THE PRESIDENT’S BOOK TOUR

by M. Rickert

I grew up in a town so small that I can still remember the number on the census sign: Seven-hundred-and-ten. Downtown was composed of two churches, a gas station, hardware store, post office, and several bars. There was no library, of course, and I didn’t see the inside of a bookstore until I was in high school. I left when I was eighteen, but it wasn’t until I was thirty-one years old that I lived in a city large enough for a bookstore and a library. How I loved that library! I spent many hours there, “wandering the stacks,” grabbing whatever looked interesting to me until the day I discovered the collection of “The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror” then edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, which I took home and read as though they held the meaning of my life. Which they sort of did. Though I had been working on writing for years, I had chosen the bohemian writer path, rather than the academic one, which had made for some interesting adventures but had left me unmentored and rather clueless about publishing. All I knew was that I wrote strange little stories that no one wanted, and I was beginning to feel some despair over this. But these Datlow/Windling anthologies were filled with odd stories that reminded me of my own, and, quite consistently, the ones that seemed most like mine were published in something called The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fictio . The first issue I ever saw was in that same library. I sent a story that had been reaping rejections, “The Girl Who Ate Butterflies,” and when I received the check for that story, I bought a big old desk and a subscription to the magazine. I’ve been subscribing ever since.—M. Rickert

Our children roll across picnic blankets, their limbs stuck in strange postures, an arm permanently raised, legs at broken angles, lips split, eyes unfocused. When the sky shatters, our children gurgle with pleasure while we remember other explosions.

Before the war, our village was green, and we remember the variety of green, the green of apples, the green of long grass, short grass, sweet grass (each, you may remember, a different tone of blade), the green of root tree, and green of berry bush, the green of birds, the various greens of leaves. We remember how, in the summer, the whole world was green, and we walked about feeling (innocently) that we were green’s flower. We did not think of it as a weapon.

“Oh Green, How We Love Your Branches!” That was written before the war, by one of our poets. Most of us don’t know what it means, and yet, we do, somehow. This state of opposites is a part of us now, we are a people who love our children, and we are a people who wish our children had died, or better still, us. We should have died and saved everyone.

(“Oh Green, How We Love Your Small Hands Like Leaves!”)

The President makes several TV appearances to promote his new book. “We made a strategic choice to destroy the vegetation,” he says. “This was a compassionate decision, and history will reflect that.”

It is rumored that the President’s wives have had abortions rather than risk reproducing little monsters like ours. You may wonder why they would do such a thing. We point to our children, crawling on twisted limbs, breathing through deviated septums, drooling. Sometimes we see childless women on TV, jogging in the park, or sitting in the coffee shop, laughing bright red lips as they stare through glass, their blank eyes like those in a mask, but we do not judge these women, if we’d had any sense, we’d be drinking coffee like them, and not changing teenagers’ diapers.

Our children have no idea of lives lived without malformed bones, painful flesh. Most people cannot separate any idea of self from skin, and this is true of our children who stare at the exploding sky on this hot summer night, tongues coated with cotton candy, gnarled fingers sticky with dripped ice cream, mouths twisted with every exclamation for the thundered explosion of color. Our children know nothing other than what they are, no lives beyond the ones they live, no idea of what it means to be human that has not been created by war.

The President is coming to our village. Hoping to sell books, we think. A man can be quite clever and still be quite stupid as well. All opposites are joined in the state of being human. We are happy, here on the tiny shoots of sharp grass that have only recently begun to appear after all these years, and we are weeping. You cannot see it in our eyes, but you can see it in our children, who we think of as our tears. Can the President really come here and ignore them? Can he really think we will buy his stupid book?

Apparently, yes.

The fifth of July dawns a beautiful day, a blue sky meringued with puffs of white clouds, a lovely sun warmly shining down on us. The streets are littered with spent fireworks, crushed red and white popcorn cartons, deflated balloons. The sweepers move down the streets and sidewalks like computer cursors. We put on our best clothes, dress our children over diapers we’ve learned to fashion from old sheets, holes cut out for extra limbs, widened for odd shapes. We look out the kitchen windows as we prepare breakfast. With all the trees gone, we easily see the black dot in the distance when he approaches, the President, and his caravan of cars. “Here, drink,” we say to our children and hand them their sippy cups.

