Writing with Lightening

Regina Scapegrace was left-handed, which is why she came home with frazzled hair and sore knuckles. It was just one of the asinine things the boys picked on her for, until three of her sliders locked up her brother’s friends at the plate. They no longer looked at her as a girl. After she had gained their respect, she did not want to do anything like a girl anymore. R.O.T.C. would aid her quest to no longer be “girly” and she rose to the top of her class out shooting, out drilling, and out marching everyone. There was no doubt of her capabilities; she wanted no trace of femininity, but her body betrayed her in her sophomore year and her mother’s curves desperately clung to her frame, amplified by her vigorous training and brown R.O.T.C. pants. This angered her not because of what she had become, but because she did not see it coming. All she remembered of her mother was her blueberry muffins. Womanhood is the furthest thing from a five-year-old’s mind, and she did not think to ask her mother before a train wreck took her. Now she walked like her, though she did not know it, and garnered unwanted attention from co-eds drilling behind her.

Nothing about her should have been submissive, supple, or soft. Her demeanor was to be sharp, rigid, granite. She did not even like making love before she married Ananias. Once she had a lover leave her because she was being too domineering. It would take years for her to realize that there was no difference between doing things like a man or woman, and that she was a woman who was capable of doing anything proficiently. Although it would be those distorted thoughts that would equip her to get her son back.

“Attention!” Lt. Reyes stiffened and the men of the 54th Brigade scrambled out their prone positions to salute.

“As you were men.” Regina walked the length of the cliff top entrenchment where the men laid and fingered their M-4 rifles, adjusting their sights on the New Mexican Territory’s Governor’s mansion.

“Major, how long will we hold this position?”

“We’ll be here till just after dawn, but I assure you Lieutenant we’ll see action tonight.”

“I’ve got word from Corporal Jackson; the cobras are ready and the Herc’s are gassed up.”

“Good.” Regina peered over a stack of sandbags into a small gathering of sagebrush. Below the stream’s gurgling was soothing and male crickets wooed slowly in the evening’s coolness. “Maybe I won’t have to chew his ass out this time around.”

“Don’t count on it, I’m sure he’ll find something to screw up.”

“Lieutenant Sir, I’ve got movement!” The young soldier dropped his night vision goggles and shouldered his rifle. He had chambered a round by the time Lt. Reyes reached him.

“Where at?”

“Just beyond the stream bank, Sir. Wagons and horses, looks like they’re moving out.” He wiped his mouth and swallowed. Regina approached and picked up the goggles to have a look for herself.

“Easy now soldier.” She twisted the knob to bring the stream into focus. “What’s your name son?”

“Griffin, Ma’am.”

“You ever been in a firefight before?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“Just keep your head down and your ears open private, and everything will be just fine.” Regina reached down to pick up an M-40 while speaking to the soldier. Jingling ammunition, bolt action and booted footfalls descended on them as Lieutenant Reyes rallied the troops to the wall.

“Nobody fire ‘till the middle of the column is in the stream. The Major doesn’t want any screw-ups on such a simple training assignment so pay attention.” Regina continued.

“Remember, don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“And the most important thing that you want to do when shooting Private?” The full moon glinted on her wreath insignia as she stood next to the young soldier with her eye aligned with the scope, waiting for the horseman to reach deep water.

“Yes Ma’am?”

“Breathe.” Her rifle gave a quick thump, leapt back in her hands, and the rider fell off his saddle into the brook.

The soldiers followed suit and soon there was enough mayhem and disjunction in the enemies’ ranks to force those still alive back into the mansion to seal their fate behind the, cold, bloody stream.

Morning crept over the rugged landscape and flicked body after body as she went. The adobe walled mansion was not as safe as first thought. Sibley’s men found this out when they lit up for a smoke or walked by a seemingly pitch-black window. Although a few well place T.O.W.s would have made quick work of the men inside, Regina wanted the mansion saved as a captured chess piece of the upcoming war. She watched the flash-bangs disrupt the dark courtyard while the early morning room to room seek and destroy was conducted.

Colonel Camby, who had not slept since the first shots of the night, also presented his face to the morning. He was anxious to find out who was shooting and why. When the sun burned away the morning’s coolness a messenger mounted up and was sent to find out, but never left on account of the body found twenty feet from camp.

“I reckon them Rebs shot him, Sir. Got a serious hold in his chest.” The soldiers rolled the dead man over with their feet. Colonel Camby rode up and wheeled his horse around to get a better look at the corpse.

“I knew them Rebs was crazy, but all of them putting up that much fuss trying to shoot this here feller.”

“I don’t know about this, something isn’t right.”

