White Feathers

For R.B. 🔥

There is momentary confusion when the door crashes wide: is it morning?  But through the cracked pane you see only false day broken by the hot song of bombs.  You have been awoken like this before to scurry to the basement, to huddle with neighbors, tremble with them and the walls, suck musty air against the gallop of your heart.  But this time your uncle pauses, strangely, to kiss your brow.  You’ll always wonder what it is he whispers in your ear, and then you are over his shoulder as you used to be hoisted in play, but this is not play.  This is war—the hard scar of the word burrowing into your tummy for perhaps the first time.  And outside the building neighbors are a boil of ghosts under the gashes of artillery, scrambling, huddling against thirsty rows of crops.   A flatbed truck like the one that brings chickens rumbles at the base of the stairs and your mother appears from beneath a tarp in the back, her face a pale oval that reminds you of the moon and she receives you, with your bare legs kicking in the chill air and then you are deep in the truck’s canopy, spine flush against the steel floor, white chicken feathers whirling and falling like you dream of snow.  The screech of a rocket ends in a thud, like when you throw balls of wet clay against a wall by the river, only bigger, and followed by a heavy grumble, which you know is your home surrendering to the slope it perched on.  The truck lurches, your head connects with the tailgate and you cry out, but not as loud as the wails outside.  A puff of concrete dust enters. The muffled sorrow of the people in the truck is worse than the awful keening outside. In the screams there is life but the quiet sorrow is something no one wants to disturb.  All the bodies in the flatbed connect at hipbones, wrists, feet upon your thighs, arms tangled.  You can feel your mother fend off neighbors, protecting your space, declaring your claustrophobia, as steel rounds whistle over the tarp like tiny birds of prey.  But you find your breath is slowing and you want to tell your mom it’s ok, you’re ok, to let more people in, that finally perhaps you have been cured. But your mother gathers you like a load of linens anyway, into the farthest corner.  She produces the big soft headphones that clamp down over your ears, the banana-yellow Walkman is glowing like space fruit in her hand, the cassette clicking, and then easy-go-lucky Grover is singing about being alone, and you can see him bopping down a deserted Sesame Street if you shut your eyes tight, his purple-blue shag fur, the stoops, the brick apartments, Oscar peeking out of a trash can, spying on his friend.  You open your eyes and do like Oscar as the truck crashes into gear: pry up the edge of the tarp and spy on the smoldering blue rubble of your home, the bodies motionless around it like stains, and behind that, a broad crimson streak, which might be another mortar or might be the dawn at last.