We assemble in the park, where just last night, we celebrated. We look at the crowd of tired faces, the beasty children groveling in the grass, ruining their best clothes, but what can be done? We do not know how to discipline them, or raise them with any sense of wrong or right, even how to begin the discourse. They are too damaged to learn moral implications; we are pleased if they can learn to use a fork. Which is not to say that they have no inner spark, no fire trapped by the dark embers of their flesh, no longing, no desire, no dreams where they are like us, standing upright, bearing vaguely symmetrical faces. What must it be like, we wonder, to desire all that the body desires but not have the body to pursue it?

The President’s limousine, followed by several black cars, glides like a slow dark torpedo from the back of the park, flags flapping in the breeze. The vehicles stop near the stage, the doors open. Men and women in suits step out, begin moving through the crowd, looking for weapons. When they walk near the children, the gnarled hands try to grab the weapon-seeking wands; one succeeds, bringing it toward what might be a mouth, but the woman pulls it away, striking the child in the process. The audience murmurs its disapproval. The woman is immediately joined by two other suits who walk beside her, scanning the crowd as though we are to be feared, though they hold the largest weapon of all, what was already done to us, what we have already lost, and what remains.

There is an invocation, a song, and introductions. The Admiral is introduced by a General who is introduced by a decorated Soldier who was introduced by a Pilot who was introduced by a Navy Seal. It’s all rather much for our children, and, frankly, for us. By the time the President speaks, the sun floods the entire field; only the dignitaries standing on the stage are in the shade. It is hot and we are weary with the small speeches our children droned and moaned through, but when, at last, the President speaks, we wonder how he does it. How does he look over the entire crowd and yet make each of us feel spoken to? How does he smile and make us feel happy? How does he make us forget how he failed?

“I know these are hard times,” he says, his voice booming into our hearts (like little bombs), “but I see in your faces the strength of heroes. I know these are hard times, but I see in your children’s faces the promise of the future.”

We look at our future’s face, the strange monstered contortions we have given birth to, and we look at our President in confusion. There is some murmuring, the suits adjust earphones and stand at attention, but even they can’t help but whisper out the sides of their mouths. The President has made a mistake. He has forgotten where he is. He is speaking as though our children are normal.

The President, his eyes twinkling, raises his hand, palm toward the crowd. “I know there are some who believe your children cannot be the face of the future,” he says, and suddenly it seems even the children are listening, the roars and groans, the babbles and slaps, the rolling and slithering have all stopped. What is the old expression, you could hear a drop of blood fall? The President smiles. “When I look at these faces, I don’t see a future that is ugly and misshapen, I see a future that remembers war and is committed to peace. I see a beautiful future, not our dream, but our destiny!”

The crowd roars. Even the children slap the ground with limbs and flippers. We forgive the President everything. Afterward, we wait in line for hours to buy his book. We are disappointed to discover that he does not sign them himself but has hired a writer to do so in his place. “The President must keep his hand strong, for signing important papers,” we are told.

We do not expect him to stay in our town that night, but he does. He spends the night at an undisclosed location (the old Maulkey Mansion on the hill) and in the morning the newspaper blares the headline, PRESIDENT MAKES NEW HOME HERE, and that is how we come to learn that the President is staying.

The next few days are very exciting. Truckloads of trees are driven through town to the Maulkey Mansion. These are not the twiggy sticks that have begun popping up between our scraggly grass, but full-grown giants, uprooted (from who knows where) and replanted in craters dug on the hill. We had almost forgotten what trees look like, or so we told ourselves, but now that we see them again, we realize the memory of trees has always resided within us. We remember shade, and leaves, branches wide enough to sit on, we remember our parents scolding us not to go so high, we remember the colors of Autumn, the snows of Winter, we remember the seasons, and the scent of green. We try to tell our children about this, our children whose ugly visages have brought us this new peace, but they don’t respond as we had hoped, they scream and writhe furiously as if tossed by an angry sea or burned by napalm. We begin to suspect that they know a lot more about what has occurred than we realized. “Hush, hush, don’t worry,” we say. “The President lives here now. No one will harm us. He brings peace.” (And trees, we think, but don’t mention, fearing it will confuse the point.)

Trucks rumble down Main Street bearing roses. Roses! The scent so sweet we think we might faint, or do something crazy. Our children try to follow the glorious cargo; we have to pull them back, promising them that we will someday take them to see the President’s garden, not knowing that we are telling the truth. Trucks, rumbling over the bumps and cracks of our dusty streets, spill silky petals and stemless flowers. We can relate to the children’s desire to stuff them into their mouths, to try to keep them forever.

