Ninety-Six: Wayne

He looked for the small ones, the ones who struggled along near the back of the packs.  He couldn’t pick one that was too small or scrawny; that just wouldn’t look good.  He needed them big enough to look like a challenge, like a job, you know?  But not so big he might actually lose.

The best ones were the smart ones.  He didn’t know why, but it seemed the brainier they were, the longer it took them to realize that something was wrong, that suddenly they were alone, in danger.  Wayne loved that moment.  It tingled down his spine, settled in his abdomen, made his blood run thin and quicksilver.  The look was the best, the way they slid their eyes up while their chins headed south.  The look that led their brains to a reality check.

He checked the end of the block.  No crowds yet, just a few early Adams waiting for the light.  No good, they always had whistles or cell phones or fat packs ready to swing.  Another twenty minutes, is all.  He swung his feet from the tree branch, whistled through his teeth, shopped for cars as they rolled past his perch.

Finally a group came floundering by.  Perfect.  An older sister led the way, bossing the host to the corner.  And there he was, tripping at the back, glasses down around his nostrils, half his shirt untucked, shoes flopping off with the laces dangling, backpack threatening to bail to the left.  Wayne waited for the perfect moment, then slid off the branch and dropped.

“Where ya goin’, huh?” he said quietly.  “Hope ya got money for the toll.”

Ninety-Five: Rami

Hi, my name is Rami and I’m five.  How long have you been here?  I’ve been here a long time, I think.  Sometimes it seems like longer, like when I really hurt a lot and the nurses say, “I know,” but then they keep on letting it hurt.  That’s a long time to me.  But then we get movies in the afternoon.  Do you take naps?  I don’t anymore, unless there’s a lot of stuff that they have to do to me in the mornings.  Sometimes Raul, he’s the tech from the lab, sometimes he’ll come up and have lunch with me.  He says I’m his buddy.  That’s cool.  Do you have any buddies?  Well, you will, expecially if you go down to Rad.  That’s the place that’s really boring, unless Nancy’s there, and then she’ll put on the TV to Nickelodeon, even if there are lots of old people in there, because she says we’re more important than cranky old people with broken hips or whatever their problem is.  Do you know how long you’ll stay?  I’m staying until they can’t find any white stuff in my blood anymore, and then I’ll go home.  I can’t wait, I haven’t seen my dog in like forever, I don’t even know if he remembers me.  Do you have a dog?  Mine’s big and hairy, his name’s Duke, I wanted to call him Shaq, but my mom says that’s trademarked, whatever that means.  Anyway, when I grow up I’m gonna be a doctor, a little kid doctor, only I won’t be like my doctor because he’s mean.  He’s the one who does all the hurting things to me, and he says all the time, “I know, keep it up, just another minute,” but I think if he was a really good doctor, he would figure out how to fix me without it hurting so much.  Anyway, when I grow up I’m gonna be the kind of doctor who never hurts anybody.  Maybe I’ll be a baby doctor.  I sure won’t be an old people doctor, they make too much noise and they talk all the time, and they smell funny.  I wonder if their doctors do hurting things to them?  What?  Oh, okay, well it was really nice talking to you.

Ninety-Four: Gloria

“Momma, why is that lady so fat?” Gloria asked when she was small.

Her mother knelt in front of her.  “Honey, it’s not nice to talk about people’s differences,” she said.  “You have to be polite.  That means you don’t say things that might hurt someone’s feelings.”

Another time with her father, she watched him compliment the neighbor’s new fence, only to go inside and complain about how terrible it looked.  When she asked why he said two different things, her father said, “Sweetie, people say nice things to each other to keep the peace.  Frank knows his fence is ugly, if he’s got half a brain.”

In school Gloria learned many things about the world from her teachers.  “I before e except after c.”  “Christopher Columbus was a great explorer and discovered America, even though Amerigo Vespucci landed here first.”  “Never begin a sentence with never.”  “2 + 2 = 4, and 2 x 2 = 4; but 2 + 3 = 5, and 2 x 3 = 6.”  “All liquids contract when they freeze.  Except water.”  “You can be anything you want.  This is a free country.  We are a democracy.”

Gloria assimilated these contradictions into all of the others.  At times she felt like there was a giant fulcrum centered just within her sternum.  At times she would stand in her room and stretch her arms out, look to either side at her empty hands, and wonder what it was she should do with the equal grasps of nothingness.

One day as she was eating lunch in the cafeteria, a boy sitting across from her grabbed a passing girl by the hand and kissed it.  “Go out with me Friday night?” he asked, begging her with his eyes.  When she refused, he good naturedly shrugged his shoulders.  “What a bitch,” he declared when she left.

