Melissa Mills-Dick
Melissa loves short stories, long poems, cookies, feminist causes, and hanging out with geeks. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Hampshire College and is the Development Coordinator at Planned Parenthood of Northwest Ohio. Recently married, she lives with her husband in Bowling Green.
"Lining Her Bones"
Jeanie became her full height when she was twelve. She had been small as a child and all the growing happened so fast that her feet seemed surprised and kept going for a year or so before they realized nothing else was getting longer and stopped just a little out of proportion. She grew so fast that purple stretch marks appeared around her hip-bones. She slipped the waist of her pants down in front of the mirror and imagined they were tribal markings or a barcode from some mad science experiment conduced on her while she slept.
Other kids seemed to grow easily, just stretching imperceptibly taller each day, but Jeanie’s legs ached in the night like it took force to make them grow. She was tall until high school when boys started to shoot up around her like grass on time-lapse photography, but still sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night with her legs aching at the joints like they were straining against her skin.
Tenth grade was Biology and Mr. Bankes chewed tobacco, his lower lip protruding, making him look constantly thoughtful. Tobacco was illegal on school grounds, but he carried a Diet Coke can around the classroom and spit into it by pretending to take a sip. Jeanie had just started to read magazines and grow her hair out and most days she spent the forty-five minute period tugging at the ends. On a Tuesday when the smell of ground unfreezing was just beginning to creep in the window, Mr. Bankes drew a large square on the chalkboard. Then he broke the big square up into four little squares and explained about recessive genes. About how blue-eyed children can come from brown-eyed parents. Jeanie drew a spiral on the toe of her sneaker in red ink and thought about last Tuesday’s lesson, about a whole personhood braided up tight in a double helix.
In some families, birth stories are re-told and re-told, a mythology composed of snowstorms, late doctors, screaming and crying and slippery stringy fluids. Jeanie asked once at the dinner table when she was ten, placing a pea on the tip of each fork tine and looking up expectantly. Her father blinked into his mashed potatoes, and her mother pursed her lips slightly.
“Well, no, nothing special I guess. Just the regular thing, with the doctor and all.”
In Jeanie’s head the scene of her birth recreated itself in tableau: her mother lying there, the doctor poised at the end of the bed with gloved hands held out; nothing moved except a tiny, pink, perfectly clean body sliding noiselessly out from under the sheet.
Sally McMahon’s had been Jeanie’s best friend since the third grade. Sally’s parents wore similar sandals and laughed and moved in the kitchen like the pairs of ice skaters on TV with matching costumes. Jeanie’s mother was small and tightly cinched around the waist, with a soft chin and neatly arranged features. Her father was lanky with a growing pot-belly and when they stood next to each other he looked angular and on the verge of breaking off. They always used each other’s names when they passed roast beef at the dinner table.
“James, pass the beef please?”
“Of course, Patricia.”
“Thank you, James.”
“You’re welcome, Patricia.”
“We learned about genes today.” Jeanie said, thinking that her parents had been circling around each other for years now, just waiting to cross paths, or maybe looking for signs of weakness.
When Jeanie was younger, they went to the beach each summer for vacation. Her father loved to swim and her mother was terrified of the water. She spent the days outlet shopping or sitting neatly under an umbrella on the sand, reading with her back to the surf, while he turned a deep caramel color and paddled so far out he was only a pinhead against the waves. Jeanie stood on the shoreline and poked her toes into the sand where it was thick and wet and the smacking waves would disintegrate her footprints.
In the tenth grade, while the ground was still trying to thaw, Jeanie’s history teacher organized a field trip. The state museum was white-tiled and smelled like it was built in the 60’s. Jeanie’s class tramped behind the tour guide, whispering and bouncing and trailing a few who were looking for the right place to make an escape. The museum focused mainly on the state’s history, which seemed to come to a slow, grinding halt in 1945. There were portraits of the first settlers on the walls of a long room with a skylight, the kind taken with a camera you had to sit still for. It was just one family, really, they had a green tinge to them from age and the early camera. Their faces were stern and their eyes stared straight at the lens from under serious green-tinged foreheads. Jeanie stood with one foot on top of the other and placed her mother’s face on all the women, her father’s on the men. She tensed her leg muscles and imagined these green faces lining her bones like armor or mold.