What was done to those petals! Crushed, loved, and destroyed. Roses, truckloads of them, night-blooming jasmine, forsythia, flowering parsley, and mint, the scent floating down the hill, causing us to remember everything we’d forgotten. Lovers found each other in the rich scented dark and did not think about the dangerous results of malformed children, and our “children,” not so young anymore, wandered from their rooms into night streets sweet with perfume, colored vaguely blue by the moon, and even with all the confusion of extra limbs and orifices, found pleasure, wantonly, selfishly, giving no border to the consequences we had never thought it necessary to mention. In the morning we found them, tiny blades of new grass stuck to their skin, streaks of dirt down their backs, hair tangled, faces pink with pleasure, drooling, cooing in their secret language.

We steer them home. They are large and lumbering, groaning, laughing strangely at things we don’t understand. We find them naked and in embrace, tangled limbs like Gordian knots. When we scold them, they only spit, or sigh, or pay no attention at all to us. We grow tired of this night dance, their sexuality like open flowers giving off a strange odor. We, the parents, suffering exhaustion, too many nights awake and on guard, fail, and wake to find them in fields and alleys, beds, and storefronts, the faces of peace smoothed by expressions of ecstasy.

These couplings, with one exception, were without any sense of loyalty or affection. It was the rutting of animals, any sum of various parts would do. We found sisters and brothers, cousins, girls and girls, boys and boys, groups of four, six, and, on one occasion, when the moon hung like an ice cream scoop in the sky, we found an orgy of dozens. They fought us like a small army, fiercely biting and kicking as we tore them apart, though later they gave no indication that they recognized each other in any significant way. There was only one couple, Syoon and Chila, torn apart, and returned to each other night after night.

Syoon is one of the children whose deformities, before the war, would have been considered terrifying, but now is thought fortunate. She is able to walk, for instance, her limbs easily accounted for and fitting into a pre-war ratio, though it is true her spine is bent at odd angles, and her “walk,” really more of a lope. Yet, compared to most of the others, she is almost graceful. Her face (and this would account for her seeing the butterfly before anyone else) tilts upward, destined since birth to look at the sky and not the humans who made such a mess of everything. Her mouth falls into a philosophical frown, giving the impression that this damaged child ponders her fate. Syoon’s eyes, though far apart from the plane of bridgeless nose, nonetheless reside in what, before the war, was the expected position, giving her an unwieldy fishy look, a creature always rising to the surface, but they are large and bright blue, laced with lashes so long they flutter against her cheeks beneath amazingly, perfectly aligned eyebrows, all of which only seems to further the impression that this one, this daughter of war, has somehow come into the destroyed world bearing a new version of beauty.

Chila’s face is not so fortunate, his eyes all varied in shape, large, small, protruding; and in composition, lashless, heavy lidded, brown, blue, one with a pale cloudy yellow pupil, like curdled butter. His mouth is wide and loose-lipped, his tongue often hangs out, dripping with saliva. No, what Syoon found so compelling in Chila did not reside in his face but in his body, a throwback by some genetic fluke to a time before the war when young men had sun-colored skin, when their flesh exuded a beguiling scent, the combination of meadow green and sex. The girls found their way to him, discovering pleasure in what, they could not know, was the perfect body of our past.

Yet, Chila only roved for one, and, with his great muscles and massive size, kept all away from her as well. Syoon, always Syoon until we could not ignore it any longer, they had become lovers, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, drawn to each other to the exclusion of all others, exhibiting symptoms of that most dangerous of emotions until at last, desperate, we tied them up at night.

It became necessary for an abortionist to come to our village and set up shop at the old meat market, designing an odd storefront window of small statues carved out of coal set in a sea of white pebbles. It wasn’t long before a steady parade of girl children (do we still call them children? Well, they aren’t adults) are escorted there by “parents.” Some days there is even a line of customers waiting outside on the sidewalk, not as unpleasant as it might have been, before the President’s arrival. We wait, breathing in the scent of green. We are standing there when a butterfly flits down Main Street followed by Syoon, who appears to be chasing it, laughing out of the frown of her mouth.

We were enchanted to see Syoon, the prettiest of all our ugly children, loping down Main Street, her moon-fish face, perpetually turned upward, now turned upward at the violet butterfly, which flitted just out of reach of the small fingers she lifted overhead, not understanding that the allure of the butterfly is lost once captured. How could she understand? Syoon, like all the children, had never seen a butterfly.

