White Feathers

- For RB & Peace Now

You do not react with terror when the bedroom door crashes wide, but there is momentary confusion: has the morning already come? But over your stepfather’s shoulder, through the window already cracked by prior percussion, you see only false day broken by the hot song of bombs. You have been awakened in this manner before, when some precarious truce between vague factions has gone awry. Awakened to scurry to the basement of the building, to huddle in the black with neighbors, tremble along with them and the walls, suck musty air against the gallop of your heart. But this time there are no barked orders, no sharp tug on your arm, and in fact your stepfather pauses, strangely, to kiss your brow, his stubbled chin blooming orange in the arc of a shell outside. You’ll always wonder what it is he whispers in your ear, the message lost to the impact of metal nearby, and then you are over his shoulder in your nightgown as you used to be hoisted in play, but this is not play. This is war—the hard scar of the word occurring to you for perhaps the first time. And outside the building neighbors are a boil of ghosts under the gashes of mortars over the Cedar rows. A flatbed truck like the one that usually brings chickens rumbles at the base of the stairs and your mother appears from beneath a tarp on the back, the slack weariness gone from her face, replaced by a pale alarm that reminds you of the moon and she receives you, your bare legs kicking in the chill air, your stepfather’s promise to be straight back, accompanied by a squeeze on your ankle and then you are deep in the truck bed, spine flush against the steel floor, white feathers whirling and falling with the grace you imagine snow to have, all about your face. The screech of a near rocket ends in a kind of thud, like when you throw balls of wet clay against a wall by the river, only bigger, and followed by a grumble of heavy shifting, which you know, even in your darkness, is your home surrendering to the slope it perched on, as they always said it would eventually. The truck lurches forward, your head connects with the front end of the bed and you cry out, but not in the measure of those wails outside the tarp. A puff of concrete dust enters the space like an ogre just exhaled his horrid cigar under the tarp in a cruel prank in the midst of war. There is something shared and similar in the sounds of crumbling walls and the muted sobbing around you—a note of ultimate demolition, of finality, of destruction that will not be reversed. You don’t know if the muffled sorrow is better or worse than the sharp pins of screams that enter you and lock you down against the steel. You think perhaps you prefer the screams because there is fight and life in them and the quiet sorrow feels like 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’s cold hands on your ribs as she fends off neighbors, protecting the space around you, declaring your claustrophobia, your anxiety as dangerous as the rounds that now whistle just over the tarp like tiny, steel birds of prey. But as you sit up, draw your knees back and a white chicken feather rises up with you, you find your breath is even 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 of the panic that cramped spaces, hungry artillery used to conjure. But your mother notices on her own, sees your eyes, maybe, and shifts back to you, gathers you like a large load of linens in her arms, and squeezes into the farthest corner of the flatbed. She roots in a cloth bag she’s been gripping and in a moment big soft headphones clap down over your ears, the banana yellow walkman glowing like space fruit, and then Grover is singing about being alone, you can see him bopping down a deserted Sesame Street if you shut your eyes, his purple-blue shag fur, the stoops, the brick apartments, Oscar peeking out of a trash can to see how his friend is faring. 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 blue smoldering rubble of your home, the figures motionless in and around it like stains, and behind a broad crimson streak which might be a mortar and might be the sunset at last.