"I am certain you are not supposed to

  be in there."  The woman on the sleeping mat did not rouse.  The tallest woman from the choir easily put a paperweight hand on the head of the child.  Pressed into place like a Pansy in a book.  "Release all weight," the older girl threatened. 

  "Let me hold the camel.  And I will tell you what I've seen today." 

  It's fur was just an iota less real than real camel hair.  Some of the older kids would say "It's real!" Just as a person snuggled the thing into a touchstone with an imaginary "place" away from the brutal sun and the cruelty of no water in a desert and the stiffening of everyone's feather-light into law and order.  The push and pull of mindhearts in play with "reality". 

It wasn't the first pop up

  nightclub shooting.  One person held a meaty hand over the blood  spurting out of "special friend's" neck. 

  A spread out mobile assistance line of people passed word of shots fired.  Medical supplies were discreetly fed back up the mountain. 

  Therefore ALL creatives are considered queers.  It was unreal that this was read aloud as directive.  Unreal, too, that the injured were just civilians and trapped in a bloody shoot out on a friggin' mountaintop. 

  "Tell me a story," the injured person said but with a gurgle.  A grandma crossing the mountain to pick up grandchildren ordered the athletic-looking person be propped up slightly and ten minutes knees up like this.  Others had already bled out. 

  One unsolved crime had led to a serious crime scene being overlooked.  One real commitment "to love" no matter what had floated through the drinking crowd like an ember in a haybarn.  "Was it a political statement?" An authority asked a person just staring at the dead toast maker, person, in a chair.  The killing had happened quickly.  The chaos of getting the hell out of here snarled all traffic in both directions. 

  "Think we'll look back and laugh about these days still?" The paling person nodded weakly.  Lifelong friends and neighbors in America share the sentiment of we have to try. 

 

  Special friend was older than us.  But not fogey.  All the way back to New York special friend didn't write us off.  Once when a spontaneous gathering of motorcyclists from both coasts suddenly bloomed as a sea of metal and edgy energy and we got sort of pinned in and called scrawny special friend totally stood up for us.  "So?  I'm scrawny too.  Whaddaya gonna do about it?" That prompted a buncha girls more her age to get tough and in silent movie fashion "the girlfriends" stilled the chaos long enough for kids my age to beat it. 

  Scram mous ah, one kid remained a kind of magical wizard of chaos and hate when he got tall enough to hang with the girlfriends and not be detected as one of us.  We'd hear adventure stories of "fighting almost broke out" and "cops din't even have to show up".  But the girlfriends weren't really sure what made such surfing in culture possible.  Even though most of them were real smart. 

  "HATE IS NOT A CRIME," the man stood almost taller than the doorframe of the restaurant.  And that was true, so his message had heft.  Especially to the "neo-nazis" not in their "uniforms".  His words were like ghost guns.  Crowding-in people seemed to be strengthened by the reminder.  Like getting enough hate onto the thin crust of civility could overwhelm the normal day.  Could seem a victory.  Just to exist, and by just existing could "shut them up!" People who didn't hate. 

  "It didn't seem to be political so much as just the opposite." 

  "The opposite of what?" The authority asked a person in nice clothes with a fine spray of human blood like spray paint across pants and shirt.  "We'd just come in to use the restroom," a woman explained. 

  "Is there video?" Another authority asked a server.  Apron stuffed with dinner cheques and pens.  Crossed arms and head shaking no.  Mouth saying, "I don't know.  I don't know." 

Poor Buddy the Bee

  "Why is the bee scrumpin' the roof father?" 

  The little little boy was a middle child in a gang of kids.  The father looked down at the boy.  The boy pointed above their heads where they were working on a pass-along team to repair damaged at great heights.  The Dad surveyed the situation and made a ticking sound with his mouth.  Debated age appropriate. 

  "Poor buddy." The father said of the bee.  "Gots pollen and no place to put it." 

  "Why?" 

  The Dad unfurled the boy's tiny hand full of putty.  "We filled up the holes with this stuff." 

  Other people in the early morning launch team area tiredly watched the conversation.  Until they heard the Foreman cometh.  "I SAID don't sweat the small stuff NOT NOT DO the small stuff.  Now we're holding up the whole world!" 

  Sighs.

They dragged the women away.

  The new bikinis were stained dark with dirt and ground cover vegetation. 

  From a place of depression and lack of self confidence the men had decided to be different.  And to be different from beaten down and runned over, bulldozed by surveillance and computers thinking for them, they'd processed the situation, and surmounted downtrodden by getting strong. 

  Without permission they started to re-claim theirs.  Most of the women were shocked.  One had the wherewithall to be a sort of spokesperson in the fluid situation.  "I see y'all have regressed to Neanderthal stage in your process Tom." The man grunted and pulled harder.  "You're giving me a wedgie." He sweatily re-gripped ankles and looked like a man pulling a plow.  She stayed rigid.  

