Thu, 19 May 2005

Just Before The Winds Come
All my neighbors are in the Vietnam Conflict Recreation Society. I kept refusing to join. I’d noticed a general lack of lawn respect from their children and an unmistakable snub at this summer’s block party: our car-part-built gamelan booth was placed on the railroad tracks. They are a force to behold, I will admit; mighty and high as kites, out on the high school football field, running flanks and scattering from imagined treeline fire. That the area is completely devoid of any jungle never deterred them; nor does the fact that most people find the entire ensemble’ in questionable taste. They were never bright boys, the Central Heights Squadron, all desperately in need of some kinda hobby that doesn’t involve Paul’s son Mandrax making flashpots and pipe bombs. Mandrax used to be content planting fake alien artifacts out in he fields with my boy Barry and the other kids, but now it’s barns peppered with shrapnel, tracers up over the house at night. Enough of this; I’d begun fortifying the house, putting up steel reinforcements, cleaning the weapons, and finally, at night, I began watching from the trees for enemy encampment in the garden, the fields, my son soliciting soldiers from his school, forming a center of resistence dead in the middle of Euclid Street.

We were in the trees, looking down, searching for soldiers in the wheatfields. Our men had split into two factions, warring over the accuracy of our uniforms, our neighborhood politics. Barry’s Consumer Responsibility instructor Jack and I had taken to the trees, lining both sides of the railroad tracks, facing the fields. Should we be spotted, they’d make quick work of us, but we had the advantage of sight and positioning. Clausewitz said “in war, there is a connection between everything which belongs to a whole”, which as true as all his truths, something we understood and our traitorous neighbors did not. The wind came down hard, from the west, and brought the stalks of wheat to the ground, leaving three of their men exposed. We quietly removed them from play and worked our way from branch to branch so as to reposition in case of any sighting. Jack and I were both getting older, and hadn’t the eyesight of our youth, and so with the setting of the sun we knew the advantage was shifting to the younger men, who still had children in diapers and lust for their wives. We could wither wait it out and hide for the night or we could force their hand now. Jack and I communicated through clicks and whistles. I feel a love for Jack, a manly and respectful love, which the younger seem not to understand. We had shared venture capital backing sources, Herodotus, cask-aged aberlour. I realized, up there in the trees, how inevitable this schism within the neighborhood had been, and how I had waited for it, for now. Jack suggested a rush on the fields, flushing the remaining two down to the river, just like Frederick the Great, then regroup with the remaining members of our squad, if any. We were agreed, and began to descend the trees when we heard something from behind. a collection of children had formed a line along the railroad tracks, headed by that foul mandrax, waste of seed and skin. I felt relived I didn’t see my girl with them; it’d be like her to be wasting her time among this neighborhood rabble…but there she was, in the back. Something left her hand then, following the arc of her arm, up into the trees, and the last thing I remember was staring at that item, spinning end over end, a capped piece of metal pipe, stuck towards the top with what looked like a fuse. Jack made clicks and whistles, and it seems so obvious, then, where the schism had truly come from. And then it was over, to the best of my knowledge. We were pressed from our bodily remains, from the pieces and fragments of our forms, our spirits collected like fireflies in some sticky summer night, pulled upwards, into a tunnel of lights. I watched out for Jack, and I saw him head toward a thick red sphere, and I pulled myself to follow. Whatever god manifest in that light was akin to ours, for we returned to the earth as rocky mountain spotted fever, built in labs for resilience and virility, and after the rush of our missile ride we got to nest in the mucous and vomit of our victims, clotting and clogging the mouth and nose, clawed out but never removed. And it was not long before we forgot our children and our sieges, and learned to content yourself on the idiot joy of replication, casting out into the air just before the winds come. Perhaps not so different after all.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #