101 Words

They raised the food, prepared the meals, and took care of the homes. We stared at screens and barely noticed them.

When the work day ended, they were bussed back behind the wall. There they tended their gardens, raised their children, and studied computer coding.

When the virus began to spread, they did not come to work. Crops rotted in the fields, livestock starved, and our homes fell into disorder as the screens went dark.

We marched to the wall and pounded on the locked gates. Our cries for help weren’t heard over the sounds of celebration drifting over their wall.

Rainy evening. Cold and gloomy. Like any other day in my heart and mind.

Another day of getting off from a job I hate, stopping at this awful store, buying crap I don’t want or need, then going home to a wife and daughter, both who’ve grown strange and unpleasant to me.

I’m tired.

As I’m leaving the store, a young man wearing a long coat is walking in. He says to me, “You’re a lucky man.”

Offended, I mean to tell him “Fuck off,” but he’s moving too fast.

Seconds later, I hear gunshots and screams from inside the store.

I come from a warring family. My son in Afghanistan, my father in the Far East in 1940, and my grandfather in the trenches. My father never spoke of the war; silence reigned. My grandfather never referred to the ‘Great War’; there was always another adjective in between, expletives I didn’t understand as a child. The old man was considered odd, shell-shocked, but I loved sitting on his knee, sniffing and staring as he managed to chew mints and puff a pipe in the same breath.

I wear a Poppy in his honour because it is easier than remembering my son.

“Kendall, how long Silas worked that piece?” asks Worther.

“Recollect ’bout eighteen year,” allows the owner.

“His crop satisfy you?”

“Satisfactory.”

“Put on a tractor; you’d get more’n satisfactory.”

“Piece can’t support no tractor you.”

“If I allow a tractor on tick, that’ll work.”

Kendall never knew Worther to put his foot wrong. He squints; shied by the man he decides, “I’ll put the question to Silas.”

~

“Silas, what’d ya say I allow a tractor?”

“What happens to the mule?”

“Sell the mule.”

“Put in a heap o’years, shame to shuck ’em as reward.”

“So, no to a tractor.”

“Yes’m, no.”

The rain washes us into the waiting room.

Condensation trickles down the window like an angry man’s sweat. The smell of wet dog hovers in the stale air.

“The train’s late.”

You look at me, eyebrows raised.

“Patience.” You are unconcerned and flick to the next page of your book.

This unconcern feeds the tension between us.

Plato’s Republic. You have lofty ideals; mine are humble. I clutch a soggy magazine, a last minute glossy from the stand.

When the train pulls out you will be alone. I will flicker past in profile as another page turns.

You will not notice.

“Do you have a different name?”

Michelle didn’t follow, so the barista continued. “There’s another Michelle over there. When we call ‘Michelle,’ everybody will be confused. Do you have another name you use?”

But she didn’t; she had always been Michelle. The barista said, “Let’s go with… Sparkle.” He wrote it on her cup.

At her office, Michelle couldn’t stop thinking about this. “Sparkle” was much too…millennial, but how about “Janice”? “Jessica”?

And riding home on the train: “Sarah”? “Stevie”? “Winona”? Michelle smiled—she could be Winona.

She missed her stop and never looked back. She wasn’t Michelle any longer.