The tall grass grew brown in the summertime. Or perhaps more accurately, it was golden-brown. Armies of stiffened blades swayed and hissed in a wind that rolled unfettered across the hard, flat lands of the far northern state.

My father had a new wife, and she was gentle with me. She tried her best to connect with me, but I’m not sure I knew how—so accustomed was I to the more chaotic forms of motherly love. My mother’s love was a surf zone, violent pulling and tugging that at times left you breathless with affection, drowned in a thrashing and clumsy attempt to convince you not to leave this time. A curious mixture of good intentions and bad results that often made for strange children.

I was one such strange child. I was afraid of everything.

Back home, every bump and bruise had been cause to stop everything and fall into triage mode. My mother over-medicalized life. I didn’t have a sore throat—I had strep. I couldn’t just have an angry red scrape—I had to have cellulitis. This was viral. That was bacterial. Say, ah! Oh, dear—now that’s not good, is it?

The world as an unclean and scary place to me when I arrived at a pale yellow house flanked by golden grass. The tall grass waved and danced, holding on to just enough spring to remain supple and compliant, flexible in a way I hadn’t the slightest idea how to mimic. Nor had I the desire.

My father would tell me to go outside to play. I wouldn’t. Gentle of temper, at least with me, he tried insisting. Kids are supposed to play outside, after all. I wouldn’t. Instead, I’d go on a buck-toothed, high-pitched rant about all the things that were waiting to kill me out there.

“I’ll get bit by a rattlesnake,” I’d say. “Gored by a deer. Stung by a yellow jacket or swarmed by fire ants. You remember that time when I was a baby, and I was sitting, unbeknownst to little old me, on top of a nest of fire ants. They climbed all over me, thick enough you couldn’t see a single inch of skin. Momma had to run over and grab a can of gasoline to pour over top of me to get ‘em off. I almost died.”

Little blue copies of my mother’s eyes grew wide and bug-like, staring up at my dad.

He didn’t laugh.

“That didn’t happen,” he said, shaking his head. “Now go outside.”

I didn’t. For the first bit of summer, he let it slide.

On days when I wouldn’t ride into town with my father, taking long straight country roads to Grand Forks Air Force Base—where I’d stare unblinkingly with my neck cocked at an unnatural angle and my tongue hanging out, hoping to convince the gate guard that my father had a child’s dead body in the back seat—I would stay back with my new stepmother.

I was suspicious of her. Needlessly. Offensively. Every time she’d make something to eat for me or my stepbrother, I’d watch her like a hawk.

“Did you wash your hands?” I’d ask.

Good-naturedly, she’d say she had. She even chuckled at the beginning. I’d watch her cook, too, careful to keep an eye on her supposedly clean hands for any signs of trickery. I was convinced, for some reason that made perfect sense in my addled nine-year-old brain, that she was going to poison me.

She’d try to get me outside as well, though with less fervor and exasperation than the talks from my father would devolve into. She’d tell me about the fun things she and her siblings used to do in the tall grass. They’d go “prairie dogging,” which is to say that a pack of marginally organized children would run about annoying prairie dogs until they disappeared into a maze of underground holes.

I had no intent to go prairie dogging. They were out there, and out there had too many dangerous things: spores and germs and bugs and Lord knows what else. The grasshoppers had wings here, for Pete’s sake. No, thank you. Hard pass. Over my dead and still somewhat malnourished little body.

My father locked me out the next day.

You can imagine how that went over. Panicked and enraged, I hammered little fists against the door. I pulled and wrenched on a handle that wouldn’t give a degree of rotation. Then I saw the blinds of a nearby window move just enough to see my father’s eye. He closed the blinds and went deeper into the house. The door stayed locked.

I paced an anxious circle around the pale house, looking for a way in.

The windows were closed tight. I jogged around back to the small concrete patio and harassed the handle. Nothing. Still locked. I traipsed back toward the front, eyes sliding against the other side of the house. Still nothing. It was a castle with siding, its bridges all drawn up. Only, there was no moat full of alligators. There was only the tall grass and whatever monsters lurked within.

I retreated from the hissing fields and ended up sitting on the small front porch, angry and contemplating the cruelty of my father’s act. Didn’t he know how dangerous it was, locking a small child out on his own like this? Probably didn’t care. What if someone kidnapped me? How would that make him feel?

I traced the gravel driveway with wide eyes and imagined a rusty van screaming down the hard pack, sending a plume of dust into the air as its tires slid to a halt. Two men with masks would pop out the side, while one stayed in the driver’s seat to make a quick getaway. They’d grab me and drag me back to the van, wrestling my little thrashing limbs inside. I shuddered. Add it to the list.

How bad would he feel if that actually happened? How stupid would he look then, locking me out to go play? What a silly way to lose a perfectly good son. I glared out into the tall grass, knees curled up to my bony chest, skinny arms crossed and stacked atop scrawny legs. I sat there for a long while. Eventually, I grew bored.

I paced some more circles around the yellow-sided house, these ones slower and more curious. I stopped looking for ways to breach the airtight fortress and, instead, began to just look at things. I saw places where individual pale planks were trying to pull away from their stacked companions, the beginning of a rebellion against the house’s edifice. I saw gaping maws of wire-covered vents for who knows what, yawning mouths only partially prepared to keep the largest of critters out. There was a cantilevered basement door, which I gave a wide berth—having not the slightest idea or interest in what kind of thing could lurk within. I was bored, I wasn’t crazy.

Eventually, I grew bored with the laps, too.

I sat back on the concrete steps and reexamined the tall grass, just beyond the mowed space, making a low, neat perimeter around the house. I stood up and walked out close to the perimeter. I’d take a deep breath, but each time I’d work myself up enough for my first foray out into the stuff—with all the intensity and melodrama of a non-swimmer preparing himself to dive down deep into dark water—I’d see something move. Then I’d lose my nerve, running and screaming back to the concrete steps, where I assumed the door was still locked.

Then, one time, I made it out into the tall grass. It wasn’t far, and it wasn’t long, but I breached the skin of the golden-brown barrier and plunged into its depths at a dead sprint, fists knuckled for the briefest of moments. Then I was running back to the steps, breathing like a steam engine and looking over my narrow shoulder at the organized band of rattlesnakes that, having taken notice of my reckless act, were giving pursuit—or the flights of grasshoppers and yellow jackets who had formed a temporary alliance and were swarming my way at that moment to drop platoons of deadly fire ants upon me. Only this time there’d be no life-saving gasoline and—

And nothing happened.

I worked up the nerve to venture out again—this time a little longer and a little farther. I ran hard, hands stiff but open, brushing against golden-brown stalks that seemed to lean into me, laughing in the North Dakota breeze. They didn’t seem to be hissing anymore. It sounded more like a thousand—no, a million—collective sighs. A part of me sighed along with them.

And I felt the weight of a world turned too heavy slough off of too-narrow shoulders for a time. It was a temporary relief, to be sure, but it was real, and it was kind. I could breathe, and I could run. I could laugh, and I could play. And the world felt childlike for a handful of merciful weeks.

I ran tall and fast out deep into the tall grass for I don’t know how many days that summer. But I know they were too few for my liking. I know that the summer grew short faster than I would’ve liked and, before I knew it, I was back in Kentucky and winter was setting in. The cold, ugly kind that climbs deep into your bones without any promise of things like white winters. And the world grew heavy again.

Sometimes life is like that, though. Not all the world can be blanketed in tall grass. But a locked door can be a way out on occasion.

Happy Father’s Day, you old goat. And thank you for caring about me.

I’m finishing a short story collection called Open Windows: of Worlds and Men. It’s deep and true and, at times, even beautiful.