Jeanie’s grandfather was tall like her father, only without the potbelly. His nose had been growing for decades, it seemed, without the permission of his face and was covered with thick patches of blackheads. Jeanie’s grandmother died when she was seven but he kept living in the small grey house in Pennsylvania and Jeanie and her parents visited once a year, on Mother’s Day weekend. They helped with spring cleaning and planted bulbs in the yard and didn’t talk about her grandmother. The spring Jeanie was eleven and a half the growing pains were at their worst and her grandfather had a cold that made it hard to breath and harder to sleep. He paced the hallway at night and ate small spoonfuls of Vicks while no one was watching because he said it loosened his lungs better that way. Saturday night he heard Jeanie crying and knocked lightly on the door. She explained about the pain and he rubbed her calves to increase circulation and then said she should walk around.
“Here,” he crooked a long finger at her when they had paced into the kitchen. “I got something to show you.”
The basement stairs were steep and covered in red carpet, a reminder of when it had been a rec-room and not just a basement. Jeanie sat on the pink flowered couch while he opened a cupboard and rummaged around.
“Here it is.” He snuffed softly to himself and handed Jeanie a scrapbook with a thick maroon cover. The book was dusty and the creaked slightly when Jeanie opened it. Inside was a record of each Mother’s Day from the time her father was born, carefully catalogued and labeled in her grandfather’s neat, tight handwriting. Each page was laid out nearly the same, cards glued on the left so that they could be opened and read and on the right a snapshot of Jeanie’s father sitting with his mother and one with her grandfather in it as well. They moved from black and white with scalloped edges to dull seventies color with rounded corners. Her grandmother’s hair became short and then gray, her father too large to fit on her lap, but her grandfather was nearly the same in each snapshot, grinning and slightly breathless, having just run into frame from setting the camera’s timer.
By April Jeanie’s hair was really starting to grow, and the air was thick with the smell of new grass. She stopped at a garage sale on her way home from school and bought a framed portrait of the Virgin Mary. Mary was pregnant with Jesus, wearing a blue dress and veil, flanked by Joseph and a donkey, neither of whom seemed to notice the halo above her head. The portrait was done in pastels and there was a water-stain over Mary’s face that made her expression even more sublime. Jeanie thought it was very funny and very beautiful. She hung it on her bedroom wall, which had been bare for fourteen years, and didn’t answer when her mother asked in a high, tight voice, “Where did that come from?”
“It’s your growth plates.” Dr. Mendelson told Jeanie when she was fifteen in the tenth grade and still waking up with growing pains. He was short and huffed his breath out when he spoke. “They’re still moving together, even after you stop getting taller.” Jeanie looked down at her leg, pushed a finger into her thigh and then her calf, wondering where plates would be located. Her mother nodded, the stiff circle of her hair framing her face perfectly, and thanked the doctor. While her mother filled out insurance paperwork, Jeanie sat in a stiff chair and imagined her leg bones, disembodied, the growth plates moving together at hyper speed, then cross-sectioned so the marrow was visible, spongy and the color of a dog’s tongue in the summer.
Across the room from her, a skinny, five or six year old boy sat waiting on a small blue plastic chair next to his mother. Once she was absorbed in her magazine he pulled the front of his Spiderman t-shirt up over his head so that it pinned his arms back and then flapped them around, grinning and snorting slightly with contained laughter. His small chest was pinkish and his sternum curved sharply inward, making a visible divot between his ribs. He noticed Jeanie watching him and flapped in her direction. She started to mimic him and then remembered her small breasts and had to suffice by pulling the back collar of her shirt up over her hair and onto her forehead, which she imagined made her look like the blob and caused the boy to lose his hold on laughter. His mother looked over to scold him at the same time that Jeanie (who still looked like the blob) looked up to see her mother’s eyes wide and tense. She made a strange, stifled ‘tsst’ noise and jerked one hand in the direction of the door.
