Independence Day

I.
This is preposterous.
This whole situation
which is only a situation
because we all hold it in our heads
due to the how we were raised
and where we were raised
to do this and that
and do it well,
because there is nothing worth doing
that is not worth doing well.
Tradition and ritual has its place,
but I have a hard time trusting it
when it has become as perverse as it has.
We are Americans.
The United States of America:
founded with enlightened pride
and discernment.
We should be bound by an oath
of reason and democracy
or else we'll sink like the Roman Empire.
BOOM! goes the dynamite.

II.
Try and comprehend what Americans
have done to this western world.
Comprehend what humans,
white humans most of the time,
have done to this world.
For Christ's sake let's just keep it simple:
Crimes against humanity.
Look at what we did to the the the...
Fuck it! The Indians;
and niggers too, to drive it home,
ya fuckin' racist!
Think about it for a moment
before you blow up something
for nothing other than ritual and tradition.
And/Or consider instead
the day before the running of the bulls
in Pamplona, Spain,
you dumb, but secretive catholic.
Or the Chinese New Year,
though they're no gift to the world
either these days,
with their strange and sadistic twist
of free market capitalism
bleeding ink into their little red book.
Or the Pontius Pilate firecracker fight
in Mexico City during Easter Weekend.
Or just let loose your incendiaries
like someone with nothing to lose,
and willing to add some excitement
to our American Dread:
school shootings
terrorists attacks
cyber-hacking and wikileaks
Edward Snowden
The protest of the world cup in Rio.

An American claiming to be Canadian departs for Europe.
David Beckham shudders, then misses his soccer goal.

III.
Ugly Americans:
Arming Syrians.
Blaming Black Folk.
Blaming the poor.
Loving Mexicans, but not enough
to stand for their human rights.
Beasts of burden.
Meddling in the sexual proclivities of others
and denying rights to those whose sexual proclivities
make you feel confused; icky.
Hating the old; hating the new,
and understanding that one demonizes
the other.
Deciding to hate a woman.
Deciding to hate a man.
Being what you are instead of what to could be.
Being a liar for the sake of your lie.
Ignoring; ignoring.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war...
POP! another firework goes off in the distance.
Several pops greet it's cadence.
Firecrackers, shallow and tinny, crackle
loudly behind me.
Oh say can you see
by the dawns earlier light
which so proudly we hail
at twilight's last gleaming...
...and the rockets red glare
the bombs bursting in air
gave truth through the night...

IV.
I pledge allegiance
to the flag
of the United States of America.
And to the republic
for which it stands;
one nation
under God
with liberty and justice for all.
Amen.

    Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth a new nation; conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

    It is past eleven p.m in Lafayette, Indiana. Noise ordinances are enforced after eleven p.m, so the bursts of fireworks echoing in the humid night become deeper and more distant; like thunder rolling on by. The faint pop of a firecracker rings out quietly within the wash of chirping crickets. Occasionally, periodically the leaves of the sycamore tree to the right of me rustle in the weather above me and above us all.
    A deep faint burst from the east, and in the west, nothing but the darkness and breeze.
    This is one single atom of America.

Aaron C. Molden

Longing

I tell you, truthfully, longing takes on a new meaning
when you feel it when you are not even alone.
To long for someone when you are alone
means you are simply a social beast,
but when you are among peers
among friends, loved ones, others, annoyances, enemies
and long for someone still so distant from yourself,
this...
This can send a shudder down your spine
and heat up your neck
or a drop in your stomach,
maybe a pang within your heart
or possibly a tension in your temple
and draw a tear so forcefully
through high muscle tension, out of your eye.
How embarrassing.
Because, honestly, why should you care?
What really has this person you long for
done for you?
It's funny because I write this as if it really matters
and as if I really mean it.

It is such a funny wild card in human thought.
Love: Sometimes we only feel comfortable saying it
when we do not really mean it.
And sometimes it is the hardest word to utter
when, at the moment, you just did not feel it;
for anything and everything, you just did not feel it.
It is strange, seductive, menacing, wholehearted,
physical, paternal, maternal, scary,
incestuous, homosexual, heterosexual,
platonic, visceral, neural, cathartic,
narcissistic, sadistic, masochistic,
gleeful, scornful, rueful, joyous, rigorous, rapturous,
seedy, selfless or selfish, healthy, fuck suck and sleep,
that love.