Right now, it’s sitting on an editor’s desk with an amazing publisher. I can’t say who just yet, but as soon as I get the green light, this Substack is where I’ll let everyone know.

In the meantime, I’ll be sharing updates, early excerpts, and behind-the-scenes reflections here first.

Supporters also get access to my other work—essays, stories, memories, and more.

If “Homecoming” hit you, or if you just want to see where this all goes, subscribe below so I can reach out directly. You’ll be the first to know when the book officially finds its home.

—C.B.

Subscribe now

P.S.—here’s a little bonus flash fiction just for you:

Milk

I held an aged ten-dollar bill between us. He looked nervously toward the grocery store, teeming with shoppers. This was supposed to be good for him. Independence. Agency.

“Why do we need money for milk?” he said, with the haughty air of a grade-school philosopher.

“Because everything costs something, son,” I said.

“Everything?” he said.

“Everything.”

“We could just take the milk,” he said.

“Like stealing?” I said.

“If that’s what you want to call it,” he said.

“It’s not what I call it,” I said. “It’s what the dictionary calls it.” I took a steadying breath, as that’s what I’d been told good fathers do. “Then you’d pay for it with time instead of money—time spent in jail. Get the milk?”

I urged the greasy bill closer.

He looked out the window.

“We could change that law,” he said.

“Then everyone would have to pay for the milk. Safety. Society. Stability. Milk,” I said. He seemed to be thinking, at least. I lowered my outstretched hand, feeling tired and like a failure in more ways than one.

“We could burn it all down. Start over,” he whispered out the window.

My voice came out louder than I’d expected and we both jumped.

“What in the hell are they teaching you at that school of yours?!” I said.

“That your generation broke the world,” he said. “That capitalism is built on theft and oppression. That—”

I cut him off.

“When are you going to start thinking for yourself? You’re twenty-two years old, Danny!” I said. I got out and slammed the car door behind me hard enough that the glass of the half-rolled-down window rattled in its frame. I held the green paper bill between us like a crumpled shield. “Don’t worry, Danny. I’ll get the damned milk!” I said.

I stormed off toward the sliding glass doors—for the first time in my life, I empathized with all those stories of fathers who went to grab a gallon of milk—and never came back.

(TLDR: Let me know what you want to see more of down below)

Dear Reader,

I’ve been working hard—really hard—on more projects than is probably good for me, but I don’t know what else to do with my hands.

I had two new essays just picked up by County Highway: one is about fishing for critters in the woods of North Dakota using glow sticks and is called “Fish On”. The other is about my time finishing concrete in Kentucky summers and the lessons I learned about family and about a life worth giving to my wife and sons. It’s called “Something Solid”.

I’ve got an interview that I did with Devon Eriksen (author of the breakout novel Theft of Fire) being run in the fall issue of Man’s World Magazine next month.

I finalized a short story collection (called Open Windows) that’s currently with two publishers. Hopefully it’s not too damned weird for them. It might be. It’s a journey through lots of different genres that I think reasonably coheres. I’ve been wrong before, though.

As of this morning, I’m over 90,000 words in on a new novel. I think I have five more scenes in it before I begin the rewrite. It’ll be ready in time for the Ark Press contest in October—it’s pretty weird, too. Maybe there’s a pattern here.

Lastly, I’m still finding time to have quality coffee talks with the wife and do boy/creative stuff with my sons. I recently took them cliff-jumping into the American River for the first time. They were pretty sketched out, but they got it done, and they felt ten feet tall—which is about the height of the little cliff they jumped off of.

My two favorite little guys also commissioned me to draw badass Zelda stickers for their school notebooks. I think I delivered (that sword is the size of my HAND):

Aside from delivering an update, I wanted to see what to do with all that free time I don’t have (while finishing grad school and doing all of the above). I think you’ve gotten to know me through my writing, but I’d like to get to know you a little more on here—maybe by finding out what type of writing appeals to you most below? Feel free to drop specific essay/story titles that you’ve enjoyed (whether on Substack or elsewhere).

Talk soon,

—C.B.

Leave a comment

The following is a rewritten version of a piece that originally appeared in Foundation Father, a wonderful publication about raising children and being a worthy husband. I hope you enjoy.

My son bellows defiance at the sea.

I watch green glass waters shatter atop him and melt into a rumbling foam carpet that pulls him along the smooth sand floor. He rolls like a rag doll for a distance, little limbs caught in the spin cycle of some great oceanic washing machine.

Then the waters retreat, and he’s back on his feet again, yelling louder than before at waves that hiss defeat. I’m unsure if he knows they’ve only gone for but a moment—sliding out just long enough to gather reinforcements and pummel the beach anew—and him along with it. I’m not sure he’d care if he were aware. This is the arrogance of young and wild men, and it is a thing of great beauty.

Go West, young man. The mountains call you forth. There’s gold in them thar hills. Seek, and ye shall find.

The call to adventure has led to its fair share of horror—to war and pain—to hardship and broken hearts—but it is also the very thing that sets sail across strange horizons. It is the spirit that ropes horizons and saddle-breaks cruel, hard lands into towns and cities, states and nations.

It’s what shot men into the bleak blackness of space and left behind flags and footprints on the powdery skins of distant rocks—and it will do so again. This ancient command shouts across time and rattles young men to their very bones. Some hear it louder than others, and they are the ones who grow itchy and restless in a world gone too familiar.

But where do the wild ones go in a world hell-bent on homogeneity? In a stilted environment that demands complete conformity and state-steered domesticity? Many of them go inward. Some rage outward. Some of them go away entirely. Yet, we have need of them.

Go any way you must, man, but—for God’s sake—whatever you do, don’t stand still! Don’t glue those wandering feet to the freeway modes of being. Don’t lean into contentment and complacency that wraps its soft arms around you in sedating and comfortable captivity.

Live hard. Live fast.

Find yourself a proper adventure to adventure and, once you’ve shattered yourself against the unknown properly, return home, wherever that might be. Then give rise to the next batch of wandering ones, for we have great need of them, but hear my caution well, for when they are yours to guide.

Don’t dare to stamp out their wildness for the sake of the mundane. In service to either safety or the status quo. Don’t presume to file their pointed teeth prematurely into the sterilized smiles of the docile. Don’t trim their claws too flat while they still have need of them. That is not your place.

That is the job of the unknown.

Another wave crashes atop my boy, and something forgotten inside me flares to life, pushing its way out. I look to the people around me, scrolling phones, tapping black glass awake that keeps them asleep, and I close the paper pages of the book that long since been my way to sublimate the call. Go West, young man.

Then, I’m up and I’m tearing my shirt off like it’s on fire and I’m running before it can even hit the ground. The water claws at my ankles—at my knees—my waist. I arrive just as the ocean’s cavalry arrives, just in time to join the battle against countless droplets of an ancient medium bearing down upon me and my son with immortal hearts full of vengeance.

His eyes are as wild as mine as I lift him up, and the water crashes over me, but I stand wide against its weight, though it tries like hell to topple me. The sea swallows me up—hungrily and completely—but not him.

Him, I hold high. High enough that his eyes can catch the sun only now beginning to crack its fiery yolk upon the far horizon—on all those places that he has yet to see and explore—and as the water begins its hasty retreat, I hear the call of the unknown again.

But this time it’s different.

This time it uses not my name, but his. His small yells of defiance at the cowardly water stop short. He pauses. He cocks his head, and I convince myself that he hears it, too.

Where do the wild ones go when all the wild things are gone?

They go to the only place they have left. They go onward. On to the next plain, the next frontier, or even to the next world—wherever the adventure might be—even when the rest of us can’t for the life of us see it.

And I wish them well.