Jeanie’s house had no basement or attic and her mother complained about storage space and never let Jeanie save anything. It took Jeanie a month of searching before her parents got home from work to find a box neatly labeled ‘memories’ in her mother’s handwriting. It was underneath an empty suitcase in the far corner of her parents’ walk-in closet, and inside were four small shoe-boxes. Each shoe-box contained neat piles of photographs stacked neatly on top of each other. One box was packed neatly with pictures of their house over the years – wreaths on the front door, the dinner table set for a special event – everything that was and wasn’t their lives. The second contained pictures of their trips to the ocean, beautiful lapping waves, surf crashing during a storm, Jeanie’s small back framed by the shoreline in bright morning sun.
The third box was marked ‘Jeanie.’ Inside the pictures were separated by white index cards with the year written on then in the same neat script. There were five or six from each year, taken at the same times it seemed, not at birthdays or Christmas but while Jeanie laughed in the fall or tugged at her sweater in the winter. They were little slices of how she really must look, and Jeanie considered the sharpness of her nose as it grew. The last box was entirely close-up’s of flowers. Jeanie sucked in her breath a little at the first - that close and vibrant, a dahlia seemed quivering and vulnerable, each fleck of pollen and dew-drop a point of weakness.
It is May and they are reviewing in Biology. Mr. Bankes drew the double helix and the four squares next to each other on the board. After class, Jeanie went to the bathroom instead of Health class. The last lesson in Health had been on desire. Mr. Harrison illustrated with two pieces of burning tissue paper (one blue and one pink) and Jeanie, who had just decided to start smoking, squatted with one sneaker on each side of the black toilet seat with her Basic and tried to imagine herself as pink tissue. It was hard so she closed her eyes and tried to imagine the pink tissue just in place of her crotch. A strand of hair fell forward and sizzled on her cigarette and she thought for a second that she was imagining so hard she could smell the tissue paper burning. But then the bell rang and she flushed the rest of her cigarette down the toilet before the hall monitor came in to check the stalls.
Jeanie’s dining room table was circular and made of blond, highly varnished pine and too large for three people. Each evening her mother set out the navy blue placemats and cloth napkins equidistant from each other, so that when they sat down their heads formed a perfect equilateral triangle. Over ham and scalloped potatoes on a Tuesday when daffodils were just starting to erupt in the yard, Jeanie’s mother crinkled her nose a little.
“James, do you smell something singed?”
“Singed, Patricia?”
“Yes, James. Something burnt.”
Jeanie kicked her foot against the table leg and felt her too-long toenail rub against the toe of her sneaker. The ends of her hair were black and crispy in one spot and she tucked that strand behind her ear as her father shrugged and picked up his knife. She kicked her foot a little harder and felt the shock of the impact spring its way up her leg, tingling, as the water in her glass made tiny waves.
Taylor Sawyer
Taylor will be a senior this year at Central Catholic High School. She is very involved at school in activities such as Student Council, National Honors Society and the Lady Irish Golf Team. Taylor would like to thank all of her teachers for challenging her to be better at everything.
"Humans in Humorous Solidarity"
It was at a little fruit market off the edge of the highway. I was sick of roadside pit stops with their greasy tables, gum spotted parking lots, and ice cream vendors. We had just entered Quebec. We were in a land much like home but without the amenity of English. The ground was made of wet gravel. The sky was so gray; it had been smeared with ash. I was restless with anticipation for what lay before us. We stopped to buy some fresh Canadian fruit.
“Bonjour,” you nodded at me, your shoulder length hair falling over your eyes. Your eyes were sunken in, I thought it seemed like your face was made of clay and I had scraped out valleys in which to place your eyes into.
“Bonjour,” I said softly in reply. Such culture! Just to say a word and imagine that whole societies spoke a different language electrified me. This is something that I can be passionate about, I though, the world is so filled with culture! I worried immediately though that you would note my American accent and be annoyed with my attempt at French.
But perhaps you’d dealt with many American tourists before, for you were perfectly patient and articulate. “Fruits frais,” you gestured to the spread before you.
“Mmm,” I nodded.
You pointed to each fruit and said their names. You made me feel deaf. I don’t comprehend French. As you spoke I felt like I was part of some circus show that you put on for every American. Maybe you had a whole routine that you went through every time. For all I know you could have been telling me that I smelled like a wet old donkey. As you spoke I imagined that you were telling me about the quality of the fruit and which kinds you preferred.
Behind me my family was still making an ordeal out of getting out of the Navigator.