We watched this glorious thing, transfixed by the memory of a time when this was almost a rite of passage, admittedly for three-year-olds, rather than children Syoon’s age, who, we later determined, was about fifteen. By the time she was on the hill, it was too late. Even from a distance we could see the small black dots that were the guards descend on her, and though we shouted, she was taken into the mansion by a swarm of them, swallowed by an open door which then was shut.

For a long time we heard nothing from, or about, our Syoon, which decidedly set a pall over the optimism we’d been feeling since the President’s arrival. Then, one day, every residence, be it hovel or better, received a hand-delivered invitation to the Maulkey Mansion. The President was getting married. To Syoon!

Years ago we built trenches beside our houses because we had learned, through the saddest of educations, that when bombs fell it was best to divide our families. Neighbor children and our own crouched in each other’s ditches. In this way no entire family was destroyed. This is the terrible mathematics of war. So, when we opened the pretty cream-colored invitations (tied with gold ribbon) and read the beautiful script of Syoon’s name, all of us rejoiced for our daughter whose lineage, through a childhood of explosions and ditch-hopping, was uncertain. All through town there was cheering and celebration, only occasionally pierced by Chila’s mournful braying, the cry as dark as night and as sad as life, though we found that if we closed the windows, and cheered very loudly, we could drown him out. This worked for much of that day of celebration, until we took to our beds. In the steely air of our closed rooms we listened to Chila’s screams, his despair reminding us of something we had once known and could not name, something buried inside, tucked beneath ribs, or smothered by the heart. On that, the happiest day of our lives, we cried ourselves to sleep and dreamt of the time before the war, when we, too, mourned for what was taken from us, as if the taking was a shock from which we could never recover.

Morning came and with it we were returned to our vigor. We opened windows and took great gulps of the blue sky, we smiled at the silence; at last Chila had fallen asleep or lost his voice or taken the pills we all carried for when things got too bad (though we surprised ourselves and discovered we could live, with few expectations or dreams, settling for the worst of everything, finally rewarded by this day when the green was returned to us, leaves unfurled, grass or something like it no longer suppressed, and one of our own daughters marrying the most powerful person in the world).

We sewed new outfits for our children, stitched around the growing limbs and disturbing sexualities which we had not, until then, bothered to bind in any way. We took those who needed, who we even suspected needed, to the abortionist and, when we discovered she could perform an operation for sterility we chose that. Why hadn’t we thought of it sooner? It had been years since we even considered the possibilities of reproduction. Since the war, anyone who gave birth to a deformed child was automatically sterilized. We had not been thinking of our children as sexual creatures. We put the abortionist on the list of things to do between haircuts and manicures, there was no possibility any of them could be parents and there was no way we would do the job for them. We were so tired by that point.

Chila continued his mournful braying. We came to think of him as Foghorn, though the horrible sound told us nothing about the weather, and dreadfully much about his sorrow, which reigned at all hours, dark and lonely, a sound we slept and woke to, a sound that accompanied our shopping, our chores, the dreary business of our lives, always reminding us of the other side of joy, a fact we did not appreciate.

We begged Chila to stop. We bribed him with homemade cabbage soup, which he took (the cheater) and destroyed in the area of his mouth. We bribed him with our daughters who came eagerly in giggles and bows, the preservation of their sterility assured; he took them as well, in angry embrace, and we heard the rutting noise of his pleasure, the heavy snore afterward, and understood that an agreement had been made until he awoke and once again returned to his wailing. Eventually we gave up on Chila. We grew used to the sound. Sometimes, when he slept, we even missed the foghorn.

At last, the wedding day arrived. The town swarmed with reporters and photographers. We were all interviewed, even Chila, though no one understood what he was trying to say, his voice hoarse, his words punctuated with sobs. At twelve o’ clock we left the sobbing Chila, and the media, in the street, staring at us as if we were something special, and walked up the hill, guiding our wayward children with their extra limbs trying to take them in various directions. We carried diaper bags decorated with bows and painted with flowers, occasionally stopping to smooth a wrinkle in our best clothes, to adjust the uncomfortable straps of our best shoes, to wipe our children’s drool, readjust their hair. The photographers aimed their long lenses at us. There were so many of them that they sounded like gunfire, which was unfortunate. We carried our cream and gold invitations in our hot hands. We breathed in the increasingly heady perfume of flowers and grass and dirt, we pointed to the birds, gasped at the dragonflies.