The following is an edited version of a heavily satirical essay originally published in Man’s World Magazine (Issue 15). It’s not fiction, though it sometimes feels like it. It’s about California, school libraries, two-spirits, pink bicycles, and how I went from a plugged-in, well-meaning suburban dad… to a radical. Or at least, that’s what they’re calling guys like me these days.

I have a confession to make. I may have been radicalized.

I say “may” because I’m not sure how that works exactly. Is there an indicator that goes on, like a check engine light or something? Is there a smell, perhaps? Maybe there’s a device that, when placed on my head like the Harry Potter sorting hat, will shout out something like, “FAR-RIGHT!!” instead of “GRYFFINDOR!!”?

(Let’s be honest, I hold an equal chance of making it into Slytherin house, though—perhaps the best men do.)

If I was in fact radicalized, it somehow wasn’t the direct result of studying psychology in university, though that will wear the sanity and sensibilities of any masculine man down to their nerve endings. No, it was likely due to a series of events that took place in the fall of 2023 when disillusionments fell like dominoes—one after the other—knocking into one another and knocking me firmly off my perch on that little cliffside labeled “everything is fine.”

Subscribe now

I spent ten years in the Navy. Somehow, I managed to be homeported in California for the entirety of my career. My first tour was in Coronado, where I deployed to jungle and desert environments alike. My second tour was in Ventura, where I deployed mostly to remote islands in the Pacific to work on underwater missile ranges and subsea surveillance systems. My last tour was in Northern California, training candidates for accession into various special programs. This is where we stayed when I got out.

California is like a beautiful woman (who also happens to have a personality disorder). She sure is nice to look at, and can be fun and exciting to be around, but make no mistake about it, boys—she’s batshit crazy. This was a non-issue with my wife and me until we had school-aged children. I can deal with crazy. I’ve been around it my whole life. Hell, I’m studying crazy, for God’s sake. So, I figured we’d be fine if we could just manage to find a good school in a somewhat sane city encased within a decently conservative county—and we were.

For a while.

Subscribe now

My oldest son was in the fourth grade when it happened.

I had been growing increasingly concerned over some of the things being pushed through the school system, but my being locked into a graduate program didn’t readily afford us the flexibility to uproot and move. My wife, being the communal juggernaut that she is (if you can find one fairly high in trait agreeableness, I’d recommend it, fellas), came up with a viable strategy: get so heavily involved in my boys’ school that we would have the most up-to-date intel on the goings on as well as a presence that we could leverage if things were to ever go pear-shaped. The strategy worked well. Again, for a while.

She became a room mom, joined the PTA, and was a member of something called the School Site Council. She took over the art program for the entire damned elementary school. I taught the art lessons (I’m the talent, she’s management). We were like a power couple from a sitcom about white people in suburbia, and it paid off. When our youngest was assigned a shit teacher, we were able to get him reassigned to a good one.

When a kid in one of our sons’ classes was going around punching kids in the chest, we told our son that if the little shit hit him again, to punch him in the nose as hard as he could. If he was sent home, we’d pick him up and take him to get ice cream. We gave the teacher a heads-up, after which she nodded and said, “Good. Someone needs to punch that kid.”

We were exactly where we belonged. We were surrounded by our people and teachers who genuinely cared for our kids. We could almost ignore all of the craziness on the news and social media about pumping kids’ heads full of ideas about race, privilege, guilt, gender, and communism. For a while.

As my oldest son’s fourth-grade year progressed, things started to get a bit hairy.

The teacher had recently won a “Teacher of the Year” award, so we assumed he was in good hands (little did we know at that time that awarded teachers in California would become something of a heuristic for those who pushed ideological subversion into the classrooms). Though my wife offered to help out in the classroom, the teacher almost always turned her down. We thought maybe this was normal. They were, after all, in the fourth grade now. Kids need space from parents to develop as individuals.

However, one day, my oldest son came home and said, “Dad, do you want to hear something I learned at school about Native Americans today?” My pulse quickened. I nodded and smiled. “Did you know that there were people among them who had two spirits?” My face was a mask, but behind it, I was sharpening battle axes and rallying a mob to tear down the California Department of Education brick by brick.

We would round up the perpetrators and line them in stockades where we would throw dildos—no, no, we don’t want to become like our enemies—rotten fruits and vegetables at them and put them on a diet of sunlight and water until they fasted their way to a spiritual revelation or, at a bare minimum, starved out the parasitic ideas that had turned their brains into Marxist mush.

Instead, I laughed. I played it cool. You should have seen me. My blood pressure was redlining the gauge bolted onto my aorta, but I was carefree. “Two spirits?!” I said. “Sounds a bit greedy to me, kiddo. One is all I need.” I ruffled his hair and told him to tell me more about it, but inside, I was making plans. We were moving. We would sell the house—hell, we’d burn it to the ground and take the insurance money if we had to—and relocate…where? Some place sane. Some place where people weren’t rolling over and offering up their underbellies to anti-American radicals and the globalists. My mind settled onto the sanest and most American place that I could think of at the moment: TEXAS!

He told me about the lesson, describing indigenous two-spirits, whereby some people were neither man nor woman but, somehow, something in between. Something unnatural. I didn’t offer up the term “non-binary”, but I knew what laying the foundation for gender ideology looked like when I saw it. I told him that people fall into the trap of thinking just because something existed in olden times, or because it’s from some far-flung place and exotic, that it's somehow a good idea. The same people who believed in the existence of whatever the hell a two-spirit was, also practiced cannibalism and thought human sacrifice would appease their crotchety gods.

Then, I told him thanks for telling me about what he had learned at school, that I really enjoyed it when he did it, and I went outside.

Outside, I was a sweating mess, even though it was nearly cold enough for me to see my breath. I immediately called a like-minded dad of one of the kids in my son’s class. I gave him the rundown and asked him to tell me if I was overreacting. He said not only no, but hell no, and what were we going to do about it? I told him I needed to think—to do some research.

Over the next few days, I morphed into Rain Man on a casino floor. I was Russel Crowe playing John Nash at Princeton University. I was crazy with digging through educational policy from local to national levels in order to get a lay of the land about what was and wasn’t allowed to be pushed in public schools. What I found pulled me further away from my false sense of security. Texas was looking more and more like the promised land with every passing moment—forget the milk and honey, we were moving to the place of meat and morality! The more I read, the more I realized that we were in the midst of a cultural revolution—and states like California were ground zero.

The other dad and I talked about meeting with the principal to get moved to another class. However, the very next day—as I was dropping my sons off at school—my youngest noticed a fat kid on a bike, maxing out the PSI of the tires as he labored his way to school. I knew the kid, who was a bit of a bully, and my first thought was good on you big boy—maybe you’ll lose some weight and stop being such a little asshole to everybody. However, my youngest son remarked on the bicycle’s lettering being bright pink.

I pulled into an open space in front of the school and shifted my truck into park. I killed the engine. My youngest spoke up.

“The other day, the librarian read a weird book,” he said. Oh shit. Alarm sirens started whirring in my head again. Keep the mask on. Stay calm—cool as a cucumber. I am the ice man.

“Oh yeah? What was it about?” I said, trying but likely only partially pulling off nonchalance.

“It was about the color pink,” he said, “That it’s for everybody.” He grabbed his little backpack, which was not pink. “It was something like ‘pink is for boys, pink is for girls, pink is for everybody’.” I nodded. I had no problem with the color pink, but like most modern ways of subverting a culture, the true message is snuck in with a palatable veneer—a bit of plausible deniability. If pink was for everybody, why in the hell would the book be titled Pink Is For Boys?

I nodded again, at a decision that I had just made—though it would take me a bit to realize that I had made it.