I stroked some peaches and smelled the air. I was avoiding speaking anymore as I knew no other French. I didn’t want to admit to a secret that you were already in on.
“Bonjour,” you said again as my family approached.
They laughed. Their teeth laughed at me. “Why didn’t you tell him?” They pushed me aside. My foot stepped backwards to catch my weight and landed in a puddle. “We’re Americans and we don’t know any French. Do you speak English?”
My cheeks became red suns.
You spoke with a perfect English accent to them, tended to them, weighed their fruit, and accepted their money. We bought a lot of fruit. Each of us wanted something different and no one suggested compromise. Peaches for Gramps, strawberries and blueberries for Grams, apples for my aunt, raspberries for me and cherries for all.
I starred into the gravel as we walked away, listening to it grind below my tennis shoes, my mind still lingering in the moment.
“Good bye. Thank you,” you waved to them. You had seemingly perfect manners.
“Bye,” my aunt hollered over her shoulder. A brief farewell. Her mind was already elsewhere. You were only a memory.
Then your voice came again. “Au revoir,” you said to me.
I turned and walked backwards, a large brown bag clutched in my arms, my foot wet. “Au revoir,” I replied, no longer worried about my accent. My family exchanged a few hurried words about my attempt at French. I didn’t care. You had relit the fire that burned within me.
You began my trip; you French speaking man from Quebec. I spent the next two weeks engulfed in your culture. If only you knew of my curiosity, my embarrassment, and my discoveries that surrounded my trip. The sense of wanderlust that I developed. The ideas that I gathered. How my mind raced from sunrise till late evening, from the fresh morning to the hours when my feet ached and my back cried! You are only a memory now but some times my mind still falls back to that day and those days I spend surrounded by Montreal.
Judi Selden
After creating a short story per week for her short story writing class as an undergraduate at Miami University, Judi Selden took a sabbatical from short story writing for years, decades even. As a high school English teacher in Cincinnati and Toledo, or as a part-time English instructor at the University of Toledo, she made no short story writing assignments; compositions, yes, analysis of fiction, yes, but no writing short stories. Later as a high school counselor, she wrote mainly college and scholarship recommendation letters – but no short stories. Now as a docent at The Toledo Museum of Art, she creates, writes and conducts interactive curriculum-related tours for high school and college students, encouraging them to respond to art through ekphrastic writing – writing in response to art. Judi enjoys spending time with and traveling with husband Phil, their daughter Laurel and her darling family, along with close Toledo friends, who’ve become family – and she enjoyed writing a short story.
"Sleep Watch"
He hears the small click of the door as it’s opened. He wasn’t asleep. Now in this spare hospital room with its high tech monitors, Lindy leans toward him and lightly kisses his cheek with a “hey, you,” as she gently places a deliberate finger on the tip of his nose. He has watched her make this same endearing gesture with their children.
“How are you feeling – how’s the pain?” she asks, dropping her lavender sweater in the utilitarian chair behind her.
“Not much pain, but,” he adds, “I’m having a heck of a time sleeping.”
“Sleep’s against hospital policy,” she quips. “Actually you look better. Your color is more like you. Even without sleep, you’re beginning to look more like you again.”
Their eyes meet as a page interrupts from the speaker above the nurses’ station in the hall.
She smiles. “Try to rest. Lisa and Todd will be here mid-afternoon. You have some time to sleep, if you can.”
“They OK? “ he asks, needing to know that at least his children are OK, even if the rug was pulled out from under him – a crazy time, surreal. He recalls the fear when persistent pain gripped his chest in the night. The rush to the hospital blurs into the post-op ICU with its fluorescent lights, its monitors. He feels the need for assurance that his entire world hasn’t collapsed along with him.
As she reaches into her computer case for her book, Lindy says, “The kids are fine. Lisa’s plane gets in around noon – she’ll connect with Todd. If they make a nostalgic stop for the ‘world’s best chili,’ I’ll be surprised. They’re anxious to see you, to know you’re OK.”
Briefly she rests her hand on his shoulder. Compared to the clinical surety of the gloved hands of nurses, Lindy’s touch feels like the brush of a butterfly’s wing in flight. He closes his eyes as she smoothes his meager, silvering hair. “I’ll just read and try to keep the interlopers at bay,” she says.
