literature

A Little Revolution

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Daily Deviation

October 3, 2009
A Little Revolution by ~Akbarsimian
Featured by StJoan
Suggested by conorschild
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Literature Text

It smells of candy dust in here.  Gum wrappers shine bright blue and pink in a line of light that sneaks through the cardboard on the windows.  Ira Stein puts a finger to his lips:

‘shh. . .’ he says, ‘tell no one.’

There are alien wars frozen on the shelves under magazine titles made of laser-beams.  But we ignore the comic-books, because Ira tells better stories.

‘shhhh. . .’ he says, ‘because no-one will understand.  Our little secret, yeah?’

In the classroom there is Plexiglas in the windows instead of real glass.  It gets scratched.  We scratch our names in it.  The yellow desks are bunched up next to each other in groups, their surfaces soft with pencil-lead scribbles that come off on our forearms and spread black to our faces from our hands.  Sarah draws a heart on her desk and inside it says I+A.  Nicky says that is gross and not the way to think about our Leader.  Anyway, if anyone marries Ira everyone knows it will be Nicky, not Sarah.  Nicky is second in command, after him.

Jackie says if Ira was in the war it means he must be at least 60.
‘Oh man,’ Nicky says, ‘that’s disgusting.’
‘Sarah,’ Jackie says, ‘that is disgusting.’
‘Fuck off,’ Sarah says.

Ira tells us stories about the war days.  The dust and dark of the candy store is always full of girls, leaning their elbows on the magazine racks, dirty sneakers hanging off the ice-cream freezer, girls sitting cross-legged on the floor in shorts and scabbed knees.  There are girls draped over everywhere with plastic bracelets and clip-on earrings, and the snap of bubble-gum between the teeth.

‘Shh. . .tell no-one.  This is what happened.  We were on a scouting mission, this is a thing they call it when you go around looking for enemies.  Because there are enemies everywhere, let me tell you, even sometimes in your own ranks, for instance my cousin Al, what a putz!  Well anyway suddenly it seems too quiet, you know what I mean?  I turn around and there everyone is: gone!  Everyone.  I’m all alone.  And then the shooting begins, oy!  I tell you, did they ever shoot!  I danced around trying to dodge these bullets, up and down at the knees like this, what a sight!’

When he tells this part of the story Ira always stands up and jumps up and down and waves his arms around.  Everyone laughs and screams and slaps their bare legs with their hands.

‘shhhht!’ he always whispers, and we all get quiet.  ‘You are wondering what happened to everyone else.  Well, I’m about to tell you now.  You won’t have to wait.  This is what happened.  I somehow escaped, I don’t know how, if there is a God it is thanks to him but I don’t think so.  When I got back to the camp, it was quiet too.  And dark, oy, was it dark.  So, I have a light, of course, this is a war, an army with resources. . .anyway I flash the light around, and I see, what do I see?” he stops and looks around, looking each girl in the eye.  “I see faces everywhere,” he says quietly, “but they don’t move.  I see Billy and Frankie and Tony and Adam Finklestein but you see they are frozen, they are so still.  And the eyes, oh!  The eyes.  They were wide.  And funny. . . there is blood dripping from their necks and I move the light down and oh!  What is this mishigas!  They are just heads!  Just heads!  Oh my God!  Just heads on stakes, oy gotenu!  What a mess.  Everyone dead.’  Ira shakes his head sadly, and all of us smile, and sometimes if the story is especially scary, we look at each other smiling and we shiver.

Later on, Sarah’s mother will get to go on television.  She will look in the camera and say:

‘My daughter Sarah disappeared on Tuesday April 22nd.  She was wearing white running shoes and a green t-shirt.  She has dark hair, which she likes to wear in a ponytail, and she never brushes it.  She is nine years old.  She likes to draw.  She is normally a happy child but the other day I found a picture she had drawn of some men’s heads severed and stuck on the end of stakes.’  

It is the month before that, in March, that Ira starts to organize us.  Just as the snow is melting and revealing all the garbage on the street, and the sounds of water trickling are everywhere and everything is wet and dirt-smeared and stinks.  We play Vietnam behind the school building.  We cover our faces in mud and hide in the puddles, waiting for Charlie.  We have a sleepover for Nicky’s birthday.  We watch Stephen King movies and then sneak out of the house to run barefoot on the sidewalk in the dark.  Everyone tries hard to stay awake through it all.