Consider the lilies.
Or at least consider the book you could be reading.
What can you find on your computer to look at.
If it is summer you can go to a pool.
It's never too hot or too cold to go biking or hiking
if you plan ahead enough.
A gleaming red beetle struggles on its back
on the cracked grey pavement.
It's six shiny legs flutter and buzz
in the glow of the floodlights.
It buzzes and its body vibrates twice.
Then it dies.

Swim, canoe.
Play billiards, play basketball.
Watch basketball, but don't watch billiards,
well unless you have to, for some reason,
whatever reason you could possibly fathom.
You could also build something
or write someone,
or draw something,
or film something
and discover something that you didn't know was there.

Plus, there is always a pretty girl to kiss
and possibly date or unexpectedly fuck,
or you know, just make out with, fool around,
and you can have dinner with her
or maybe lay on a blanket with in a park
-any park, but some parks are better than others-
and maybe you will have sex with her again,
with her milky white thighs and knees
and her goddamned nearly angelic smile.
And maybe you will try to call her
and hang out with her,
and maybe find some peace out there
from the one you still long for, you sucker,
you longing sucker.
Or maybe you will just watch a movie
to take your mind off of it.
"I'll see you guys, later." You said when you left.
What a gnawing suspicion this longing is in you.
You should be submitting your shitty first novel
instead of writing this, what you call, poetry.

The (short) name list:
Reverse Bukowski
Frank O'Hara
                            Raymond Carver
                            Elizabeth Bishop
Kenneth Rexroth
T.S. Eliot
             Song of Solomon

I don't feel like describing your body
your flesh and bones and eyes and hair
and how your cheeks blush
when I flatter you
or when I slap my hands
against your ass and thighs.
That's mine.
And if I have to get it out sometime
I'll let that sometime come when it does.
It's not the best of you, woman,
but it is a photo finish.

Write a poem as an excuse, an escape.
Abstraction or distraction or subtraction of yourself.

Aaron C. Molden
  

Memory and Recollection

    There were good times, too. Cracking jokes with each at the all night grocery store, always at the expense of unaware strangers. Taking walks around the most interesting place we could find; I always tried to go hiking, she always opted for a pleasant stroll in a place where she could window shop. Embracing after we had sex; one summer afternoon we lay naked in our bed, uncovered and sweating, with the sun beaming in on us. We were writhing against each other on moss green sheets twisted beneath us, for hours and hours. Eating at a new restaurant. Seeing her reaction when she first tasted the new dish she had ordered. Dancing together without caring who sees us. Dancing with her and her alone. Watching her bathe on the banks of a river in her black and gray bikini. Quiet conversations as we spooned with each other on the couch, on the floor, in front of the heater when we went swimming too early in the springtime, wrapped in my blue sleeping bag on the linoleum kitchen floor. Her, listening to the words spilling from my mouth -trivia about the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of western Australia- looking up at me and smiling her incomparable smile. Us, sneaking into the botany greenhouse on campus, where I saw countless numbers of succulents and cacti; plants that, until that very moment, I didn't know existed; a fern whose leaves shivered and closed on floral instinct at the touch of a human finger; a creamy purple flower shaped into a bowl that catches light misting rain; plants known to be carnivorous in the right climate. Watching her watch The Red Shoes for the first time -Emeric Pressburger, my god! you were a genius- her stunned gaze at the dizzying final dance sequence. The curve of her nude hips in the bright yellow sunlight, casting new illumination on where we lay; my hand on the small of her belly, just below her navel...
 
