My Cardboard Balcony

Sweet Charity by Belinda Roddie Hush. Lights out on the second story. The river's lip is plump, but closed off to any echo of previous sound, the ripples lost to the dying whimper of yesterday's traffic. Thousands of feet above the rooftops, a pilot signals for his companion to make a crackling announcement to the sleeping civilians just departing from Washington, D.C. "This is your co-pilot speaking. We ask that you please expect turbulence in the next hour of mutual silence." Everything feels so, goddamn, dead. A thirty-seven-year-old private, raw from her first tour, lights a stogie in the privacy of her hotel room. The door says, "Smoking," so she shouldn't get (m)any complaints. She leaves the television on at half-volume, just enough to hear the eleven o'clock news about another black girl shot to death asking for help at the ATM in the whitest part of town. Half-eaten soldier pumping smoke into her congested ...

The barricade put up in front of the memorial did wonders for the temper of the politician, who ranted and raved and foamed at the mouth as the reporters surrounded him. He whined and whined about the nerve of the government to shut down such a marvelous part of American history, just as an old veteran in a wheelchair squeaked by him and stared thoughtfully into the red-faced representative's eyes. "You're the one who forced us to fence this off," the former soldier murmured, "remember?"