Subscribe now

We pulled my sons out of school at the start of winter break. We began homeschooling them through a charter that taught the classics. They started to learn Latin. They were taught about the Founding Fathers with respect and reverence that didn’t ignore faults in a way due to such flawed but great men.

The following year, they reenrolled at the same school, but this time in person. This past Veterans Day, I was asked to speak at an assembly. Not knowing what to expect, I receluctanlty agreed. My wife and I pulled up to the school. The parking lot was lined with row upon row of elementary students waving little American flags and shouting USA! USA! It was pretty amazing. To be honest, it kind of choked me up.

My boys now walk around our house whistling God Bless America. They learn about Rome. They learn logic and rhetoric. They learn the importance of the great experiment that is our country and how much of an impossible place it is when compared to the rest of the world—as well nations of the past. We can talk about slavery being vile in the same breath where we discuss how England was the first place to outlaw it and how America is the only nation to have fought a civil war over it.

Above all else, we’ve begun to feel hopeful again about the direction our country is taking with its gradual return to sanity, hard work, and gratitude. It’s no longer a radical position to want a nation with a border, a school system that focuses on ideas rather than ideology, and placing the pursuit of truth and greatness over the equitable redistribution of resources based on a person’s skin color, sex, or whatever the hell else they might self-identify as—or how many spirits they might claim to have.

I think it’s safe to say, based on the standards of only a few of years ago, that we’re all far-right now. California is still without a doubt the hot girl with a personality disorder, but more and more I find myself staring at those majestic mountains, her shining sea shores, and the curves in them thar hills and I think, Yeah, she’s crazy…

…but I can fix her.

Leave a comment

I was being swallowed up by a place that was supposed to be familiar. I watched as dilapidated buildings slid over my windshield like crooked teeth in a mouth full of hate. Shotgun houses—with siding that curled and porch awnings that pitched and slanted like the grins of idiots—watched me make my way down the lane in my little rental car. Ditches that I’d always thought of as too deep for such a narrow street flanked me on either side.

Memories of swimming and splashing in them with the other poor kids bubbled up from the deeper parts of my mind. Summer rains would flood the storm drains with water like chocolate milk and we’d try not to get sucked into the culverts. We’d emerge from the muddy water, into the overcast heat, peppered with leeches whose anesthetic mouths kept us clueless while they planted razored kisses all over our sunburned bodies.

For better or worse, this street was home. At least, it had been. Over the years, I’d managed to run far from it in just about every way that could matter. I’d kept off the drugs—the hard ones that bloom sores across sunken cheeks and lead to shrunken teeth like the withered smiles of jack-o-lanterns left too long in a Kentucky sun. I’d managed to stay out of jail and prison—an anomaly in my family and neighborhood. I had even, through joining the military, escaped the type of crushing poverty that sits heavily on people’s chests, making it hard to breathe. I’d felt that feeling before, but never quite understood it. The air was free, after all. It was having a dream that would cost you.

I got the call by way of a text message, the one we’re all destined to get, provided we live long enough to answer the phone: Last chance to say goodbye. She’s going down fast. I didn’t want to say goodbye, though. I didn’t want to come back to this place, return to a world that I’d managed to claw myself out of—not because I was ashamed. The time for shame over such things had long since passed in my life. It’s just that, to me, it’s always been better to look forward rather than to dwell on the past—to focus on what could still yet be instead of stirring up all the things that have already gone by.

DOUBLE-WIDE DREAMS:

Subscribe now

The first time I heard the phrase white flight was during a gen-ed course on American History. The kind but dusty old professor tossed the word out there in passing like we were all supposed to know what it meant. Then he clicked to the next slide, and he rambled on. I’d only recently begun attending college, after a decade spent in the U.S. Navy, and I sat surrounded by mostly twenty-somethings who nodded along in understanding. I didn’t understand the phrase, though. In fact, I’m confident I had never heard it up until that point. So, I raised my hand and asked the professor what it meant.

He explained to me that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, white families fled the cities to get away from black and brown folks. Then, he clicked for the next slide and rumbled along like an old locomotive cutting a familiar track. Meanwhile, I was thrown into the past, my imagination grinding its gears until I was back in the only place I recall my family ever managing to escape.

It was a single-wide in a run-down trailer park, choked with overgrown weeds and crisscrossed by underwhelming gravel thoroughfares. I remember feeling relief when we said goodbye to that tin-walled tumbleweed, mainly at the prospect of no longer having to flee it each time a tornado siren would scream down the county road. Aside from that feeling, I have only two other memories of that haggard place: when the manager of the mobile home park gave me a concussion, and that time I burned my rear end getting out of a cold bath.

You can be forgiven for not knowing that mobile homes aren’t renowned for their heat retention properties. In the wintertime, in ours, you could damn near see your breath. There was no central heat, and we didn’t have the funds for such luxuries as everyone having their own individual warm bath. On a day when it was my turn to go last, the water was already frigid by the time I got undressed. My mother brought in an ancient box heater and set it as close to the bathtub as the electrical-taped cord could manage. The thing buzzed like a crate of resentful bees from an angry distance that was both too far to be effective and too close to be safe.

I moved like white lightning—in and out of the tub in a blur—sudsing just the important parts of my skinny body before momentarily dunking beneath the chilly water. When I stepped out of the bath, only partially rinsed and chattering, I wrapped myself in a ratty towel and huddled in front of the little heater to warm back up. I inched closer to its orangey glow, jagged electrical wires putting off pitiful heat. The thing was doing its disgruntled best but still could only manage to warm small patches of my body at any given moment. So, I inched closer, rotating like a vertical, voluntary rotisserie chicken. Closer. When my rear end pressed and sizzled against the metal grill that caged the front of the heater, I yelped, and my hands teleported to my backside. As my pale ass flew entirely too close to the electrical sun, I shot into the air in the only version of white flight that I would ever know.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when we finally moved out of that place, but I do remember it feeling like a dream. Nor do I remember how many months passed between the first time I heard the term white flight and the first time a professor used the words white privilege. That felt like a dream, too, though not the good kind. I remember feeling personally attacked— watching all the struggle and effort and sacrifice it took for me to climb out of the squalor and chaos that I had been born into disappear like warm air through the drafty eaves of an old single-wide trailer. Then I remember being very, very angry. These days, it seems like a lot of other people are, too. Maybe that’s a good thing.

DOWNSTREAM FAREWELL:

I got the call by way of a text message, and I hesitated. Knowing what was fact and fiction with her had always been hard, especially toward the end. When I was growing up, I never knew if the stories she told about my childhood were real or not, and that had made things difficult then. Now, however, I think I can see what she was up to. Sometimes, when reality is too hard and too flat, a fiction can be a balm of sorts, or—as I discovered in the pages of novels that took me far away—it can serve as an escape route. It can add a little color to drab pages of black and white. It can change the story. At least for a time.

After my older brother texted me, I called the nurse station, and a man who sounded like Foghorn Leghorn answered from two thousand miles away. He laughed and told me that she was doing just fine, that she had been up and walking, and that he had been in her room yuckin’ it up with her all morning—said, “Boy, ain’t she somethin'.” I was inclined to agree.

I hung up, relief filling my lungs like welcome air, and I decided to wait. The next day, my brother texted me again, more urgent this time, and I dialed the nurse station once more. Foghorn-Leghorn answered, but there was no bounce in his words today—no pep in his verbal giddyup. He said it was bad—real bad—"say sorry”. I hung up the phone and bought a one-way ticket, knowing in my heart that I would never make it on time. I’m ashamed to admit that a terrible, miserable part of me was relieved. So, I had to make do with saying goodbye at a river.

