I was lying in the bathtub one night thinking about Simon (Bren, don’t be mad, I only liked him because you were gone and because I was so lonely), and I lay there picturing him and Corrine together until the water went lukewarm. When I wiped the steam from the mirror, I looked the same as I always had but inside I was completely numb. Every which way my mind went was bad—Simon, Ziggy, you.

Jenny steered the car out of the vast Walmart lot to head west out of Moberly on Highway 24. Since starting the job as a cashier six months ago, she drove back and forth this way four days every week. The pay was low, only twelve dollars per hour, but there was the health-care benefit. Child support from Karl was hit or miss.

Amy fell in love with soldier Blackie Boyette because there was a war on, and her daddy was gone to the front. “Your papa’s off to the seven seas,” jived the Andrews Sisters on every jukebox in town. Amy never had enough time with him, her big, strong daddy, Captain Tom Archer from the Kentucky mountains, so fiercely devoted to the U.S. of A.

The doctor, who had been perched on the edge of his seat, now sat back.  “Well, with humans, it can take weeks, months, sometimes even years before they start telling the truth.”

     “They lie to you?”

     “To themselves.”

He looked up from zippin his fly an I guess he could see I weren’t convinced, ’cause then he said, “I wouldn’t want you followin in my footsteps in most things—card sharpin can be mighty dangerous an drink can ruin a man ’bout as quick as anythin—but I hope you’ll heed what I say about how to treat women—whether we’re talkin ’bout one woman or a hundred, ’bout one night or fifty years.  Now you just set there a minute an hear me out.”

Furious, Sasha stormed to the window and looked down at the neighbor’s yard. It seemed as though they had completely ignored their earlier conversation and were allowing their dog to roam around freely once again. Sasha couldn’t believe it.

“Those motherfuckers,” she muttered to herself.

The triage nurse took one look at the woman in white fur held in the arms of a man in oil-stained coveralls and dropped his cinnamon twist to the desk. Another nurse wrapped her chocolate eclair in bakery tissue, shoved it in her pocket, and scrambled for a wheelchair.

Early on, fearing he’d be recognized, he went far from the building to beg for funds to replenish their stocks. He got caught in black rain once during a phage surge. At least the rain wasn’t yellow. He wouldn’t be here now, he’s sure, if it was yellow. That day, before he could make it home, the rain burned holes in his suit and damaged his mask. The shakes from phage exposure set in then.

You may be able to guess that this is from my wartime experience.  She, Pinky, the woman with whom I had sex …  was in some ways just a girl – things were different then and we were all so afraid – and no one, none of us anyway, none of the American soldiers, were allowed to think let alone – let alone anything – we were … we were just there to fight and kill – kill as many living things as possible – plants animals people of all ages and all anything else …

I liked the work; I was good at it. But the company, Cory, getting demoted…I hated this place and the bastards who ran it. But I couldn’t leave. Not with my seven-year-old daughter, Tina, just starting private school. Tina and her mom, Tanya, had me deathly afraid of getting made redundant, for redundancy here meant redundancy there.