Gloria rose slowly and stood up on the table.  Those nearest her watched quietly as she took off her sneakers and held them in the air.  “These shoes were made by ten year old girls who were paid seventeen cents a pair.”  She threw them in a nearby trash barrel.  The boy across from her applauded.  Seven tables over, the quarterback whistled.

Gloria picked up her US History book.  “Columbus raped women and killed babies,” she said firmly.  “We enslaved native people and lied to them.”  The book hit the trash.  The cafeteria ladies stopped serving lunch and stared.

Gloria’s tray was heisted next.  “The food you eat is processed by corporations.  We could plant enough grain in the heartland to feed the population of Africa, but farmers are paid by our government to leave their fields bare to keep prices up.”  Before she could throw the tray a girl took it from her and deposited the food in the barrel.

Gloria’s shirt came off next.  “Made in Pakistan, where the average worker earns $700 a year.”

“Shit, I made that in two weeks over the summer,” another jock said.

Gloria wiggled her jeans off her hips just as the principal tried to enter the cafeteria.  Several students flipped the door locks and stood in the way.  “Assembled in Mexico of US materials,” she announced.  “It also says I’m a size 2.”  Girls in the room laughed, understanding.  In went the pants, followed by underwear and bra.  No one moved.

“This is the only way to see the truth,” Gloria said.  “They won’t tell us.  They won’t show us.  They hide it or lie about it and want us to do the same.  Well, I quit.”  Gloria stepped down from the table and walked away.

Ninety-Two: Kai

Kai denounced his fosterage and left home at the age of twelve, determined to live forever upon the mountain whose peaks he had always seen from his mat near the door.  He took nothing with him but the sandals he had woven with his own hands from tough grasses, the breeches he had sewn from the skin of the bull he had slaughtered and skinned the past spring, and the shirt he had painstakingly stitched his name into under his mother’s critical eye.

On the southern side of the mountain he found a cave, and swept out the dung, droppings, and bones.  He urinated at the opening to claim it as his own.  He scampered atop a nearby boulder and settled into its warmth.  The boulder would be his father.  The sun, soothing his tired feet, would be his mother.  She would provide not only heat, but light for him to hunt and grow by.  The moon would be his lover, joining him nightly in his dreams.

From man he would take nothing.  Men were aggressive without cause.  They were arbitrary and false.  Men stole, lied, and tricked.  Kai found nothing of this in his new home.  He would play with the wind, commiserate with the stream that trickled downhill near the cave.  Fish, birds, and trees would learn his name when he shouted it to the stars.  But men would see him no more.

Eighty-Seven: Miguel

Miguel spat on the ground of his forefathers.  Stupid farmers, what did they know?  Nothing.  They worked, they died, they got run over by greedy Americans looking for land, for oil, for more–always more.  So now Miguel’s heritage is reduced to bastardized treks to San Dingo-Yego looking for quick cash to bribe the border guards.

He checked out the scope of his rifle as he lounged across the hood of the car, tanned arm leaning catlike against the windshield.  He could gauge accuracy by counting the windows in the nearest high rise, barely a mile down the hill into the city.  He wondered if any girls were changing their clothes.  Was it powerful enough to see that far?  Was it keen enough to look into their greedy souls and see what color their blood was?  He wondered if it was as red as his brother’s.

A click and a cold pain at the back of his ear.  Slowly he lifted his hand from the gun in his lap.

“Stupido,” his father growled.

“Si, padre,” Miguel agreed.  One day, he would be as silent.  As deadly.  He left off his dreaming and transferred the rest of the gun shipment into the truck of his father’s American partner.

Eighty-Three: Christopher (Robin)

After supper he knelt in front of his bed and lined up all of his friends.  He made sure they all had their dinners, then he brushed all of their fur, put them each into their pajamas, and told them stories of life outside of their small, dark apartment.  These were stories he heard down in the laundry room, or out in front of the double glass doors that he must never, ever venture out of, for that was where the bad people walked and carried their dangerous things.

Most of all he made up stories, for this seemed to please his friends the most.  Sometimes his stories had monsters in them, but he made sure that when he got to any of the scary parts he tucked in his yellow bear’s head deep under the blanket, so that he didn’t have to listen.  Of them all, the worn yellow bear was the most timid. 

He was the best for keeping small boys’ chests warm, however.  After Christopher (Robin) brushed his own teeth and tucked himself into bed, he made sure the worn yellow bear was closest to his side.  All of his other friends he lined up alongside the wall or around his head, and he said good night to each of them by name before he drifted off to sleep.  And late at night, when the bad noises came through the walls, they would all tuck in around Christopher (Robin)’s head so that he would not wake up and be afraid.