Much of the childhood that I’d forgotten, that I’d distanced myself from, caught up to me like some long-lost shadow that I’d shaken loose somewhere along the way. As I drove down my narrow street with its too-deep ditches toward my childhood home, I was hit with a realization that I’d likely always known, at least on some level. It takes a real son-of-a-bitch to convince kids—boys and girls who are, at this moment, growing up in ways similar to my own, and worse—that they’re somehow privileged by dint of the color of their skin.

You have to have a dark heart to snuff out the already weak fires that burn within their sometimes-empty bellies, fires that will need to roar like an angry river for them to even stand a snowball’s chance of making it out of the circumstances they were born into. What type of person would also demand that they add blood debt and back-of-the-line obligation to their non-existent inheritance? My mother died with three hundred dollars to her name, a stack of past-due bills, and a desktop littered with high-interest loan denials. Was she privileged, too?

I said goodbye to my mother at the river, while the muddy waters of the Ohio did their lazy best to slow the flat-bottomed freight trains of floating cargo pushed along by the sleepy barges, because I arrived too late to do it in person. I’m not sure she would have wanted me there, if I’m being honest. Such was our relationship by the time she passed. I stared into that water, and a part of me couldn’t help but see bigger versions of us kids playing and splashing in those chocolate-colored currents. Then I closed my eyes.

The most beautiful thing about a river is that it continues on, and that change is always just around the next bend. Oftentimes, I count it a kindness that some old dead philosopher was correct when he said that no man can enter the same river twice. I said goodbye to her at the river. If there was one privilege I had in this life based upon my skin, it had nothing to do with the color that it was and everything to do with the woman who made it for me.

Leave a comment

I’m back—and it’s been busy.

I’ve been swimming through a sea of essays, stories, edits, and query letters these past couple months—and loving it.

One essay ran in the spring issue of Man’s World Magazine, titled “We’re All Far Right Now.” It’s a hoot: a bizarre, humorous account of my son coming home from a California public school and telling me about so-called native two-spirits. I’ll have it up here in a few weeks, once the exclusivity period is up.

Another was published in County Highway (the beautiful brainchild of Walter Kirn and David Samuels). It’s called “The Cards We’re Dealt”—something I wrote for my dad. He read it the other day and told me it choked him up pretty good. Good. I’ll post it here once CH’s longer exclusivity wraps up. If you already subscribe to them, you can read it here.

And a third essay, “Muddy Waters,” just got picked up. It’s a rough one—but a good one—about losing my mom earlier this year and going home to revisit a place, a house, and a life that everyone keeps trying to convince me was one of privilege. That’ll be up here within the month.

TWO BIG UPDATES:

First, some of you beautiful people have started dipping your toes into the paid subscriber pool. That’s amazing, humbling, and deeply appreciated. Thank you. It means the world that anyone cares enough about what I write to pay for it.

Second, I finished a short story collection I’ve been working on for a while. It’s currently making the rounds with the tiny microcosm of publishers who still publish fiction and don’t roll their eyes at my worldview. (That list is smaller than you’d think.)

More to come,
—C.B.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

“I got it,” he said. The guy in the otherwise empty classroom snapped his dark brown fingers like he was Einstein, having finally pieced together the proper equation with an E and an M and a C in it. “You’re c-c-c-culturally black.” He leaned back into his chair, crossing his arms and nodding approval at his own ability to maintain an insane worldview in which white people simply had to be more privileged than minorities, even if that meant turning me into one—despite my pale skin and a set of baby-blues that would get a nod from Sinatra.

Tyrone was a black guy seven years my junior. He had a stutter like a faulty version of one of those heart-shaped quarter beds in stuffy velvet wrapped honeymoon suites. He was veteran, having been some non-deployable MOS in the Air Force that allowed him to do a four-year stint basically in the backyard of the town in which he had grown up, where he happened to have been raised by a white lady who adopted him, who happened to be an unmarried psychologist—hence the major we both shared.

I shook my head as if to clear it of the retarded revelation before it could crawl its way into and through my eardrums and reach my brain, where I just knew it would begin the long process of chewing at neural connections until I, too, could think such a ridiculous thought.

“What are you talking about?” I said, scrubbing at my face with both hands. I was tired. We had been at this for hours instead of the research project we were supposed to be working on about young men and pornography addiction (look up the Coolidge effect sometime if you want to see Pornhub for the evolutionary bug-zapper that it is). I was worn down from the circular reasoning struggle session and was getting irritable.

“Well,” Tyrone said. “You grew up p-p-p-poor and in a bad n-n-n-n-neighborhood. Most of your siblings went to jail as f-f-felons? Everybody was ad-d-d-dicted to something?”

I nodded, eyebrows glued to their highest setting out of equal parts fatigue and disbelief at how many times we’d been over this already while he tried to convince me that white privilege was both real and a useful concept. We had been over my upbringing a half-dozen times. Evidently, having barely managed to escape the trailer park and the cigarettes-to-meth pipeline didn’t exempt me from a blood debt owed for being pasty or a categorical privilege that was all the rage at the moment.

“Well,” he said. He slapped his hands like a baker ridding himself of the powdery white of excess flour. “You’re b-b-black.” I pinched the bridge of my nose—hard.

“What would that make you?” I said. The part of me that was a glutton for intellectual punishment was morbidly curious as to what turn he would have to take next, what cognitive twists and knots were necessary to maintain such an inane and literally black-and-white view of the world. He’d told me about his upbringing. He had grown up fairly affluent, with little to no chaos or criminality—though I was beginning to suspect quite a bit of c-c-crazy—in the household he was raised in.

“I guess that makes me c-c-culturally w-w—,” he struggled but stuck with it. “W-white,” he stuck the landing and beamed at the invisible judges. I started packing my bag. I bid him a goodnight and begrudgingly scheduled a time the following day to finish our damn project.

On the way home, I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around how someone could be so religiously affixed to a set of ideas that required them to ignore both the forest and the trees. As I moved through that program and into grad school and began to get more fully exposed to the cult of empathy, some of that began to make sense.

Have you had an experience like this academically, professionally, personally, or otherwise?

Leave a comment

Share

Jerry sat and stared unblinkingly at the overhead sun bulb in his little room. His white puffy body poured over the sides of the reclining chair, which doubled as his bed, like folded mayonnaise. His breathing was labored, though he hadn’t so much as stood in hours.

“Angela, what time will lunch be here?” he asked the room.

A voice answered in an imitation of humanity that still sounded cold and artificial around the edges.

“The courier is still fifteen minutes away, Jerry. Would you like me to send another pulse to the driver?”

The men and women employed to deliver all the things wore headsets that alerted them to new pickups and dropoffs, as well as customer reviews and complaints by way of pulses—small subcutaneous jolts that were more annoying than painful. It sounded like a hellish vocation to Jerry, much worse than being an unboxer.

“Absolutely,” he said, “send one every five minutes until they get here.”

Jerry shambled to his feet without a shred of grace in a series of groans and pauses until he stood breathing like the air brakes of a semi-truck. His bare feet thudded on the tiles around the windowless room as he shuffled between leaning stacks of new boxes.

From the back of the chair bed, he pulled on the same white shirt he had worn yesterday—and likely the day before. His legs he left bare, except for the pair of saggy underpants that were at least twice as old as the shirt.

“They don’t see me below the waist anyway, do they, Angela?” he said.

“Not usually, Jerry,” the room said.

He looked at the press-sealed laundry packs by the door. They too were piling up.

“Good enough,” he said. He slid the nearest stack of unopened boxes toward the only other furniture in the white room, a glass desk the color of frozen milk made from the same material as the walls.

