49

When I was an infant, swaddled in my pink blanket, strangers would peek into my carriage, as their nosiness forces people to do. They would lean in, their faces all full of gooey happiness, coos and kissy lips. When they got a load of me, the phrase most spoken to my stone-faced mother was, "Oh, what a...a baby."

48

"It's a magic wand," Troy declared, holding the stick he found aloft so the other kids could see and appreciate it.

"It is not," griped his sister Athenea. "It could be a sword, though." Troy brandished it like a true swashbuckler.

"It's not a sword," piped up Luther. "It's a lightsaber. From Star Wars."

"I know what it's from," snapped Troy, who started making lightsaber swoosh sounds anyway.

"It's the bone of a child's leg." All heads snapped to Druelle. Dirty Stinkpants Druelle. Athenea was ready to retort, but stopped short at the way Druelle was staring, rapt, at the stick.

"It's a wand," Troy whined, going back to his original, and he thought best, assertion. Everyone else continued to watch Druelle, wondering what she would say next.

47

How could she have not known her friend was living like this? Val was horrified when she let herself into Halle's bungalow. Granted, Halle never invited Val in, but still. Still. There should have been signs. Val sniffed and wrinkled her nose.

Val and Halle had been friends since elementary school in their middle class suburban neighborhood. Halle's parents were tough, but they had seemed fair. There was a rough patch in high school where Halle seemed to have a hard time adjusting, but she had eventually pulled herself together and gotten her own place.

Halle's original apartment had been small and poor but neatly kept in a sort of shabby-with-cat chic. Val had been there many times, but then they had fallen out of touch. Now it was ten years since Halle had that apartment. She lived in this bungalow now. Val was afraid to walk in any further than the foyer.

The floors were immaculate. And white. Blazing white. The walls were blue Jamestown toile wallpaper. Toile! There was a highly polished antique table in the foyer upon which no key chain had ever sat and no mail had ever piled. Val peered into the living room to the left. The furniture and lampshades were covered in plastic. The floor was white wall-to-wall plush pile carpeting. Val felt the tears well up in her eyes and she involuntarily sniffed them back. Potpourri. Freaking potpourri.

46

Moscow talked in his sleep. He didn't know he did because it was a new phenomenon. He had never talked in his sleep when he was still living at home, but now that he was out and in his own place, he talked, yelled, whispered and sometimes screamed. Moscow found out he talked in his sleep after he picked up a part time job in the used bookstore.

45

The woman was obese and she breathed through her mouth. Her blue floral tank top and matching blue shorts were cheap but they looked clean enough. Her hair was lank and dyed an improbable shade of yellow. On the back of her flabby upper left arm she had a small mountain of cancer. At least, Susie thought as she looked at the woman ahead of her in the grocery store checkout line, it was what cancer was supposed to look like.

It was summer and all the fashion magazines had devoted at least one article to spotting melanoma, in between the ads and fashion spreads with healthily tanned models. Susie remembered melanoma had irregular shape and color.

The fat lady's arm had a misshapen hill on top of a misshapen mountain that were both black and purply-black. The lumps were as irregular as they could get and Susie felt a little nauseous. Did this woman know the lumps were there? She was so fat, maybe she couldn't reach to feel or turn to see them in a mirror. Maybe she had no one else to tell her about them.

Maybe they weren't cancer, but just moles. Yes, just moles, Susie told herself, but still she wondered if it would be considered rude to mention them to the woman. Maybe it was too late already. Susie watched as the lady huffed and puffed her way to the exit, clinging to the grocery cart full of cans and boxes and plastic bottles. Susie vowed to remember sunscreen every day.

44

Everyone had thought that science and logic and empathy and rational thought had finally triumphed over faith-based belief, blind patriotism, righteousness, and self-centeredness. It hadn't. The others were not converted, they were simply seething, steeping in their own closed-minded juices and plotting their return to power. They also were planning how they could permanently hold that power.

Secret militias formed in churches, basements, compounds, bunkers. Plots were hatched in those places as well as in marbled halls of justice, well-appointed DC offices, and in the homes of the rich and formerly powerful. God, Country and Freedom were mentioned over and over as these people armed themselves and planned to kill any fellow countryperson who didn't share their beliefs.

In shock and disbelief, the scientific, logical, empathetic and rational were plowed down by the combined force of inarguable faith and bullets, bullets, bullets.

43

They have told me that my mother is alive. My uncle said she is in hospital with me and consented that she is unconscious and badly injured, but I do not believe him. After all, he was not on the plane and he was not in the water like I was. He does not know what I know. I only nod, carefully, because of my fractured collarbone, and say nothing; I know he is only trying to make my recovery easier. No matter the superficiality of my body's injuries, it is not easy to be the only survivor.