  "In sickness and health.  And whatever this is," another woman called out.  Her breasts exposed to the dirt as she was face down in the pull and her bikini top was up under her armpits.  "Not sure this is what I had in mind for girl's day at the lake." 

  Other couples worked their ways from awkward capture into holding hands and becoming "one" in stealth.  Most worked silently to retrieve stashed survival kits and make way back to "real life".  Never again to be as simple as childhood had seemed to cared for children.  

  Decisions had been made between couples that made a casual goodbye impossible.  In a parking area a partnerless man asked to and took a few photographs.  "I can't unsee this and that." He had already explained, first exposure to therapy in a group setting.  "But this is how I'll think of us!" Weary smiles and Org tees. 

"Where did you take the public?"

  The Reporter had come from Atlanta after Minnesota.  Because of "missing money" in the Town's money pot, a new school building was put on hold.  The lease was also up on the container classrooms. 

  Several people would not back down on demanding accountabilty.  A new phrase that came from watering down "protests".  Nobody wanted to get arrested for having thoughts and opinions about the gone money. 

  As the paperwork that wasn't lit on fire was sorted to forensic a "papertrail" the labels on the outside of the pods would occasionally change.  Someone held up a black markered sign that read: 

          The Public 

  It had two corners missing because there'd been a heated debate about the "budget" as a "pie". 

"Minimize the confusion,"

  to "What can we do to help?" 

  The man winced as he stretched to reach for the salt and pepper.  He'd been months without much besides dubious water in his canteen and flavorless food stuffs when available.  Broken ribs.  Not from laying in front of a tank as might have been surmised from popular photos. 

  "I cannot get the AID trucks in.  And my people cannot cross any lines." 

  A pudgy man started digging through crates.  "What are you doing?" A woman put in charge of field desk asked.  "Looking for all the spray paints our friends sent." 

  "For what?" 

  "Well, clearly, some have been wounded for crossing lines but I didn't see any lines.  Did you?" 

  The woman thought back in her head.  It had been a wild journey. 

One minute world wide open, the next

  "Our tour guide is freeeaking out." 

  We were somewhat hungrily peppering a "living book" with questions. 

  One of us whipped a Bible out of a handbag, couldn't decide what to open it to and espouse, started to hyperventilate, and was dragged by friends to a taxi with a driver saying in a thick accent, only to dee airport. 

  "I'm just saying.  Not an expert.  BUT JESUS was confident enough in his own belief system to at least listen to the living books." 

  The tour guide had dumped the safety purse contents on the seat.  Passports and boarding passes and tickets and mints. 

  "I will tell you about the city when we are back home." 

  "Pointless." 

  "Pointless?" 

  "How would I know you're not just as big of a liar as everybody else?" 

  No answer.

  It wasn't long before we were redeposited with our Academic Advisors.  And seemed pretty quick to the time when we were, like everyone on the planet, being matched up to dots on military surveillance, numbers on paperwork, chip readers for meal points, labeled as haves and have nots as marketable consumers, being told there's no, there's no, there's a no, there's not, and just NO. 

  It took only a little while for people to piece together "story" and a quiet shock took hold of personality when a room full of skeptics and will never believe YOUs had truth uncovered.  A "living book" had been dragged bodily, beaten, and wound up in a suicide vest.

  From objectifying humans to weaponizing humans.  

  It would take people a long time to re-humanize. 

Underground containers and luxury pods.

   "We'll still need you to bring us the footage for the splice with the closed circuit tv." 

  We've all met the types. 

  It's always prompted "normal" people, living, working, sleeping, waking, eating to kind of re-up interest in American values.  Amongst decent people there are children and grownups, fully human, and by some miracle usually able to pick a thread of freedom and sacrifice to which they can relate. 

  A lot gets relegated to that must be Science Fiction.  And brushes with brutality, ongoing abuse, really weird people and digitalia, well, some of it gets sorted into the crime and lifestyle piles.  In some situations sequestering and buffer zones only make sense. 

  All in a day.  No matter our work. 

  A head popped up out of the bare ground.  Grass hadn't grown yet.  "Come on in!" It was a salesperson's pitch and it was kind of echo-y below ground. 

  It was a fiancè who, cross-armed, took four or five stiff steps closer.  "Dad, can I go in?" A middle age young boy, maybe nine years old, asked loudly.  "Ask your mother." 

  "She's not my mother." 

  "Are there neighbors?" The Step-Mom-to-be asked.  "There's a whole neighborhood."  People looked around at the trees.  A boyfriend drinking a blendered smoothie licked off a pinkish moustache.  "Yeah, not the first time the world has ended."