He doesn’t have to look to know that she’ll be wearing her vigilant expression. It causes the tiny furrows around her lips to deepen. Sitting in the plastic chair that’s held the rears of many hospital visitors, her back will be straight. Lindy is a carrier of books, hoping to glean reading time. Now her eyes will be on a page of her book, but not on the words. She’ll sneak peeks at him.
He knows this. When you’ve been married more than thirty years, your spouse holds few surprises. The routines are down. The idiosyncrasies are out. Lindy can knock your socks off with her brilliance, but he knows not to tell a bad dream before breakfast. Tell bad dreams before breakfast and they’ll come true. Her Irish grandmother told her so. Lindy believes in the possibility. He’s complied.
Nice if this heart attack could have been just that, a bad dream, shared with Lindy after breakfast! But the constriction in his chest had been real. In their bed he’d reached toward Lindy, his voice a primitive croak.
But now his heart isn’t under attack. He’s on the mend. No one told him he’d feel this tired. If someone did, it didn’t register. He wonders how he can feel so monumentally tired and still have trouble sleeping. Maybe his doctor will know. Is he subconsciously fighting the black of sleep, afraid that if it happens, he’ll not wake?
For him, falling asleep has usually been easy and, once there, he’s a sound sleeper. When, as a baby, Lisa had a fussy night, Lindy had accused him of faking sleep to avoid the up time that the baby demanded. He’d felt the finger poke that had finally roused him, but hadn’t consciously heard her call his name.
He hasn’t thought about those baby days in a long time – their first, a baby girl. He’d been amazed by her tiny fingers, humbled by her dependence, and elated by her face flickering with her first smile. Before Lisa could sit on her own, Lindy would prop her in a comfy chair. Walking in from the office with a “where’s-my-baby-girl,” he’d been rewarded with Lisa’s baby belly laughs. She’d laugh so hard that she’d tilt in the chair. Once righted to sit, she’d tilt giggling again.
Here in this hospital room with life stripped to essentials, he has more time to think about the past and the future. His doctor reassured him, “Tom, it’s normal to be concerned about what life will be like after a heart attack.” Is that it – is that he why can’t sleep? A kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
He and Lindy have been through tough times before. Married just a month, he still can’t believe that he’d had to leave for a tour of duty in Vietnam. Saying goodbye at the San Diego pier that foggy morning – both of them in tears! Gone for six months in Vietnam, back stateside for three months, and then back to Nam for a year. He remembers the second goodbye as infinitely harder than the first. That time they knew exactly what it would feel like to be apart. That time it was twice as long. That time was killer.
Vietnam – hard to forget! He’d thought he pretty much had. But years after he’d returned from Vietnam, there had been that movie about Vietnam vets – the one with the revolver scene, Russian roulette – Lindy would know its title. Safe at home with Lindy, watching that scene in the movie, he’d been ambushed by memories of times he had been ordered into DaNang, a case with top-secret information handcuffed to his wrist. A .45 had been his only defense against snipers – each trip, a gamble.
He’d had to stop watching the movie and retreat to bed, but then he couldn’t sleep. He was waiting for an anonymous whining bullet – the same sound he’d heard rush past his ear on watch one moonless night. Lindy had slipped in beside him to hold him. He’d slept. When he woke, Lindy was propped on her elbow watching him – alert – as he senses she is now in this new war.
Watching, she sees his breathing start to slow. She continues to watch as it becomes regular. He sleeps.
L.A. Strawbridge
L.A. Strawbridge grew up in Point Place, then traveled the country for 15 years before settling down 14 miles away in Sylvania. She writes contemporary, experimental fiction exploring darker and heavier themes. Her first novel Whiskey Myths is available on her web site LAStrawbridge.com. Project: Silent Night is a micro-story of her second novel that she is currently writing.
"Silent Night"
Burning books is so last century. You don’t have to burn books if no one is reading them anyway. Intellect has always been a minority, but this is ridiculous.
They’re after me now.
