 

  "Ours is trying to figure this out." 

  Quiet. 

  Then the person rested the buttend of the machine gun on a boot and knee hugged it, started feeling for pockets.  The flashlight's spotlight drawn back slightly so whole person including face could be observed.  A small notebook was retrieved.  Hands flipped through pages and a finger pointed at a word on a column of English words next to a column of Hebrew.  The finger held firm as the notebook was held up to the light. 

     International 

  "Can I show my friend?" The man asked while gesturing, give it to me. 

"MY TRUST IN THE GREAT WHITE FATHER

  has been shattered." The barely-a-man stood there bereft. 

  In front of the rawhide door'd wigwam was clothing ripped to shreds. 

  "Dogs?" Asked a woman Marshal. 

  "Some were chased by dogs, yes," told a male co-worker.  "But the dogs were all different.  Like they'd gotten away from their masters and packed up." 

  "Do dogs do that?" A woman looked through binoculars in a 360.  She lowered them revealing mesmerizing green eyes and said, "I'm a cat person." 

  "What in the tarnation is going on down there?" A radio asked. 

  "That's the General." 

  "The units have scattered." 

  "Everyone was supposed to have been making way North.  And now this shit." A late twenty-something Officer, faced smeared with paint and tactical pants with a leg ripped almost off, pushed his mushroom hair towards the back of his head. 

  "Oh no." She held the satphone device away from an ear as a man kept bellowing.  "I don't think it would be helpful at all," she talked to the air around the device.  Snapped it back into it's carrying cradle and straightened her back.  "He's coming back down." She looked at the ground and said. 

  He drove up in a spitshone lavender colored classic pick up truck.  Oh man.  That's embarassing.  Guys mumbled on the horn.  "It's my wife's!" The burly man bellowed.  Then he pulled and pulled at the seat belt jammed into a rigged-with-a-lock seat belt click it.  A Correspondent took a picture of a redfaced and spitting man not struggling and not swearing, but repeating, "It's my wife's!"  He withdrew a stout knife from his utility belt and cut the seatbelt.  Lifted the door handle and the door didn't open.  He jammed his shoulder over and over against the door.  His satphone device vibrated.  He answered, "I'm getting there Sir or M'am," and hung up.  A magazine Editor grabbed a walkie talkie, ducked behind a rock, and taunted, "Try unlocking it." 

  When the man did get out, he took off his utility belt and left it on the front seat.  People spewed bits of information at him as he made way towards one of mine.  He stripped out his greens, out of his whites, and approached the young man buck neked.  "What's going on son?" The boy was staring at the lake in the distance.  

  There was no actual lake there but some visiting pastors had reinvigorated the churches with pastors away on missions in the all-night fire and brimstone way, see, and the THOU SHALT NOT KILLS and the "counting on y'all to have my backs" were twisting the young man's mind into frozen. 

  No lie, right about that time a gaggle of women folk came lightly marching up to the trailhead.  All knee socks and grandmother's very hiking boots, the wife of the neked man yelled out Honey.  What in the hell?!  He didn't turn towards her but waved his hand back off, back off.  She stopped short of proceeding and got poked in the butt by a fishing pole.  The snowblind man in hip waders called out a shorry. 

  Through the woods in a kind of reverse echo came the summer's familiar cry:  TIMBER, TIMBER, TIMBER, TIMBER, TIMBER 

          TIMBER!!!!

  "That sounded close," a campcook with a big pot told a greenjacket named Granny.  "Should I be scared yet?" The sound of a chainsaw and group chant of PUSH, PUSH, PUSH mustah collided in the action because it was way less than thirty seconds before a leafy tree top whooshed in a resounding and bouncing crash.  Nobody flinched except for Granny who sucked in his scared in a backwards stifled scream and wound a ladle and wooden spatula up in the front part of his just bathed towel.  The cook turned to look at him.  And snortily growled, "Whadyadoinatfer?" 

  "Ready to run.  You think I should run?" 

  "Nowin'llhaftawashthose good." 

  Dirt and gravel and leaves and twigs rushed from the felled giant as gator-clads and jumpsuited heavy chain carriers single-filed past headed towards road. 

