This part of my life has always been separate.
Everyday I leave our house behind;
I drive these roads
and walk these paths
alone,
and my two worlds
have never intersected.
Until today.
My time on campus
has always been about learning
and living dreams,
so it’s funny that it took you
coming to school with me to teach me
how much of my dreams are already here
in you.
Her chubby fingers barely wrap
around the white chain case,
and her little legs barely hang
over the edge of the plastic seat,
but her smile—
her smile fills her entire face
when I push her on the swing.
Caffeine-induced headaches
and drooping, bloodshot eyes
are the spoils of our warfare—
and productivity’s the casualty.
The boys found a field mouse family’s
burrow beneath one of their tents.
The mother ran under a bush to watch
as the scouts inspected the shallow trench.
In the earth she’d made a careful nest,
laid with cotton fluff and fine, dry grass
for the naked body of a birth-blind pup,
which chirped as it searched for her in the dirt.
I covered the place with a piece of bark,
and whispered to boys to step away and watch
the mother come back from where she’d fled.
They crushed her pup with a rock instead.
I was going to try to get a little work
out today. I did a few warm ups,
stretched myself over a couple topics,
and bounced a few ideas off the walls,
but it just wasn’t coming naturally, and
I didn’t want to pull anything.
There is something in writing
greater than the simple groups of letters
through which we meet our restless thoughts,
which breathes a vibrant life into the words,
that transcends sentences of meaning,
that recreates something in reading.
An officer shoves me to the edge of the pit.
“Kneel!” he screams.
My knee sinks into the mud at the brink,
and I look in and see death,
twisted and tangled in bare heaps of limbs,
contorted unnaturally on the faces of children,
their eyes as wide and scared and lifeless
as those of the bigger bodies around them.
They were shot in lines that moved forward as one,
sometimes holding hands as the soldiers
took aim and fired.
There is no line for me because
there is no one left to shoot.
Entire families gone.
Entire swaths of the city erased,
the ghettos as empty as their vacant eyes.
And I am the last one.
The last Jew in Vinnitsa.
I lock eyes with a face below me.
We have much in common:
both brown-haired, both Jews, both dead.
I feel a barrel press against my skull.
“Wait, you dummkopf, you’ll get his filthy brains
all over you if you shoot him like that.
Step back, and wait for the picture:
this is the last one, after all.”
“Look up!”
I stare at the blurring face while
the photographer makes a few adjustments.
“Eins…”
A breeze plays gently with my hair.
“Look up, Schwein!”
I wonder who will see this picture.
“Zwei…”
I inhale deeply and raise my eyes.
“Drei!”
A flash of light—
A woman with short hair and a red sweater
smiles into the camera as she explains
that she’s been very busy lately,
and her mind is a little jumbled.
She’s been preparing to meet Ti
and the other level-above-humans
in a ship behind the Hale-Bopp comet,
which is passing by Earth a few days prior
to the planet’s recycling.
She talks about business and
casually recounts a few anecdotes.
With a coquettish grin she tells the group’s clients:
“you might need to get someone else
to finish up your website right now.”
There is chuckling behind the camera.
“And one last thing we’d like to say is”
here she taps the space above her left breast,
Star Trek style,
“Thirty-nine to beam up.”
More laughter this time.
Someone claps as the clip fades.
On the surface it’s just a funny way to end a vlog,
only she isn’t joking.
They really were all taken away—
in body bags after they killed themselves.
Legal papers litter the table,
the family huddles together in the living room.
It’s time to say goodbye.
There’s a desperate sucking of air
through tear-burdened throats
as they hug each other one last time.
A sibling hands her a teddy bear.
“We’ll get you back,”
her mother chokes on the words,
her eyes wide and wet.
“Don’t let them take me, Mommy!
“I don’t wanna go, please…”
Her dad scoops her up and kisses her,
breathing in her smell.
“I know, sweetheart,” he says, his voice shaking.
“We’ll get you back. I promise.
Be strong for me, okay?”
“Okay,” but the tears don’t stop.
He carries her to the door
she’s been in and out of most of her life,
only this time she might never come back in.
Her mother clutches her hand
as she leads her siblings behind.
Outside is a flag over the garage,
a crowd of protestors,
and a black car that will take her away.
Shutters snap as they walk under the flag,
her sister breaks away, screaming:
“No!”
Her mother holds her back with one arm,
she screams too:
“I love you, Lexi!”
There is no fear in her voice,
but it’s there, in her eyes.
The girl is strapped into the car with strangers.
Her small hands clutch at the bear.
Her father says goodbye through blurry eyes.
“We’ll fight for you, Lexi!”
They walk back under the red, white, and blue flag,
because this is America,
where 1.56% Choctaw blood
is more important than a family.
A child shakes out great
pillows in the sky, and the
snowflakes billow by.
Sam Bartholomew's Writing Blog 