LARAMIE, WYOMING
We’re heading to I-80 between Cheyenne and Laramie to a giant bronze head of Lincoln. I think, I’m pretty sure, they’re meeting there. I tried twice earlier to catch up at the six-story pagoda in Reading, then the giant cowboy hat and boots in Seattle. The old roadside attractions are easy to find, but desolate. There’s a rebel army building, and I need to catch up. They don’t know about the list.
WASHINGTON D.C.
I saw it coming years before, a distant relative of a childhood nightmare. There was a faint hint of decay in the air, so faint one likely wouldn’t notice, except that I knew it intimately. I could smell a diluted whiff on the horizon – tiny burning, the edges barely beginning to disintegrate. Particles flittered on my skin. One day, it crashed into my conscious thoughts, and I recognized that smell. That day, the moment it hit my nostrils, heaving into my guts, rolling violently back up, it dissipated into a bad taste that stayed with me.
I tried to go straight into the mouth of the beast. When the new administration reinstated Cointelpro, I figured the smartest place for me to be was inside. I got a job as a reticence engineer and was assigned an inventory database.
It went against everything my doctor was telling me to do. I called his advice Proverbs for Paranoids. After everything that happened, I had a little post-traumatic shock. But, just a little. I actually think I was handling things pretty well given the circumstances – both past and present.
Proverb for Paranoids #12: What is happening now is being filtered through trauma.
See, that’s what he didn’t get. I was right. This wasn’t just in my head. I was on the inside helping them do it. There really was a master plan, or something.
The beast was big – that I knew. It was the depth for which I was unprepared. They managed a penetration that was not forced, but invited. In my village those many years ago, when the others killed my mother and father, it was all force. Juan and Bianca – that was their names. My father was a soldier, my mother a professor. This was much more sophisticated. Turns out, the strongest weapons are not secret weapons at all, but transparent. Victims even contribute, seeing the provided luster over encroaching darkness.
After a few months, I heard a whisper of a project so secret, it didn’t officially exist. All I could track down was one piece of it: Operation Nil. That’s the list.
Staying late a few times, pretending to work on my own stuff, I started at the top and dug up anything I could find. James Haughton, a constitutional law profesor and activist, I tracked to UC Davis. He killed himself nine weeks ago.
Annie Filmore – Tucson murdered in robbery nine weeks ago
Jaime Hernandez – Denver gangs nine weeks ago
Alice Wendell – Atlanta car accident nine weeks ago
Jason Cho – Norfolk drug overdose nine weeks ago
Challenging, it wasn’t. After a few tries, I realized all I had to do was go to the obituaries for that city. I did recognize the names, though. They came from my database. But mine had tens of thousands of names so far. This one had 2,937.
WASHINGTON D.C.—16 months earlier
Boy, did things change quickly. Money will do that. A new political party seemed to come out of nowhere – the American Prosperity party. They wanted to clean up government waste and send the difference to American citizens. They campaigned to run the government like the best businesses in America. But, for once, the people would reap the benefit directly. They got voted in.
Citizens got their first check in the mail just two weeks after the election. My neighbors were like teenagers trying heroin for the first time. Checks arrived for Heather, Hank and Joey inaugurating a profound satisfaction. Brains across the nation bathed in the promise kept. They reached that warm, drowsy, cozy state and wanted to return there as much as possible. I watched Heather fade into a shell of a person. She became pale, isolated – distant. The only thing she could talk about was the Prosperity Network, which I didn’t watch, so she eventually stopped talking to me.
Coming back for more, more, more, Heather and the rest turned up at primaries, special elections, citizen initiatives – and the party kept dealing the checks. The more streamlined and efficient the government became, the more money the voters got.
There’s only so much you can streamline a democratic system, though. It’s inefficient by nature, all the checks and balances. But Americans were getting bored, depressed, antsy. It took more to get the same satisfaction. They wanted luxury cars, vacation homes and blingety bling. And not those small rocks either. The good stuff.
After awhile, what became necessary was a Re-Constitution. Most were so consumed with their own lifestyle and so ignorant about their own government, they didn’t know what they were giving up. What they did know is they’d do just about anything to keep the prosperity coming.
COINTELPRO
It was then that I was hired. The party announced a few details but not all of the Re-Constitution. Ways to save money included getting rid of elections and just using the electoral college and getting rid of all the necessary public relations in government—press offices and so forth. It was now wasteful since the Prosperity Party had their own network. They combined the three branches of government into one and did away with Congress since any person could contact the Prosperity Party directly.
The Party knew those intellectual-types would have a problem with it. So the government set up town hall meetings across the country and encouraged people to speak their mind. All were filmed, but none were televised. I’d been watching films for eight months compiling my database.
TOLEDO
Back to the list.
Richard Hafinger – Half Moon Bay heart attack nine weeks ago
Zoe Phillips – Kansas City natural gas explosion nine weeks ago
Wynn Williams – Portland suicide eight weeks ago
Floyd Zawicki – Silver Springs murdered in robbery eight weeks ago
Aristotle Jackson – Philadelphia gangs eight weeks ago
Samantha Schwartz -- Dallas car accident eight weeks ago
I skipped ahead. About 150 names down was Ruby Lee – Toledo. She wasn’t in the obits. After a little more digging, I found out her stage name was Miss Liberty Lee. Her MySpace page advertised a political vaudeville show she was in at the Valentine Theatre called “Give Me Liberty.” When I called, the guy told me she wasn’t in but was supposed to be there at 7:30. “Knowing Ruby, it’ll be more like 8:15,” he added.
Seven hours later, I shimmied around construction toward the rehearsal. There was a giant TV on stage playing a commercial that made fun of the American Prosperity Network. That must be what got her on the list. APN was the new channel 1 on all cable systems. It was a government channel mandated to be played in all public places. Basically, it was a shopping network sprinkled with speeches from the party and one-sided news reports.
On stage, a voice from the TV speaker told viewers, “Don’t hate me because I have everything. I bought into the American Dream, literally. What piece of the dream are you missing? Coming up this afternoon, we have designer handbags, from 2-3. Patio sets from 3-4. And for those little darlings, patriotic video games from 4-5.”
Suddenly in the flesh, galloping out on stage, there she was – a live body with dyed red hair and milky skin. In this skit, she was dressed like Dorothy but raunchier in little more than a country-blue, sequin bikini with a white apron. She had a little dog in a basket and skipped down a yellow brick road that ended at the giant TV. In a sweet, Midwestern-girl voice, she said, “Oh my Toto. I don’t think we’re in America anymore. This is rather scary. I don’t think this is what Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin had in mind at all. What would they think? All the Toms and Williams and Georges, oh my.”
On the TV appeared a guy who must have been the wizard behind the curtain. He had big, blonde hair but a little moustache outshined by a pink, satin suit and was doing propaganda speeches from the network sung as opera.
I caught the last twenty minutes, and the show was ballsy and funny. Ruby was the kind of girl you’d like to have a beer with. Scratch that. I’ll bet she drinks some obscure brand of whiskey. She was fearless. She took on the new party, and that took guts. I don’t know who would come to see her show, though, given the new political climate.
Closing the finale, Miss Liberty Lee skipped back down the road singing, “Ding Dong, the country’s dead. Which old one? The cultured one. The cultured one is dead.”
When I met her, Ruby told me she didn’t get hurt the night the boiler exploded because she happened to be out back smoking. I told her about the list. Now, we’re on our way to Laramie.
LARAMIE
Ruby and I arrived at Abe’s head. There were a couple dozen people there. It was more than you’d expect at such an out-of-the-way place, but not so many it looked suspicious. “We the People,” they called themselves.
Lincoln once said America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
The Prosperity Party knew if citizen’s basic needs are met, you gain their trust. If you gain their trust, you gain control. They knew the idea of democracy was always an idealistic, utopian dream. The real money, the real power was between government and corporations.
Running the country like the most successful businesses means the business deals aren’t always nice. It was about time, the party knew, to put the power where it rightfully belonged. In order to do that, a cultural shift was needed. Because of a few, the culture would first have to be purified. Operation Nil was merely an intellectual cleansing – a necessary step.
The party knew they could make America the most successful country in the world once again. They needed to do the work without question, without interruption and without the incessant need for explanation. It was a government the corpocracy had long dreamed of. What they required was efficiency: zero dissidence.
Burning Books is so last century. If you blatantly take from the citizens, they’ll rebel.
Give.
Project Silent Night gives generously to silence the people and walk right out the front door with democracy in hand.
