tell them they were assholes, because I was a good girl, and I wasn't going to sink to their level and use the f-word. I recited this plan out loud, every detail, down to the asshole, and my mother heard. She slapped me in the head for bad language. Like the time I was trying to open a package of donuts, my hand slipped and I yelled Shit! She hit me then too, and for me the word shit means a pile of powdered donuts scattering tragically to the floor. I fell flat to eat them anyway, you cannot waste anything, not a single speck of sugar, so I lapped it up, tongue to hardwood like a cat. And Mother, horrified, treated me just like a cat, thrusting her broom at me, and the straw poked me in the eyes, scratched my face. Yet later she was very reasonable, and said: People who use bad language are out of ideas. You're smart enough to always have ideas. Always, always, always.
***
 | | The soldiers created a game out of it, I am told. A test to eradicate the coward inside you, vanquish every single fiber of being that does not allow you to attain your full potential. It was a diversion from the damn heat, the dust that stung their eyes, the sewers poisoned with dysentery and rotted limbs. If it had been winter, it would have been different. Snow to drink, enough gas to boil water all day and night. But in the summer, in the midst of drought, gas was rationed, hardly enough to even burn the prisoners' bodies. They tried, but the corpses could only burn halfway -- the husks remained, blackened rusty gnarled trunks sprouting from the earth everywhere, like contagion. So they gave up, gave in, created this game. Prisoners were lined up by the dozens, and the prisoners greatly outnumbered the soldiers, and yet the prisoners' eyes held only pleading, fear, supplication, which infuriated the soldiers all the more. What an utter lack of pride and will and
|