Long strips of white ribbon fluttered in the afternoon breeze as if the gates, the house, the trees were gift-wrapped, and in a way they were. The suits waved their weapon detectors over us, their expressions disgusted; we tried to hold our children still, we fed them cereal to distract them from the trees, the grass, the birds, all those flowers, and a fountain of water flowing there, as ordinary as sky, all of it decorated with white ribbons which fluttered in the wind like tattered ghosts.

In spite of all the accouterments of festivity, many of us recall a vague feeling of unease, though it is difficult to know if this is recollection, or memory tainted by what followed. I, personally, recall staring at those white ribbons fluttering in the wind and being filled with dread. This was not unusual in itself. Many of us adults, survivors of the war, had suffered the experience of emotions not tied to surroundings. The Doctors called these occurrences flashbacks. We called them ghosts. A popped bubble becomes the shot that killed a mother, a whiff of cinnamon becomes the morning the first bombs fell, a white ribbon flapping in the wind becomes a wounded spouse in an old dress shirt, whose wife dares not come out of hiding to save him, for risk of being shot herself. The coward.

The guards move through the crowd searching bodies, invading orifices with one hand while offering trays of appetizers with the other. Our children, dressed in the best we could manage, register nothing of this abuse on their happy faces. They gurgle and drool and even squirm with inappropriate delight at the invasive touch while shoving cheese rolls and herring crackers into their many mouths. The guards, dressed in tuxedos, look like cockroaches scuttling amongst us. The birds sing, the windchimes tinkle, the water fountain gurgles, the ribbons flap in the wind, and the President’s mother (is it her? Is it possible, after all these years?) stands in the doorway of the mansion, her white hair haloed around her little head so that she looks like a human Q-tip. We are silenced when she raises her tiny shrunken hand and speaks in her ancient voice. “We are so happy to have you here. Please come inside for the ceremony. God bless our President, and God bless our country.”

For a moment we are silent, then we cheer, though anyone listening closely could discern the nature of our response, a cheer of longing, rather than support, the difference between funeral bells and wedding ones, though the same bells ring for both.

Our children tumble and roll toward the doorway. We follow them into the mansion where the President’s mother leads us into a room decorated with white flowers, garlands on the ceiling, and great bouquets in front of the altar. Each chair, in the many rows of red chairs, festooned with the ghostly blooms. When things got really bad and all the green had been destroyed, we lived in a place of these colors. Those red chairs and white flowers remind us, for a moment, of that time of blood and bone. Yet, there is beautiful music and one of our own is about to marry the President. Even our children were subdued by the enormity of it all. The room grew quiet. Well, it had been a long time since we’d heard music, some of the children never had. We think it was a flute.

We sat in silence, listening to the flute, breathing in the scent of unknown flowers, surrounded by tuxedoed security. A religious leader of some kind came to the front, standing before the altar in a gold robe. The President’s mother sat in a great chair facing all of us, bowing under the apparent weight of her Q-tip head. After all the build-up it seemed that it began suddenly. Suddenly there were young women coming down the aisle, tossing white flowers at us (they fell softly, like feathers, and without a sound, but still, we flinched). Later we realized that all these females were wives of the President, each more beautiful than the other. Then the President came, walking down the aisle in his suit of war medals, waving at us as though in a parade, stopping to kiss his mother’s cheek (she raised her heavy head to squint at him before she fell asleep again), and as he turned to face us, his demeanor boyish, his eyes twinkling, his mouth in dimpled grin, the music stopped. The silence would have been startling had there not been, just then, the faintest noise of Chila’s foghorn rising up the hill. The President’s eyes widened though he held his head still. We watched as his face changed from shadow to a beam, and we followed his gaze to Syoon, dressed in white lace, wreathed in foxglove, coming down the aisle, accompanied by the flute. In that moment when we gasped, and we all gasped, there was again that sound, perhaps just a little longer this time, and definitely a little closer. Chila. We fell to weeping, sobs of pretend joyous tears. We made the noise to protect Chila, though it did confuse our children who became quite distressed. They squirmed and blathered. Several of us noted the eye-rolling of security. Even the President’s mother lifted her head to squint out at us. Did the flute grow louder? We think it did. Everything got louder. The further Syoon walked down the aisle, the more volume Chila’s foghorn made, the louder we wept our false tears, the more noise our children made, while the President’s mother glared, the security guards rolled their eyes, and the President, his war medals glimmering in the light of wedding candles, smiled at his bride, who turned toward Chila’s sound, which now seemed suspiciously close. Not all our noise, the noise of the children, or the raised volume of flute could drown out his mournful cry. Slowly, with great reluctance, we looked at the President, who no longer beamed like a lighthouse in the storm.