Ira has found a book of instructions.  He is organizing us around it.  He has a vision.  This is a vision we don’t understand, but we will soon.  The book is small and old and dusty like the candy store.  It is full of pictures of happy boys in shorts with fishing rods and diagrams of how to build a lean-to.  There are no girls in the book, as far as we can tell.
‘Ira why is there no girls?’
‘What?  There are girls.  It is chock-a-block with girls.’
‘I don’t see any girls, Ira.’
‘Look at him, here- this one is a girl.  He is definitely a girl.’
‘You just said: “he is a girl.”’
‘Ech!  Who cares the gender!’

He tells Nicky about the organization first.  He calls it ‘the initiation.’  He tells Nicky she will be first.  Nicky is always first.  She is our Prime-Minister.  Ira tells her in the back room of the store and closes the door.  When they come out Nicky is crying.  She cries like that for two days, off and on, and then she cuts her hair short, and she tells us about the plan and we start to get organized.  Many of the girls cut their hair short, too, in Solidarity.  There is a lot of talk about Solidarity.  Nicky says Ira says it’s the most important thing.  The Organization depends on it.

Ira likes the book because it gives us practical instructions.  He starts to teach us things out of it; that is the first part of the Organization.

The first thing we learn is how to tie knots.  It doesn’t go so well.  Ira gives us all some scratchy brown string.  We wrap it around our palms and it scratches the skin on our hands.

‘IIIIIIIraaaaaa!’

Ira gets up on a red plastic milk-crate with that little dusty book and he starts to read instructions to us:
‘Loop end A over section B.  Loop section B over end D, and then pull loop C through, over and back through loop H.’
‘Ira!  Slow down!’
‘Oy.  Thread. . .end D. . .back over section B and twist in a figure eight around loops H and L.’
‘Ira!’
‘Nudnick!  Stop kvetching!’
‘Ira help!’

Ira looks up and the scratchy brown rope is everywhere around the store, girls and candy and everything all tied up in knots and bunches.  It is looped around our necks and tangled in our hair, it twists up our legs, it goes up under our clothes.  Ira takes to it with a pair of scissors, but an hour passes before we get ourselves untangled.

After Sarah’s mother goes on Television, Jackie will start showing up on milk cartons all over the country, smiling with no front teeth into someone’s cereal every morning.  In the picture she has that patch over her bad eye.  We never see this, of course, because by that time we are all long gone.  

The second thing Ira teaches us out of the book is how to make a fire.  This goes much better than the knots.  He teaches us to make a fire from scratch, by striking two flints together and then catching the spark on a special kind of burnt cloth.  The first spark we get lands on Laura’s skirt and burns a big hole in it.  But after that everything is okay.  We learn how to hit the black flints together so that they make a metal sound, and how to make the tiny white spark jump and bounce on the rough cloth until it starts to burn.  In our space behind the school we pile up paper bags and popsicle sticks and twigs from the pine trees just outside the wire fence and we light them and watch the fire spread and start to lick and dance and leave everything the strange clean shiny black behind it.

There is a girl from another school who walks by our school on her way home at lunch.  We hang off the wire fence, some of us on top of it or leaning far over, and we yell at her through the wire squares.  We shake the fence so it rattles, and sometimes we throw tennis balls and juice-containers at her.  We are not allowed to cross the fence, so we bang on the ‘No Dogs’ sign and yell about how much we hate that girl and how much we hate our school.  The teachers can’t do anything.  It’s freedom of speech.

Ira teaches us about Freedom of Speech, and about the Capitalist System and Free Trade.  He also teaches us to do everything for the woods.  We can all light a fire and cook and build a shelter and trap a rabbit in a snare and skin it and we know how to slip a knife up through the belly of a fish so the guts spill out all in one lump.  We keep our blades sharp on wet stones.  As time goes by, there are more and more instructions and less and less stories.  Every time we learn something, Ira gives us a special cloth patch for that particular skill and soon we have shirts that are covered all over in colored symbols, sewn on all over everywhere there is a space.  We can only wear these shirts in the store, with Ira, because they are secret.  He makes us take them off everyday before we go home.