Sometimes his room felt like a jail cell. Other times it felt like a sanctuary. Today it just felt small and cramped with the newest towers of unopened bullshit he had awoken to find—twice as much as yesterday.

It was like an unwanted slot machine—free and endlessly spinning. Every lever pull brought a prize. Food, electronics, lotions, toys, and whatever consumables he was given by people that he never saw.

Jerry adjusted both the monocled camera lenses—one facing him, the other centered on the desk overhead—and pulled out the small stool. His ass spilled over the hard wooden top like a fleshy marshmallow pressed flat by a circular thumb.

“Angela, turn on the duel feed,” he said.

On the white glass wall in front of him, directly under one of the unblinking lenses, two side-by-side screens appeared. The left displayed an overview of the empty desk. The right reflected an obese man with deep shadows under a pair of jaundiced eyes.

Jerry blinked and the man on the screen blinked. He tried for a smile, but it came out as more of a snarl when the sallow man on the video mirrored it. What Jerry saw didn’t look like him anymore—not as he had been—but in some ways, it was who he was always meant to become.

For a moment, a part of him was on the verge of screaming again. A familiar voice inside him railed that this wasn’t the way humans were supposed to live. He was nearly overcome by the urge to pick up the hard little stool and use it to shatter the plate glass walls—to escape and run until he was surrounded by trees and wild things, where no one would ever find him again, but he knew better than to listen to that voice. Had listened to it too many times before. A dozen? Twenty?

Each time he had reduced the stool to splinters on the concrete blocks that lay behind the frozen milk veneer, he had gone from smashing and screaming to sweating and dreaming with a suddenness that defied explanation. Then, he would awaken here again—or in a room identical to it—with a splitting headache and another fresh crop of unopened boxes. Jerry tried another smile. This time it came out slightly less insane looking than the first one.

“Angela, another dopamine tablet please,” Jerry said.

“You’ve already reached your quota for the day, Jerry. Would you like me to increase your daily allowance?”

He said yes—he always said yes.

The wall compartment sighed open and Jerry emitted his own batch of pneumatic noises as he labored again to his feet.

“Dispense a pain tablet while you’re at it. My knees and back are fucking killing me.”

“Of course, Jerry. Would you have me request a telehealth consult?”

Ignoring the question, Jerry snatched the two small pills that jingled into the metal basin revealed by the sliding of one of several seamless glass panels located throughout the room. He chewed them eagerly without waiting for the tiny water bottle that would follow and walked back to his desk.

His heart was hammering before he even sat down. The man on the screen’s pupils pushed against the colored rings of his eyes until they reached a bizarre size. Jerry threw back his head and laughed.

“Angela, turn on the filters,” he said between giggles, and the man on the screen transformed. Jerry’s waxen pallor gave way to the glowing tan of a man who had just spent a month on an island instead of years under a sunlamp. Clear eyes—the whites white—and dazzling teeth, devoid of a single brown stain, smiled back at him from a too-handsome Jerry.

He laughed again.

Whistling a songless tune, Jerry pulled the topmost box from the stack beside the stool. He centered it on an otherwise empty desktop, watching the wall screen to frame it precisely in the shot. He found the lone button on the underside of the desk, pressed it, and a small red circle blinked into existence at the bottom of each screen. It flashed slowly three times, then it stayed lit.

“Hi, folks!” the too-handsome Jerry said on the screen. “Unboxer 332 here, but my friends just call me Jerry, bringing you another consumer report as well as the best unboxing videos on the server.”

Jerry laughed as if at some inside joke. He sliced the unopened box’s brown tape expertly down the middle in a smooth swipe of the plastic blade.

“Before we get started, and see what’s on the inside, make sure to leave a like on this video and subscribe to our network, as it helps with the algorithm.”

He chortled again and paused. The screen lit up with the stacking of user comments.

“You guys are the best!” Jerry said, and—thanks to the wall-dispensed pills—he meant it.

A comment flashed over his feed.

“You’re the best, Jerry,” it read.

As he opened the top flaps of the crisp brown box, Jerry held his breath. He assumed the people watching at home did the same.

“Ooh-la-la,” he said, pulling out a lady’s pink neglige speckled with tiny black hearts. He held it over his too-wide chest. There was no way it would ever fit the real Jerry, but video Jerry made it look like it just might. He swayed playfully back and forth, blinking heavily and making kissy faces. The screen was inundated with heart emojis and the rapidly stacking replies.

“Jerry’s the silliest!” one user typed.

“Brings out your eyes,” another joked.

“Matches your purse,” said a different one—that one quickly disappeared.

“You’re the best, Jerry,” someone repeated.

Jerry cackled madly into the camera, his enormous pupils slowly shrinking as the medicine already began to wane.

“We’ll have another box for you in just a few moments, folks,” Jerry said just as there came a knock from the glass wall on the far side of the room. “Or maybe a bag—that sounds like lunch,” he leaned in conspiratorially, close to the lens. “I wonder what we have today!” He flashed a grin that disappeared, along with the red circles on both screens, with the press of a button.

The knock came again.

“Hold the hell on, for Christ’s sake!” Jerry yelled, groaning to his feet.

He double-tapped a blank section on the wall that, except for an army of greasy fingerprints, looked like every other section. A rectangular void appeared, through which a faceless pair of hands pushed several to-go containers double-wrapped in cloudy plastic bags.

“Is that curry again?!” Jerry said as his hand closed around the bags. “I fucking hate curry.”

The panel slid closed and from the other side came the same muffled words as always, though from a different voice.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jerry said irritably, “five stars, coming at ya.”

He framed the unopened bag in the overhead shot and delivered a vicious kick to the nearest box tower while grumbling about the smell that would stay in the room for days. He called out bitchily to Angela. Two more pills went into the tray—then his hand—then his mouth—and a violently trembling finger reached for the button again.

“God, I hate curry almost as much as the idiots that watch me eat it,” he said.

The red balls flashed three more times and his pupils slid nearly to the size of nickels.

“Hi, folks!” the too-handsome Jerry shouted from the screen. “Unboxer 332 here, but my friends just call me Jerry, bringing you another consumer report as well as the best unboxing videos on the server!”

He laughed like a maniac as tears rolled down his face.

“You guys are the best!” Jerry screamed and—thanks to the unending supply of pills—he actually meant it.

…if you liked this story…

Subscribe now

“Keep it moving… keep it moving,” droned the little creature—a gelatinous thing that looked like a pair of eyeballs plopped atop a mound of congealed hand sanitizer. Eyes that were thankfully disinterested enough not to recognize me. It waved flashlights with bright, pointed cone lids at the steadily flowing river of beings that poured into the final corridor of the transport station.

Above the entrance to the corridor was a metal arch with cut-out curved letters that said simply:

THE GARDEN TRANSPORT STATION

“How many times have you been through?” a sing-song voice asked from beside me. I looked over to find a pair of wide, friendly eyes suspended in translucent purple-tinged goo only inches from my own.

“Through?” I said.

“The gateways—life,” she said. I got the feeling that she was, in fact, a she—though here, there weren’t any lady parts or man parts to speak of. Here was transient. “I’ve been through seven times,” she said without blinking. Seven times—one every thousand years or so. Though, of course, there were exceptions.

“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “I don’t remember all of them. Three or four…”

She looked smug for a moment.

“…hundred.” I finished.

She stared at me, and her eyes reached the roundest they could, and—if she had had a mouth—I got the feeling it would be hanging open. Were it not for the steady current of souls pressing behind us, she may well have stopped moving altogether.

“I’ve been through seven times,” she repeated, quiet and seemingly to herself.

“That’s great,” I said. “Each time’s different—a real adventure.”

She didn’t seem to hear me.

“You’re…one of the old ones,” she said in a wooden voice.

“Yeah, but once we get there, I’m just as lost as everyone else,” I said, looking around to see if anyone had heard her.

“How old?” she said.

“Well, now, that’s not a particularly polite thing to ask,” I said, only half-joking.

“So you know… all of it.” She said it too loudly for my comfort. “Were you there at the beginning?” Her eyes alit with a zealous fever, and I pressed further into the crowded stream of goopy spirits and away from her question.

The gel was crude, but it worked—a holding medium of sorts until souls could be inserted into material bodies. Otherwise, spirits tended to cling together like sticky magnets, and when that happened, they were hell to pull apart. No, the gel worked well enough—for now. I pushed downstream and away from the inquisitive soul.

“Were you in the garden?” she practically yelled after me.

I looked at the arched sign—its cut-out letters backward from this side of the terminal.

“We’re all in the garden now,” I said to myself as I watched her slip away in the flowing crowd like a leaf floating atop a steady river.

“Atum,” a voice called out from an open door that—were it closed—wouldn’t be detectable in the corridor’s bulkhead. I pretended not to hear.

“ATUM!” he yelled, pointing at me. Other souls began to look at me curiously. I made my way toward the loud jelly-man.

“Hey Shu,” I said, as if only just now seeing him. “I’m kind of busy, what do you need?”

Shu looked at me for a long moment. Then he snorted an unpracticed laugh that came out more like a honk.

“Busy?” he said finally. “You remember this—all of this…” he gestured his formless limbs as if to refer to the entire transport station, “… isn’t real—not really real. You can’t be busy without time, and you can’t experience time without going through those damned things.” He pointed at the far end of the corridor to where the crowd was disappearing.

I sighed impatiently.

“Of course, I know that…”

“Because you’re the one that built it,” he interrupted.

“I know that as well…”

“Even though he told you not to,” Shu said.

“I remember. It’s a while, but I remember most of it,” I said, gritting teeth that didn’t exist.

He cocked his shapeless head as if to say, “Do you? Do you really?” but he—like the others—would only push back so far. I still demanded some respect. The transport was a pretty polarizing issue, and it had never officially been approved. Animal skins imbued with souls—spirits melded with body—the union of the ethereal with the material. It was a plan that had almost never gotten off the ground, and it wouldn’t have—had I waited for approval. I was still paying for some of the blowback, though.

I had been in the garden when the idea hit me. Time.

It was a simple enough—if a bit crackpot. Implementing it had turned out to be a whole different story. What was the Earthen expression—distance makes the heart grow fonder? Well, it doesn’t. Not without time. Distance is a proxy for time—for how long it would take to see someone again.

Before the station, distance could be crossed with all the delay of wiggling your little toe. When you live forever and can feel the constant and complete connection of all of existence, you can check in with any part of it whenever you want. There is no sorrow, pain, or loneliness—but there is boredom by the bucketload.

Shu waved his blobby hand in front of my face.

“You still with me, big A?” He sounded amused.

“Yeah,” I shook my head to clear it. “I’m here.” My head continued to wiggle long after I stopped shaking it. This body was like being incarnated as a Jell-O cube.

Shu didn’t think the Garden Transport Station should be allowed to operate, and he wasn’t alone, but too many high-order beings continued pumping their lower-resolution selves through regardless of what others thought. Over and over again, they broke themselves into pieces and sent parts of themselves through to experience love and loss, hope and despair—the reality of duality.

Critics of the Garden felt that it caused more problems than it was worth, and, in some ways, they were right. The presence of time creates the illusion of scarcity. Scarcity breeds resource hoarding, which makes things even more scarce. Then come all the things that accompany fear and envy—hate, war, greed, and so on.

Every dozen millennia or so, souls would start returning twisted and bent, and the entire system had to be shut down and given a hard reset. It was retooled before it could be restarted, and then everything would go smoothly again—for a while. The trick is staying current on the system status, and the only way to do that was to do what those like Shu feared the most—going through one of the portals.

“There is no time here,” Shu repeated to himself, and I got the impression that this was something he reminded himself of often. I followed his gaze downstream to the many archways at the tunnel’s far end.

“I know that too,” I said,” but I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.”

“You might need to lay off living for a while,” he said before he could think better of it.

“Lay off life? Are you serious?” I snapped.

Shu looked where his feet would have been, were there feet on this plane.

“Do you have any idea how much work it takes to keep this place going?” My voice was now loud enough to draw glances from souls slipping by. I lowered it.

“How many souls go through this station every day?” I said.

“Hovers around two million.” Shu looked like a scolded child.

“That’s just Earth,” I said. “How many things can go wrong with this one station? That’s just one plane—a single dimension.”

“A lot,” Shu said petulantly.

“Exactly. We’re still shaking out the system—it’s still in its infancy. None of these things run by themselves, and trains can’t stay on tracks that aren’t well maintained.”

“What’s a train?” Shu said.

I pressed jellied fingers against my eyes—a human gesture that I was sure was lost on him.

“Worlds don’t build themselves,” I said, backing slowly into the steady push of souls ambling toward the archways.

“Maybe there’s good reason for that,” he said loudly.

“Your concern is noted,” I shouted over my shoulder without looking back. I knew that if I had, I would see a very judgmental Shu glancing between me and the far end of the destination that I was being pressed toward. We must have had this conversation a hundred times. I navigated through the crowd, setting the largest archway in the center as my target.

As I grew closer, one of the guards recognized me and elbowed his companion. They both stood up smartly.

“My lord?” the one on the right said, gesturing at the rows of spraying fountains—banking either side of the steady procession of souls—from which every traveler was to drink.

I leaned forward and slurped the sweet liquid in a long, cold draught and immediately felt my mind relax. My memories loosened, sliding like raindrops sloughing off the windshield of a speeding car. I shuddered as deep recollections were scraped away from me as easily as mud from an old boot, and, for a glorious while, I became like everyone else.

I felt myself gently nudged forward by the steady pressure of gelatinous forms behind me. We ambled toward a rippling wet membrane that stretched across a sleek metal archway in front of us like the shimmering soap skin clinging to a bubble wand, and for a moment, I was worried and confused.

I didn’t know where I was, who these people were, or even what I was. All I knew was the steady hum and pressure of those around me as I was pushed through the cold silver skin and into a new place. My last thought was great comfort in knowing that at least I wasn’t alone. We entered the world as one.

I held an aged ten dollar bill between us. He looked nervously at the grocery store, teeming with shoppers. This was supposed to be good for him—independence—agency.

“Why do we need money for milk?” he asked with the haughty air of a grade-school philosopher.

“Because everything costs something, son,” I said.

“Everything?” he said.

“Everything.”

“We could just take the milk,” he said.

“Like stealing?”

“If that’s what you want to call it,” he said.

“It’s not what I call it, it’s what the dictionary calls it,” I said. I took a steadying breath, as that’s what I’d been told good fathers do. “Then you’d pay for it with time instead of money—time spent in jail. Get the milk?” I urged the greasy bill closer. He looked out the window.

“We could change that law,” he said.

“Then everyone would have to pay for the milk. Safety. Society. Stability. Milk,” I said. He seemed to be thinking about it. I lowered my outstretched hand, feeling tired and like a failure in more ways than one.

“We could burn it all down. Start over,” he whispered out the window.

My voice came out louder than I expected and we both jumped.

“What in the hell are they teaching you at that school of yours?!” I said.

“That your generation broke the world. That society is built on lies and oppression. That—”

I cut him off.

“When are you going to start thinking for yourself? You’re twenty-two years old, Danny!” I said. I got out and slammed the car door behind me hard enough that the glass of the half-rolled-down window rattled in its frame. I held the green paper bill between us like a shield. “Don’t worry Danny! I’ll get the damned milk!” I said.