    "You're a liar. You have wasted my night...with passive aggression."
    "Make an excuse; you know I've hit the nail on its head."
    "You took advantage of my kindness. You treated it as weakness."
    "Again."
    "It's your turn to prove yourself to be worthy. Worthy of my love."
    "I'm tired. I've been through hell and back with you."
    "I try to be honorable. Dependable. Stable."
    "Yes, I have faltered, but I have constantly proven I can redeem myself."
    "You have fucked me over enough times for me to turn gleefully against you, you bitch."
    "I hope the rest of your night turns out sour. I hope you realize you have no one left to turn to because you will not know where I went." Jed said in a cold and strangely clear tone.
    Steph sat at the table in her thin brown slip with her head sunk towards her bare and bruised knees. "I..." she began to speak, but then fell silent.
     It was dark in the kitchen, and Jed was standing in a hunched posture. He was a silhouette cast completely in shadow by the bare white light behind him. It was the only light on within their railroad apartment. Jed was looking at the back door with his entire body trembling with fear, shame, and rage. The back of his neck was flushed red and hot in his darkness. "You were with him again." His voice quivered. Tears were beginning to stream down his face. He looked back at her still sitting slumped in the kitchen chair. He wanted to hit her. Then he looked down next to his leg to see their dog, Jack, looking up at him, wagging his tail vigorously. Jack was expecting to step outside with the human he somehow trusted. "Well?" He asked Steph without looking back up at her.
    Steph began to weep. "I don't know what to say."
    Jed stepped out of the back door into the night without the dog, without Steph, and without another word. He descended the deck stairs briskly without a destination and without believing he would ever come back. He walked the streets of the city for hours alone because he could not manage to sort out his thoughts. He didn't want to love her anymore. He did not want to love her anymore. But he did. "God damn it." He whispered as he circled back towards the apartment he had left nearly four hours before. He sat at the first worn wood step of the deck, facing the darkness to the west, There were railroad tracks, warehouses and factories, suburban sprawls and strip malls, schools and parks, and of course the river that washes through it all, catching all the spillage and snaking it away towards the polluted Midwestern water shelf. All of this and so much more he knew were out there, but he could see any of it in the darkness of that night. He did not know how to end this awful and unfair situation. "God Damn it." He whispered again.
   When he finally went in, he discovered both Steph and the dog were gone. On the kitchen table there was a piece of paper folded in half with "Jed" written on the outside. He opened the bifurcated sheet and discovered that the inside was blank.

Aaron C. Molden 

Canine

    I watched a dog kill a gopher. It is not really surprising that it happened, but the dog happened to be a dog I was living with and I was taking him for a walk at the moment.
    He was on a long leash because anytime I see a dog being walked on a short leash for no purpose other than discipline for discipline's sake, I wonder what the dog could have possibly done to make the walker want or need to yank its neck whenever it strays just far enough to render the leash taut. The possibilities are numerous in both visceral and psychological ways. It is particularly troubling for me to see when there is no one else around but myself to witness it. What phantoms do these dog walkers refrain their beasts of leisure from reaching?
    The dog -Jack- and I were walking along the edge of the train tracks on the north end of town. The man made embankments create a three mile stretch of grassy bucolic hill with small patches of pine tree oasis below, some even with park benches and gazebos. A fence is installed along the edge of the tracks, at the apex of the industrial ripple of land. It turns out there are animals in the area who can burrow beneath the fence, into the hill; animals such as gophers.
     Jack had stopped to rest on the hill in the grass, panting and squinting lazily in the sun drenched clovers. I stood near him, admiring his massive and regal skull structure while simultaneously realizing if I were to let him go free he would almost immediately have been hit by a car, or picked up by animal services. I looked to the park bench at the bottom of the hill and considered taking repose from the summer walk as Jack had.
    That's when the leash went slack towards the opposite direction, away from where Jack was resting only a moment before. I looked north down the parallel tracks and saw a glistening and nearly black gopher scurry up through the unkempt flora.
    The gopher wasn't fast enough.
    Jack gained quickly on the twenty five foot dash up the hill. His tongue was back inside of his mouth. His thick architectural head, matted in paint strokes of white and black and brown fur, looked more determined than any dog's face I had seen or will ever see again. The sun shined bright on him on that nearly cloudless Midwestern afternoon. He was moving fast enough to blur his body.
    He caught the gopher by its neck with his wide and muscular jaws, and lashed his head upwards. The gopher's slick fur and seal-like blubber whipped up like a pendulum of carefully constructed animal matter, with legs and feet and muscle and blood and a skeleton with fragile vertebrae; specifically fragile when too much fast and angled trauma is applied to the to neck of a creature.
    Jack tossed the gopher high in the air, towards the train tracks. The limp body bounced against the edge of the fence, rattling the grayish blue chain links. The gopher toppled and barrel-rolled down the white gravel hill on the other side of the fence, next to the tracks.
   I ran to the fence and stared through the mesh at the dead animal dusted with powdered rock; it was nearly a quarter buried in the fallen stones. "Oh shit" I muttered in a low droning tone.
   Jack stood at attention with his snout pressed against the fence, his tail whipping back and forth at a vision blurring speed. He snorted and shook his head, letting his wet cheeks and jowls slap against his pearl yellow teeth and his shiny mauve and spotted purple gums.
   I wish I would have let him have it: the gopher. I wish I would have let him study it, poking and prodding is with his superior nose, that glistening wet furry ebon lump of an animal organ. I wish I would have seen it and I wish he would have at least tried to eat it.
   "Come on, Jack." I finally said, yanking his leash.
   He looked up at me next to the fence, his tail still wagging. His front legs collapsed as he pushed his head into a matted net of grass. He pushed and strained his muscular terrier legs and body against the green and tan web of friction. He snorted again, then rolled over on his back and remained that way.
    "Come on, Jack." I said and yanked his neck again.
    Finally he stood up.
    We walked back to the apartment.
    He was a dog of noble Roman origin, trained and bred for glorious combat. He was a dog with a biologically canine lineage, but only a short paper trail in his inevitable breeding from wolf to domesticated sport dog.
    As we neared the apartment, I said to Jack, as if he actually had the ability to talk, "We're not going to tell Steph about this. She would probably freak out. Deal?"
    Jack stared up at me panting and squinting in a way that made him look happy and oblivious.
    "It's a deal."

Aaron C. Molden

To Bathsheba, in Jerusalem: with Longing

The battle was won and the warriors made camp.
They drank wine, slaughtered and feasted on fatted calf,
one of the few left in our army's herd.
One warrior was left to clean the dishes.
The next day they rode towards the city,
fast and joyous, whooping and howling
for the men they had slain.
We took lodging in a city that night.
Some of the warriors took wives.
Some of the warriors decided to stay.
Some of them left their new brides
riding fast into the sun,
howling a warrior's howl,
hoping someone from the band of warriors
heard their cries of desperation.
In a night of intense and chilling darkness,
while huddled next to the fire,
I asked Micah why he left his new bride.
Why did he rejoin the group?
He said the day after they took their holy vows
and consummated their nuptials,
he woke up in her bed and stared out
through the wood window frame
and saw his new bride watering the desert grass
with an urn made of red clay.
Why would she water the grass?
We are in a drought.
He said she would not have made a good mother
and then Micah fell asleep, quietly weeping.
I remained awake for the rest of the night
thinking about the question.
No one in the army could clean their clothing.
We had not come across a river
or a pond or even a small puddle of water
outside of an urban landscape
in nearly twelve days.
Micah's clothing was clean
catching only its third night of wood fire.
I thought of you all night;
of your smile,
of your fleshy hips
and ample bosom.
Of your the deep midnight mane-hair,
your bouncing and fidgety body.
I thought of your eyes
and of your pursed pink lips
and of shapely navel
and of your milky thighs
and even of your delicate toes.
I thought of you
until the only thing I could do was fall asleep.
Micah made the right decision in returning.
I did too.
This is why I write to you.
I long for the next time we meet, darling,
after our legions take the Ammonites.
With Love,
Uriah

Aaron C. Molden

Scars

    She had scars protruding across her thighs. She told me they were self inflicted late one night while we were sitting on our used couch in our apartment living room. Her friend, Rebecca, wanted to get rid of the couch because she claimed they held too many bad memories. It was mauve and upholstered in a course vinyl fabric. I had my arm wrapped around her and her head was resting against my collarbone.
     "In high school I use to cut myself." She paused for a moment, listening to my deep and steady breathing; feeling my chest rise up and down against her cheek. "It use to be the only thing that actually made me feel alive." She pressed her nose into my chest, bare at the neck between the collar of my button down shirt. She took several deep breaths.
    If she had told me this in high school I would have been shocked, but somehow riveted by such an audacious act of self mutilation.
    Sitting on our couch that night, alone in our new home, I only felt confusion in such an inexplicable act of blood proof. "Of course you are alive." I finally muttered, not quite knowing what else to say.
    She took another deep breath. "Do you want to see the scars?" She asked quietly.

    The first time we bathed together, I noticed the scars on her milky thighs blushed a bright pouting pink when they were immersed in the steaming hot water. They were only faint rippling contours on her legs before, no different in tone and girth than an elbow compared to a knee cap. In the hot water, they swelled to the color and impression of fair lashed flesh. She noticed I was staring at the scars. "I cut myself on our couch, once." She said quietly. "On Rebecca's couch." She was looking down into the steaming water in the cream colored claw footed tub. She folded her feet around my bare lower back, immersed in the same steaming water. "There was blood everywhere." She added in a low monotonous tone.
    I stared at her from across the bathtub. Leaning forward, I grasped her hips, pulling her closer to me. A small wake trailed her body in the water as I moved her towards me. I kissed her neck, her cheeks, her lips, and her eyes. I heard the drizzling sound of the water pouring off her when I picked her up and laid her face down atop my naked and saturated body. Her wet hair draped across my forehead while our lips breathed in and out of syncopation, only a half an inch from each other. I grabbed the clef between her thigh and buttocks and pulled her even closer. I pressed every inch of her wet naked skin I could manage against mine.
    "Thank God." She sighed.
    I kissed and caressed her chest and neck with my face.
    "Thank God." She said again. "The clean-ability rating of that couch is rated W." She said with a sudden distance in her voice. "Otherwise the blood would have never washed out."
    "Steph?" I held her still against me. "Steph? Are you okay?"
    Her body went limp against mine. I went limp too.
    "What do you mean?" She asked. "Why wouldn't I be okay?"
    "What?" I asked emphatically confused. "Are you happy?" I asked, suddenly desperate for words.
    "What are you asking me, right now?"
    I lay there in silence. Her head rose from the tub, and though I was looking away from her, I knew she was staring at me. I didn't know what to say; how to answer. I had asked genuinely if she was okay, wanting to hear her answer. All is farce unless you have someone to speak to, so why should it not be someone who loves and cares for you: your boyfriend, your friend, your roommate? I simplified the question when I was met with her confusion and boiled down my concern to a yes or no question: Are you happy? And I was met with a counter offense of a question: What are you even asking me, right now?
    "Uh..."
 
    We heard from outside of the bathroom our roommate, Max, enter through the back door of the second story house apartment. He was with someone. The sound of their feet walking up the old wood stairs of the house. The sound of the painted red door clasping and closing in the jamb after they entered the kitchen. He had a girl with him who was obviously drunk due to the stumbling, yelling, laughing and barking noises being emitted through the walls and doorways. Steph and I laid still in the bathtub during the cacophony.
    "Let's do a shot." in a muffled cadence.
    "Do you think I'm pretty?" Could be translated in a faded timbre.
    "This looks like my old couch." Were the last word I heard from her that night.
    "Let's do another shot." Max said and then there was silence. After that, Steph and I listened as they entered Max's room. And finally, Rebecca's faint moaning.
    Steph pushed herself away from me, plunging my head beneath the cooling bathwater. She reached for a towel and dried herself off. She put on a robe and laid down on our bed. A couple of minutes later, I climbed into bed with her and kissed her behind her earlobe. It smelled like vanilla; I could not smell her skin.
    "Not tonight, Jed." She said in pained, but quiet frustration
    "What?" I asked, still confused.
    She pushed her body away from mine. "I want. To be. Alone." She spoke in metered exhaustion.
    I laid there for awhile. Then finally found my sleeping bag in the closest and slept on the floor in front of our; her; Rebecca's couch.

Aaron C. Molden  

Spring Break Part Three: The Fall

Part Three

    When he fell, Bobby had a pair of keys to his house and a Nokia cellphone that was hinged in the middle -it broke in half upon impact- in his right pocket. In his left pocket he had a sharpie marker, a ball point pen from Lafayette Savings bank, and  a small green Mead notebook; the pages were worn and old and the spiral bound wire was bent in on both sides. In his back left pocket he had an old tan wallet with seven dollars, several loose receipts, and small bits of paper in it. The one piece of paper I read had the name and mailing address of a girl in Colorado. I thought for a moment about taking the seven dollars.
    "What do you think this is?" I asked Sarah, who was peering into his wallet with me.
    "It's the address to his pen pal." Sarah answered.
    "Pen pal?" I asked slightly baffled.
    "We did that writing program with Westside middle school in seventh grade for English class." She said. "You don't remember that? The girl he was assigned to moved to Colorado when we went into Eighth grade; her dad got a job out there."
    I squinted, watching her head eclipse the sunlight above me. The overcast clouds had by now passed and I was mesmerized by the glowing wisps of her hair dancing in the breeze for a moment. "Yeah. I remember. What about it?"
    "He kept writing to her. They're still pen pals." After Sarah uttered these words, she looked over at Bobby's body laying limp and unconscious on the unfinished concrete floor of the roofless bunker buried in the ground.
 
    The fall had been hard. He was sitting in the edge of the foundation, pointing his legs outwards at a forty-five degree angle; craning his neck and shoulders forward, peeking into the depths below him. While teetering on the edge, a gust of wind caused him to lose his balance. He couldn't managed to catch himself and jack-knifed against the concrete only ten feet below him. He landed on the back of his neck with his head curled towards his chest like a nautilus shell of flesh and bone and brain; a brain controlling his muscular, cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, digestive, lymphatic, and reproductive systems as well as normal and irrational human thought. He accomplished one third of a high dive before landing on the pavement. Neck first, as I mentioned, then his head bounced and wobbled on the cement floor. After that his toes tapped the floor causing the rest of his body to act as a brittle spring before he finally slumped over unconscious.
    "Boing!" was the first thing Zeke yelled at Sarah and me as he ran over to us. I have never heard anyone say the word :"boing" in such a distressed tone.
    Sarah and I had left Bobby and Zeke at the construction sight to explore the woods that surrounded it. We were sitting up against a tree and I was trying -rather desperately- to figure out how to kiss her. There were some embarrassing moments, but as far as I could tell, I was doing pretty well.
    "Boing!" is what Zeke yelled as I was just mustering up enough courage to move in for the kiss.

    Zeke was standing on ground level looking into the bunker at Sarah, me, and a very injured and unconscious Bobby. "Guys, what are we going to do?"

    During the thunderstorm, the back awning of the patio was a waterfall. Standing under the eave, peering into the rain falling in front of her, she wondered where her son might be.

    Sarah's older brother was driving laps around our neighborhood in his air-brushed Honda low rider with a custom green and silver coat of paint. He had installed a Nos cartridge in it earlier that week and had been aching to push the button from the moment it was at his fingertips. The car was too low to the ground for him to drive very far on the deteriorated pot holed roads of that early spring. He was resigned to peeling out in quarter mile stretches on his imaginary rectangular tracks lined with houses where families and children lived.
    He was trying to impress the girl in the front seat with him, a Sophomore from our high school. Steve, Sarah's brother, had graduated two years earlier and was working at a factory where he wired together lamps and other home furnishings. When he came upon a kid riding his ten speed bike down fifth street, he swerved slightly towards him, as if to indicate that he planned on hitting the adolescent. The kid panicked and, twisting his handlebars sideways, crashed his bike against the curb.
    "Hmm." Steve smugly mumbled. "Fucking hilarious."
    Sarah was planning to call him first to come pick us up, but the battery on her phone was dead. Using it as a flashlight in the tunnel had drained it to nothing. I doubt he would have helped us out anyways.
 
    The sun shine had diminished and the dark grey cloud coverage was only becoming more congested above us.
    "He's breathing, right?" Zeke asked.
    "His chest is moving up and down." I answered.
    "How hurt do you think he is?" Sarah asked in a shaky and worried tone.
    "We need to get a hold of someone." Zeke said.
    "Yeah, but who? I don't want to get in trouble." I said, and began to flip through Bobby's wallet nervously. "And how? Sarah's phone is dead, Bobby's is snapped, and I didn't bring mine."
    "I have my phone, but there is no signal around here." Zeke said, looking into his screen. "I would call my mom if I had signal.
    "Don't do that." I said immediately. "We fucking stole her car, and I'm pretty sure we're trespassing." I pulled out another piece of paper: a worn post card from Arizona with a cactus and cow skull on the front.

Hey Little Brother,
I was fucking this chubby Mexican girl down in Mexico while I was there. She didn't speak any English so there wasn't much talking going on between us. She did know how to fuck, though, and we did it on the beach a couple times. When I was leaving at the end of the week, she didn't seem to care that I was going. I found out on the bus ride back into the states that she had given me crabs. A nurse from the army based near where I stayed was on the same bus and checked me out downstairs in the bus bathroom. Ain't life grand! Be safe baby brother. I'll see you soon.
Your big brother,
Kevin

    "What about Bobby's older brother?" I mentioned. "Does he live in town?" The postcard was dated almost exactly a year prior.
    "I think he goes to college out of state, if I'm remembering what Bobby once told me." Sarah said, sitting against the wall farthest from Bobby's body, chewing on her fingernail. I did not realize it at the time, but Zeke had wondered off looking for a signal for his phone.
    "Do you think he might be on spring break?" He was on spring break. He had gone back to Mexico for the second year in the row and he, inevitably experienced a second round of medicated pubic shampoo, but there was no way for any of us to know this, and contacting him would have been impossible because the only one who had his phone number was Bobby, whose phone was destroyed in the fall. Sarah didn't answer and I realized quickly that the course of action I had mapped out mentally at the time was quixotic; I sighed.
    The clouds above us were only getting darker and thicker.






Aaron C. Molden