The second phase of the Organization is called ‘the Renunciation.’

During this phase there is a fight.  The fight happens because Sarah starts bothering Jackie about her eye patch.  Jackie gets so angry the muscles in her thigh start to twitch.  Something rises up behind her good eye, you can see it big in the thick lens of her glasses, and then it gets control of her.  She gets up and takes Sarah by her hair and swings her around.  Sarah screams and Jackie keeps on swinging her.  Then Sarah takes out her knife and cuts her own hair so Jackie is left just holding this brown knotted ponytail with no-one on the end of it.  Nicky laughs through the whole thing.

The Renunciation is about making sacrifices.  Ira takes Nicky into the back room of the candy store almost every day and closes the door.  The rest of us wait.  There are girls everywhere in the store waiting, standing stiff by the cardboard windows, not speaking, the sound of our quick breathing echoing through the sunlit dust.  These are serious times, waiting times.  Something is coming that makes us all feel like we can’t move or we might disturb it.

During this phase Ira teaches us the importance of tracking.  We study footprints and follow each other through the park.  We loop back on ourselves and learn the difference between each girl’s walk, who leans more on the left shoe, who drags a little on the right.  We learn to change the way we walk so that we can imitate each other and confuse whoever is following us.  Ira reads out of the little dusty book, one finger wagging in the air: ‘If at first you constantly remind yourself to do it, you will soon find that you do it as a habit without having to remind yourself.’

In a few weeks Nicky’s father will go on the radio, on a talk show.  He will be on a panel with a child psychiatrist and the parents of some of the other girls.  He’ll say:

‘Nicole was not herself.  She began to walk with a limp.  I found . . .things in her bedroom.’
‘Did she begin to act in any way older than her age.  By this I mean was she growing up too fast, so to speak?’  The psychiatrist’s voice will be soft and hard at the same time.
‘She was developing. . .’ Nicky’s father’s voice will break,
‘Ah. . .developing.’
‘No, not that.’  He will cry.  ‘She developed . . . um . . . political ideas.’

The Renunciation goes on for a long time.  Finally we get to the third and final phase, which Ira calls The Birth.  We spend a long time preparing for it.  It is the most dangerous phase, and the most important thing about it is survival.  Solidarity, Sacrifice, Survival.  The three S’s of the Scout.  That is what Ira is calling us now: Scouts.  We are the Scouts of the Organization and The Birth is not of a person, but of a community.  The Community of Survival.  When he explains this all to us, girls are kneeling all over the floor of the candy store on the hard cool stone tiles, working the smoothness of our fire flints in our palms, or testing the sharpness of our knives against white sheets of paper.  Nicky has hollows in her cheeks, and she looks like a woman.  Soon we are ready.

Ira looks at us all and his eyes are wet with pride.
‘Ah, my girls.  I’m kvelling.  I tell you.  I never thought this kakameyme business would get so far.’

The spot Ira chooses is only an hour outside of the city, but it seems much farther.  No-one else is around.  There have been some tears because we have had to leave everything we care about behind: all our comic books and wrestling cards and Sarah’s drawings and all the candy in the candy store.  We walk there in a line, packs on our backs, leaving no trace but our smells.  The leaves crunch softly under our shoes and the air smells like cedar.  It is cool and damp and all the browns and greens and whites are wet and thick and heavy and deep.  We can see our breath, and the air is tight and sharp in our chests because of the long walk in the cold and the heavy packs on our backs.

There are deer in the woods.  We see the white flash of hair under their tails as they run by us up ahead.  Ira whispers to us that we will shoot one of them and eat the meat and use the skins for clothes.

‘We will use every single part of it so that none goes to waste,’ he says
‘What about the stomach, Ira?’ Sarah asks, ‘What will we use that for?’
Ira thinks a minute.  ‘We will blow it up like a balloon and play sports with it, like soccer, or volleyball.’
‘What about the antlers?’
‘Easy!  They are coat racks!’
‘And the ears?’
‘Handkerchiefs!  Oven mitts!’
‘Feet?’
‘Paperweights!’  Ira’s index finger flicks in the air.
‘Okay, Ira, what about the eyes.’
‘The eyes!’  Ira says, ‘The eyes will be telescopes.’