Seventy-Three: Lucy

Lucy had a favorite game at school, called Intimidation.  She was very good at it, and she played it differently than any of the other girls.  Dressed in identical yellow button-down shirts with tidy round collars, matched with blue and yellow plaid pleated skirts with dark blue knee socks, it was very hard to distinguish oneself at the academy.  Lucy became famous.

When it was Lucy’s turn at the game, no one would know who she would pick at first.  Some matches were easy.  Jane, the fat girl, was always picked early on.  She knew it as well as the players, and eventually began taunting back that whoever chose her was unimaginative.  But when Lucy chose a target, that person remained unaware sometimes for days.

It was never as obvious as a shot at Jane, or Bree who had a particular odor; Lucy’s victims were usually popular, successful, enthusiastic attendees to the conference of life.  But within a few days of Lucy’s having chosen them, they began walking more quickly, looking around in trepidation, losing sleep.  One girl left the school, never to return.  Another was found unconscious in her room, having taken a large handful of  the head mistress’ “tolerance tablets”. 

Lucy rarely spoke to her victims; she rarely had to.  One well-crafted note placed in a book was usually all that was needed.  Because no one knew her tactics, nobody knew it was she who wrote:

I’m watching you.

Seventy-Two: Sophia

She watched her mother planting flowers around the large marble slab.

“Why do we come here?” she asked.

“To see Grandpa,” her mother replied.

“Where is he?  I don’t see him.”

“You can’t really see him anymore, he’s in heaven.  His body is buried here, so we come to visit.”

“Did he die here?”

“What?  No, of course not.  He died in the hospital.”

“Then why isn’t he buried there?”  Sophia twirled a clover leaf in her fingers.

“The hospital is only where people go when they’re sick.”

“But Grandpa died.”

“Yes.”

“So you go there when you die, too?”

“Well, they didn’t think he was going to die.  They were trying to make him better.”

“They didn’t do a very good job,” Sophia commented.  She watched her mother for a few more minutes.  “Does he like you doing that?” she asked.

“Planting flowers?”  Her mother sat back on her heels and looked at her daughter.  “You are in a very strange mood today.”

“It’s just that Grandpa hated flowers because they made him sneeze, so I don’t think you should put them here.  Maybe you should give them to that guy.”  Sophia pointed to another stone.  “Or maybe we should bring coffee.  Grandpa drank a lot of coffee.”

Sophia’s mother smiled, then stood and held out her hand.  The two walked back to the car, and her mother took a silver thermos out of the trunk.  Together they returned to the gravesite, and Sophia poured out the rest of her mother’s coffee onto the ground.

Sixty-Eight: Cheri

Carefully she maneuvered the Bunsen burner from the black countertop into the accessory sink, turned the flame on low, and carefully fed the pages of her textbook to the fire, one at a time.  It took almost two chapters for her teacher to notice, and she was summarily dismissed to the office.

While she waited for her upbraiding from the principal, she quietly tore out the interior of her Great Expectations text.  The secretary noticed the slowly building pile of printed snow beside the girl’s chair and yelled for her to stop.

“Why?” Cheri asked calmly.

“You’re destroying the school’s property!”

The principal came out and returned the girl’s question to her.  By way of reply, she took off her shoes, climbed up on the counter, and jumped out the window.

Instead of falling, she flew away.

Fifty-Two: The Actress

She was discovered the old-fashioned way, while waiting with her mom for an ice cream in the mall.  Her mom was suspicious, thinking the man was some molester-weirdo trying to hit on her daughter.  But the man produced credentials, had a legitimate address, real connections.  The mother guardingly agreed to an appointment.

The girl’s lovely wheat-colored hair and smattering of freckles made her a perfect choice for many family projects.  A movie with a dog, a movie about a dog, a movie about an alien who pretends to be a dog, a movie about a mom dying of cancer, and a movie about three girls bonding over a shirt were just some of the projects the girl was involved in.  With each endeavor her reputation grew.  She became known as “bankable”, “dependable”, “profit-driven”.

When she turned fifteen her agent had a striking proposal:  why not cater to an older market?  The script called for a Lolita-style unveiling of the daughter of a wealthy American family.  She captured the role easily.  On her first day of filming they stripped her down to the waist for make-up.  Her eyebrows were darkened, her lips reddened, her nipples bronzed and outlined.  Without a word the director parked her in bed and called, “Action!”

The girl learned to hide out in a back corner of her head.  Acting became as rote as doing the dishes.  Someone mentioned her eyes needed more sparkle; drops were added between takes.  Her agent called her listless; vitamins and “helpers” were added to her food.  Her coworkers told her she needed amusements, showed her where they came from and how to use them.

When she turned eighteen her agent declined to renew the girl’s contract.  Her friends became too busy to meet, her directors absorbed with new and younger faces, and her mother’s phone switched directly to the answering machine.  She was free.