On 9/11, with the radio transcribing the ongoing events and his white coworkers in the plant nursery going mad as though the place was burning down, all my dad could do was laugh. As far as he knew, the Omaha nursery was fine. The roof was still above their heads. The ground was unmoving. The sky still blue, and most importantly there was work to be done.
At the time of my commission, I did not know all the things this man would do, which means I did not know federal troops would be ordered into the cities, that water cannons would be fired, that there would be dogs, horses, rubber bullets, tear gas, that all of this that had for decades been taking place against civilians abroad would now take place, here, against civilians at home
Address: Papa has a lot of rules and his new rule is that we’d better not tell people where we live anymore. He used to not care, and I was allowed to invite my friends over and give them the apartment number and everything, but ever since that guy followed Mama home in his truck yelling about she’s a dirty commie and she should go back to where she came from, Papa says to just keep it general and tell my friends if they want to come over...
Sixty years now the town of Centralia has been burning. Some folks say it’ll take two hundred years more to burn itself through. The maze of coal mines underneath us caught fire and there’s enough kindling there for centuries and air will always find its way through the cracks of the earth to keep it going.
It happened in a matter of seconds, this overlay of violence in my mind, that took us into another life, and then it was gone. Perhaps what I wanted was to have my future thrust upon me. No, I thought, just another anxious fantasy. It was just the mind’s preparation on overdrive. It all might have happened differently. The alligator had every intention of biting her. Tori’s face flashed with anger momentarily before Frank tried to pull her away.
Mother and the children had never killed before. That was Father’s work. All month long the rain came down, and gray-faced Father coughed in his bed, shrinking into a yellowed quilt. Mother and the children waded in the garden leaves and plucked off the heads of squash and tomatoes, ripped hairy potatoes out of the dark. But there was no meat on the table.
One thing was for sure: Elise couldn't be Robert's void wife. On the day the void was scheduled to hit San Francisco, she hid from him in the ruin of the Sutro Baths. She gazed out at the Pacific while behind her, the void consumed Oakland. The void had appeared six months ago in a slender belt around the globe near the 90th meridian, slicing through Detroit and New Orleans, Bangkok and the Kirov Islands of Russia. Since then it had expanded in both directions on both sides of the planet at the rate of seventy miles a day, like two immense pairs of lids drawing over the eye of the earth.