We shiver in the cold and smile at the thought of the warm red meat and the thick warm deer fur against our own skin.  Nicky walks at the front of the line, reaching up over her head to hold Ira’s hand.  We are all smiling.

We make camp in a clearing on top of a high hill.  The earth is loose and shallow over the bedrock.  There is the sound of water running nearby.  We pitch our one big canvas tent that Ira brought back from the war and we lie in it in our sleeping bags, all of us together, girls all over the floor of the tent lying and looking at the darkening sky through the mesh windows on the walls of the tent.  Our stomachs are full of pork and beans cooked over a fire we lit from flints and char-cloth.

The next day we set up animal traps and Ira shows us his shotgun.  All of us get to hold the gun, but not when it’s loaded.  On the third day Ira shoots a deer.  The deer is eating some new leaves on a cedar tree.  It turns its head and looks right at us, and then  the bullet makes a crack like a branch breaking, and the deer hits the ground with a thud.  Nicky runs over to it, and we all wait while she kneels down by it and strokes its head.  She gets up and we think she might cry, but instead she puts her foot on the deer’s back and flexes the muscles in her arms like a weight-lifter and grins, and we all laugh, and the deer is dead.  We go and stand around the body and look at all the parts and feel the skin and the organs.  Some girls paint lines on their faces with the blood, as a joke.  We are always laughing and working.

On the fifth day it rains.  We have trouble lighting a fire.  Even Ira has trouble lighting it, and he crouches over the wet wood and curses over the wet flints that won’t spark.  Some of the girls get bored watching and they wander off, kicking their feet in the soggy leaves and tossing pebbles at the crows to shut them up.  The rest of us sit around shivering, wrapped up in green wool blankets.

Ira hits the flints, and Nicky scrapes her knife over a big rock sticking out of the ground.  There is the sound of teeth chattering and shuffling in the leaves and the thud of rocks that miss the crows and land on the hard dirt.  No-one is talking.  Our faces are streaked brown, caked in sweat and old deer-blood.  There is black under our fingernails.  Ira hits the flints three more times, and then there is a spark.

“Ah-ha!”  Ira yells.
We all jump up yelling “Catch it!  Catch it, man!  Ira!”

Ira catches it and we all cheer and jump up and run around and hug each other as the flames lick cedar bark and then there is a big clap of thunder and a crackle of lightening snakes across the sky and it is beautiful.

Sarah yells “Holy Shit!”

At first we think she is talking about the lightening and then we realize she is pointing to something else that is shining and glittering in the distance.  It gets closer and deep in our guts we feel everything tie into a tight knot because we realize it is a car.

The car stops on the side of the road below us, at the bottom of the hill.  Some men spill out of it and walk around in circles, talking into walkie-talkies.  They look like little blue ants swarming around down there.  Ira gets a serious look on his face.

“Hide” he says, and we do it right away, the way we were taught.  We cover our faces in mud and stick leaves in our hair.  We blend in.  Girls are everywhere around, hanging from the highest branches, buried deep in the underbrush, crouching in the roots of trees.  We are invisible.

Ira doesn’t hide.  This is his plan.  He stands by the fire, tending it, feeding the kindling carefully into it.  The men crawl up the hill behind him, and as they get closer we can see one of them is a woman.  She yells and points a gun at Ira, and holds a badge up in her left hand.  

“What is this?” Ira says, “I am camping!  I am camping alone in the woods!”  

He puts his hands in the air slowly, still holding a piece of burning stick, and then his hands are behind his back and he is on the ground with his face in the dirt and the woman’s knee is digging into his spine and she is smiling just like Nicky over the dead deer.

All the invisible girls are hiding in the rain, watching.  We are soaked through, but we don’t move.  We stay there as long as we can.  They have to send dogs in to sniff us out.
This is a story about going out into the woods.
© 2009 - 2024 Akbarsimian
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Mrs-Elizabeth's avatar
This gives me sooooo many idea hehe. Great work, and congratz on the Daily! :) :rose: