100 Proof

She sprinted through the woods, skimming over roots and rocks and slats of small bridges, racing from the world, racing from the news, racing from herself.

The night before, he had played a song of peace on his guitar, and she had been able to forget, but when dawn broke, she looked out the window at the smoke rising from tiny fires that never seemed to go out and remembered again.

So, every day, she tried to outrun every story of suffering like each life depended on it. Every day, she fell further and further behind.

The signs they carried read the same as if they’d saved them from a march in 1953. All these years later, there has been no dissipation of that same bright, hot anger. Why does that hate never go stale? she asked her friend.

They’re afraid of losing something they never had the right to take in the first place, her friend replied.

So many of the marchers’ faces glowed as if on fire. She stared at each one as they passed, reading their statements of hate, imagining the coals smoldering at the very heart of each one of them.

She pushed through a curtain of beads into the room, leaving a swirling clatter in her wake. It’s Friday, she announced. Let’s find a way to forget all of this.

She had something outrageous in her purse, she whispered, and she didn’t care what they did with it. He found that confusing, but he also liked her style. He liked a woman who could look in the face of disaster and laugh.

There’s nothing left for us to do, she said. We’re going to have to have fun despite it all. Come on. Let’s go.

At the end of dinner, we eat cake. Maybe we have some champagne—mostly for the ladies, because they love bubbles, am I right?—but we have chocolate cake like you would not believe. I know the pastry chef, and let me tell you, he makes the best cakes.

Everyone tastes the cake, and they say how great this cake is, and then we all talk about that icing—no one makes icing like that pastry chef. Sometimes we bomb one of those countries over there, but mostly, we eat cake. The most beautiful cake. Believe me.

That afternoon was three parts cloudy, with spatters of rain landing like spittle launched from a high balcony. He waited for the barista to make his coffee, the lines in his face deeper than usual.

For days, he had worked on the briefing book he hoped might stop the impending invasion, sleeping on his office sofa in a rumpled shirt and khakis for a few hours at a time before diving back in.

No one would read the book, but he wanted, someday, to be able to say he’d thrown words in the face of the the oncoming storm.

Deep inside a northbound carrier, a sailor played solitaire all night in his bunk, unable to put words to the anxiety that was, maybe, unfairly arising. After all, he signed up for this, and you don’t join the military without accepting the possibility of war. But the cards felt like they were falling differently this time, and the stakes felt far higher than he had ever expected.

Batten down the hatches, a friend had said in the mess over dinner. This is going to be one heck of a storm.

They talked of ghosts in the woods. I think I saw one like a sparrow, she said, but it has been so long since we’ve seen real birds, I can hardly remember.

He remembered the spring blooms in the desert, the wildflower hikes he took with his parents along mountain paths. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever see something real again, he said. Sometimes I wonder why our parents had us. Didn’t they know what was about to happen?

They probably couldn’t imagine the after, she said. And now, we can’t imagine what it was like before.