(Oh Green, How We Taste Your Bitter Shoots, Rooted in the Dark.)

The security guards moved to guide Syoon toward the glowering President. She looked at him, we hope for the first time in this cowering position, and began walking forward.

Chila’s foghorn sang its terrible note, this time quite near.

Of course there had been other wars and we followed them on the TV and Internet, but then war seemed like a distant planet. We maintained our belief in love, until war came to our town, and love grew a shape we had never imagined. Here we were, in the President’s chapel, watching his guards walk Syoon down the aisle, tears streaming down her face, as the President grimly stood waiting. Chila’s foghorn, quite near now, brayed again but was ominously cut off. Our distressed children were braying, and moaning; we tried to shush them, and hold them back, as they pushed their way past, and at that point, just when it seemed they were in general revolt, shots rang out.

Of course we knew the President’s people were capable of shooting our children, shooting us. What had we been thinking, anyway, to come here as guests? The shots rang out, and for a moment, everything stopped. No one moved. No one made a sound. This moment was followed by terror. We looked at our children, we looked at each other, looking, looking even as we checked the doors, guarded by security, while suits scurried amongst us, swiftly. They knew before we did that the President was shot. They tackled Syoon to the ground, like the football players of our youth (Oh Green, How We Love Your Stain), wrenching from her small, misshapen hand the gun.

Syoon? Our Syoon, an assassin? How was it possible, she, who was the promise of the new generation, the beauty, the charm, the one amongst all the rest who had a chance at a normal life? Or so we thought. It is incredible what people believe, in order to fool themselves about the world they live in. As they tackled Syoon, and wrestled the gun from her small hand, she called Chila’s name, over and over again.

We thought we were guests at the wedding, but must accept that we were complicit with her captors. Had we not come to the captor’s house? Had we not eaten his food? Had we not smiled at Syoon as she came so unwillingly down the aisle? What had we been thinking? Even now, in the spirit of understanding, we do not really understand, we only know that we are misshapen in ways we had never imagined. When did we become our own ghosts, shadows of what we once believed in, heartless, barren?

The President survived, of course. The wound was not serious, but his capacity to show the world his resolve for peace by marrying Syoon was shattered by her bullet. In fact, he never returned after his short convalescence, but continued on his book tour, and though we were sorry to see the trees, flowers, and fountains carted off, the mansion demolished, we were not sorry to see him go.

We protested the hanging by staying home. We shut our doors, and tried to distract our children, who seemed to sense what was happening, or perhaps we just imagined that their keening had anything to do with us. Still, we could hear the fanfare, the band (they brought in from who-knows-where) playing, the speeches delivered to a bussed-in crowd. We filled the sippy cups, and looked out the windows, to the east, the west, the north, the south, searching, searching first the faces in the windows of the other houses, and then the horizon. We did not know, until we heard the unmistakable sound of the trapdoor drop, what we had been looking for. Chila. We had been looking for Chila to come riding in on a horse, or running down the road on his magnificent legs. We expected Chila, somehow, Chila who was probably dead since the wedding day, we thought Chila would come and save Syoon. We did.

It didn’t come true, of course, but that isn’t the point, after all.

We have worked hard at making strangers comfortable in our community, made infamous first, all that time ago, by the small militia that had assembled amongst us, followed by the war, and then the assassination attempt here, and also, the strangeness of our population, the way we let our “children” (indisputably grown now) make families in whatever fashion, by whatever whim they desire. Strangers who do dare to come here, often comment on the surprising kindness of our town.

We ask our children’s forgiveness, but they are so busy (coupling everywhere, at any time of day or night, in places both public and private) that they never seem to have the time to answer us. Besides, where should forgiveness reside? Often, at night, just before sleep comes and we are taken to memories too horrible for light, we think of Syoon’s bloated silhouette, hanging forever, and while there is much to focus on in the nasty dregs of the lives we made from war, when we think of Syoon, we remember that moment before, when we looked at the vast horizon, searching for something we thought we no longer believed in (Oh Green, How Impossible Your Heart), and we smile, even as the rope twists tighter, we smile.

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