  "Cun'tthinkno boozechet." 

  "Somebody needs to look at a map!" A snooty-sounding man with a pipe clenched between his teeth and trying to button his longcoat over sidearms strapped to thighs couldn't really order.  "But that won't really shut him up.  Watch." 

  "Okay I will but is this the training?" 

  A little car with two doors different colors than the body came from the direction of where the chain carriers went.  It didn't look like there was a driver.  But there was a very large, muscled black man in a Garrison cap and tan short sleeve shirt in the passenger seat.  A tiny, wizened-looking woman got out of the car by pushing the driver's seat forward.  This honked the horn by squishing a kid's face against the steering wheel.  The little old lady opened the passenger side door and grabbed the ear of the big man.  Twisted, hard, and pulled him out of the vehicle.  He stooped so it would hurt less.  She dragged him over to the woman in the hiking boots.  "ARE THESE YOUR MEN?" She demanded to know. 

  A woman with an eyebrow penciled moustache behind the waders laid her hobo kerchief on a stick down on the ground.  She put hands on hips after rolling up the sleeves of the old tuxedo blazer and sung out, I just might be m'am.  Not exactly sure if this there is there yet or where we are exactly.  She scrunched one eye and looked at the hand drawing blood from the man's ear and right into the woman's eyes, "What if'n Iyam?" 

  The little bitty woman looked up and spit at an angle on the ground.  "ASK!" She barked at the man in the bear trap grip.  The man tried to turn to face the hobo but blood spurted out on the tiny woman's face.  Above the baca stains at the corners of her mouth.  "I'm, ma, I'ma s'posed sposed to ask why the units broke up suhm'am." 

  "Let go of this man's ear," the hobo took the slightest upper body step forward.  The woman spit at an angle closer to just in front.  But she did.  The man in uniform stood up straight and tall and brought heels into a tap and square and saluted in the direction of no one.  "You were hurting him.  And your hand is dirty." 

  The saluting man stayed saluting.  The kid in the driver's seat got out and unlocked the trunk.  Put a hand out to help a slightly taller kid with similar hair twists in rows onto the ground.  The taller one walked over to the hobo and curtsied the sundress over jeans.  "You newspaper?"  The hobo looked around as if in a dream.  "I may be," she said.  The kid put hands on hips like the hobo.  The hobo crossed arms.  The kid crossed arms.  Then they had a staring contest.  

  The shorter kid locked everything on the car and put the keys down the front of also rolled up jeans.  Walked over.  Observed the staring for four long missussippis then snapped fingers in between.  "You first!" The taller kid said.  Hobo mimed was so happy, then night, sleeping, woke up, looking, looking, sad.  The shorter kid stood on tip toes and patted the hobo's shoulder.  Hobo signed a thank you.  The taller kid blared headline and lead...

  "We here 'cuz his cousin [head shove at saluting man] come from bottomland and tole." 

  The hobo knelt on one knee and put a hand out like wanting a biscuit.  "What'd she tell?"  She just more than whispered.  The kid put both hands on the hobo's shoulders.  "Steady youself." The hobo nodded yes.  Yes I will.  "They's was coming up, all dem." 

  "What happened?" 

  "Cousins getting to Georgia to come back, tole." 

  "Grapevine?" 

  The kid nodded hesitantly.  "Dogs and poeleese and chain gang." Kid looked at the barefeet on the ground.  "I didn't even see that there'ses gravel here." 

  "What else grape?" The hobo asked on both knees then. 

  "Pretend I'm a leaf.  A big leaf covering up alls mine." 

  "I will, but what else.  What did the cousins say?" 

  The kids face turned to stone.  Then remembering.  Then fought through scared shakes and blurted, "Theys hanging 'em in trees a, ah, again." The child tried to push away a wave of tremors running from knees suddenly knocking together and running in place at the same time.  The wave pushed passed hands pressing away and clutched at chest, then throat, running, face making every emotion.  The child collapsed into a seizure.  The hobo straightened the legs and arms and yelled BRING MY BAG.

"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. 

(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. 

"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".