I stormed off toward the sliding glass doors—for the first time in my life, I empathized with all those stories of fathers who went to grab a gallon of milk—and never came back.

She had a laugh like an old brokedown car—the staccato of an engine that wouldn’t start. It made me want to take the plastic knife off my paper plate and push it into my eardrums. Instead, I stared at her teeth and smiled.

“We just got a new car,” she said to anyone that would listen, in between big smacks of gum. “Stevie picked it up for my birthday. Ain’t that right Stevie?”

From over by the smoking grill, in a cluster of three men talking about sports scores and performance reports, Steve raised a plastic-cupped salute.

My wife appeared like a wisp and squeezed my shoulder, not without affection. I tried to make my smile more believable.

“It’s way too fancy for me,” the woman with the machine gun laugh said. She let out another three-round burst. I gripped the arms of my chair until the hard white plastic bit into my fingertips. “Brand new. Off the lot. All the bells and whistles,” she offered when I failed to urge her for any details.

“Well, that sounds lovely,” my wife said in a voice that still sounded like Mississippi even after twelve years and four duty stations. “Doesn’t it Jack?”

“Yeah… real fancy,” I said.

I had been back stateside for less than two weeks and was still coming down from deployment. In culture shock after returning to my own country, go figure. Everything was different. My home had become a foreign land to me and it was tearing itself to bits. I looked at the neighbors, littering my backyard like strangers, holding disposable paper plates and red plastic cups.

“Good to have you back,” a man said from behind me. He clapped his hand on my shoulder and electricity shot through my body like a car alarm. I pulled away from him.

“Sorry, Jack,” he said, both hands raised in a universal don’t-want-any-trouble sign. Several people nearby stopped talking and looked over at us. My wife appeared at my side.

“Jack,” she said quietly, placing a hand on my chest. “Should we get some air?”

We were already outside. I nodded.

“Be back in two shakes,” she said to the guests and everyone went back to their conversations.

As she led me by the hand into and through our little house, I breathed like they had taught me—two breaths in, one breath out. It almost always worked, temporarily, but it never fixed the problem.

Fixed implied something was broken.

Two breaths in—one breath out.

Fixed implied that I was broken.

Two breaths—one breath.

Maybe it wasn’t me though. Maybe it was here that was broken, and being away had finally given me the ability to see it.

Two—one.

That wouldn’t account for the meltdowns at places like Costco though, or pulling that guy out of his car after he whipped around my family in the parking lot.

“Jack, Hunny, you doing alright?” my wife said, once we were alone on the front porch.

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t mean anything… he didn’t know…” she said.

“Yeah, I know. He’s a good guy. He can’t know that I have the startle response of one of those fainting goats these days.”

She laughed weakly.

“It’s just… different… everything is different,” I said.

“They said it’ll take some time for you to acclimate again—to get reaccustomed. Just like last time…”

She looked strained and tired, pulled in too many directions with too many concerns, like most military wives. By God, she was beautiful though, like an oak tree—something solid. I looked at her and let out a long breath.

“That’s just it,” I said. “I’m not sure I want to get used to it again. I don’t want to fit into to…” I waved my hands at the little suburban neighborhood we had bought into, “…this.”

The house had been perfect when we moved in. With my last reenlistment bonus, we had finally been able to afford the type of place we had always wanted. It was her dream home. At one time, it had been mine too. That was before I came back to see America with new eyes—the people that lived in it.

I still don’t see how it could have changed so much in nine months, yet here we were. Privilege divorced from gratitude and reattached to guilt. Tolerance became unacceptable, and advocacy was a requirement. Everyone was either an adversary or an ally, with nothing in between.

Meanwhile, idiots like me traveled the world doing bad things to bad people—ridding countries of the type of men that make sure little girls don’t learn to read by stoning them to death. Losing friends for strangers and coming back home to watch people tear down flags and topple monuments.

People thank you for your service and companies still offer discounts, but people don’t go to war to be mislabeled heroes or given ten percent off major appliances. They go to war because others need help, and home is worth protecting—its people are worth protecting.

“This place isn’t worth protecting,” I said quietly to myself. My wife wiped at my face, at tears I hadn’t known were falling, and pressed her forehead to mine.

“Jack Allen Wagner,” she said, the steel of her voice wrapped in velvet. “You don’t go to those places for BOGO culture or cowards that hide behind ideas. You go because that’s what good men do. You go to show our sons that sometimes evil people do evil…shit…”

That got my attention. My wife swore less than a Gideon Bible. A smirk cracked its way across my stone face.

“…until good men kick in their door and jerk a knot in their rear end.” She was breathing heavily, the look in her eye not unlike the men I traveled the world with.

I smiled—deeply—proudly—all teeth and crinkled eyes, like a boy that had just caught a frog in a creek following a stick-gun fight with his friends—back when the stakes were lower but there was a lot more worth fighting for.

“There you are,” she said, stealthily wiping a rogue tear from her cheek. “There you are, you big lug.” She grabbed me by both of my ears and kissed me fully like I was a mirage she was afraid would disappear at any moment. “I knew you were still in there somewhere.”

We sat down on the little white bench, both her hands wrapped around one of mine. She rested her head on my shoulder.

“This country might not be good enough to warrant people like you—not right now, anyhow—but I have hope that it will again. Someday soon.”

I looked at her in disbelief, in awe of the one thing that I couldn’t seem to muster: hope.

“How?” I asked. “Everyone is either so concerned with stuff, with getting theirs—whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean—or they’re at each other’s necks trying to compete for who has it worse. Show me where it’s more fair. Put a pin in a map and let’s go have a look. I’ve been to so many places—so many places—and I haven’t seen a single one of them that has it figured out better, but we can’t see it for our own greed and envy. The whole damned thing is like… It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.”

My wife’s eyes shone wetly and she squeezed them shut.

“And what if there were just ten righteous men, Jack?” she said.

I didn’t consider myself a believer—not anymore—not yet—but I knew the stories well.

“For the sake of ten, He will not destroy it,” I recited in a whisper.

She nodded. “I think you can find nine more.”

I let out a breath that I felt like I had been holding since stepping onto a homebound C-130. As far gone as America was—greedy, resentful, dishonest, and ungrateful—worse had been brought back from the brink of destruction time and time again. For the first time since stepping off that plane, I felt a glimmer of hope, delivered on the wings of a five-foot-four angel—that only cussed on occasion.

Two old fellas sat at the park. The sun was bright, and the air was crisp, but they complained anyhow—as old men are prone to do—about the weather.

“That’s one hell of a sweater, George,” said the smaller one from under a bushy mustache.

George’s bulging frame was squeezed into an absolute circus of a Christmas sweater that—in Clyde’s opinion—no self-respecting man would have worn.

“The old lady got it for me,” George said, looking over at Ethel, who was chatting with another woman some distance away. “I’d take it off, but you know how she gets if I don’t wear the stuff she buys me.”

His tone was a veneer—a mock annoyance sitting overtop a chasm of deep and enduring love like a manhole cover. George had been with Ethel since he was a kid, and their love was still like something out of a storybook.

George smiled. George was always smiling. Clyde looked at Ethel—who gave a little wink and a wave to George. After all these years, he still pined for her like a puppy chasing its owner, and she still pined for him.

“Got a new medicine,” George said matter-of-factly, his wrinkly jowls quivering as he shook his massive head in feigned disgust.

“We’re not getting any younger, are we?” Clyde said, scratching behind his ear with a toe. “What’d you get this time, new heart pills?”

“Dewormer,” George said, as he scooted his ass across the grass.