“You think it’s ‘spooks’ Sir.”

“I don’t believe in spooks soldier.” Colonel Camby dismounted and stood on a slab of rock; a natural pulpit pushed up from the earth. He looked at the sprawling mansion and its wall and a cold shutter went through him.

“Your orders Sir?”

“Cover him in rocks. We don’t have time to bury their dead.”

“Yes Sir.”

The soldiers lifted the dead man by the arms and boots to a natural quarry just behind an adjacent hill. The attic window’s curtain moved; Colonel Camby squinted to see more. The sun had just come from behind the mansion and reflected off the gold buttons of his single-breasted tunic. He believed the glare caused the sharp pain at the base of his forehead. Yet he could not stop looking even though the pain bored inward and down through his teeth. Finally, he saw what he had been looking for all his life. His facial expression relaxed, and the shining man approached him with his arms open as if to embrace him. The pain was gone, and he smiled.

Regina stepped back from the window after she saw the two soldiers return in time to see the hot spray jump from the Colonel’s head. His body ricocheted off the horse, leaving the stallion’s flanks smeared with blood. She handed Corporal Jackson her rifle and felt the tingling return. All the men felt it.

“Major, this is the weirdest simulator I’ve ever been in. I ain’t got the jitters since Iraq Ma’am.”

“That’s the point Corporal. Remember your training.” Regina straightened her fatigues and sat in the straight-backed leather chair in Governor Connolly’s study. A burgundy humidor sat on the table. She opened it and pulled out a presidente. “Tell the men to put down anything that moves in that camp. I want clean up done by o nine-hundred hours.”

“Yes Ma’am.” The two privates within earshot didn’t need the orders repeated and bustled from the room. Corporal Jackson watched Regina light the cigar with the Governor’s fancy lighter.

“Something wrong Corporal?”

“No – Uh no Ma’am, just didn’t know you smoked.”

“Just enjoying the spoils of war Corporal, that’s all.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“Update me around o seven hundred unless there is a major development.” Regina sat back and knocked the cigar ash onto the floor. “That will be all Corporal.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

Finally alone, Regina looked out over the field. Occasionally she blew smoke at the window and watched it collide and spread over its panes. She tried to ignore the tingling and buzzing that accompanied the gunshots, but it was hard to do as she was pulled further away from her native strand. Trying not to fiddle with her wristband, as Ananias told her not to, was even harder, so she took off her locket to look at the heart-cropped picture of her son.

Soon, my dear boy, soon. I will have you with me again.

***

Ananias saw his shoelaces were untied and bent over to tie them when everything struck him as plum hilarious. Then, he was on the floor of his lab with uncontrollable fits of laughter.

What will I name myself, President? No, too much like the old structure. I know - King! The western hemisphere hasn’t had a King, a true King since the Mayans. And my son will be – My son will be prince.

The thought sobered him. He stood up dusted off his coat and returned to tying his shoe. He had hoodwinked the pentagon. The buzzing and popping of the very air around him was proof of that. No one had bothered to check his reports or vouch for accuracy in his progress. General McGillacutti was delighted to hear he had been able to “lube” or quantumly speed up 12lbs of matter with neutrino particles, which when applied to the cams of a titanium reinforced engine block, provides an extra 12,000 horsepower. It pays to have designed a copter that can dodge any missile fired at it, just as much as it pays to have a wife who is the chief of operations for the energy-weaponization sector. Now he was tying his shoestring, knotting the lace into one central anchor the very way he had managed to tie several strands of reality, and only two people in the world knew.

After years of being unable to land a government contact and riding his wife’s coattail to glory, he had reached his own self-actualization and proved himself to the military’s upper echelon. What was even more delightful to him, he didn’t give a damn.

He made coffee, sat at his computer terminal with his thermos, patched into the system, and his wristband hummed. It would be late in Gettysburg.

“Hello.”

“Hey Baby.”

“Hey Munchkin.”

“Did I wake you?”

“No, boo, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.” Ananias suspended a silver ball from the end of the perpetual motion toy on his desk and let it swing back into the other three balls. “I’ll let you get back to sleep.”

“Uh-uh, talk to me.”

“No. You know I’ll miss you more if I hear your sleepy voice.”

“Hmmmm, come on.”

“Is everything okay?” Ananias’s face reflected off the computer’s screen from the toy’s light and he saw his puffy, bloodshot eyes staring back at him. He wasn’t helping the newly formed bald spot on his head by constantly stroking it, but he rubbed it anyway.

“Yes, the Colorado Volunteers are out of commission and the rebels won’t make it back either.”

“Does any of the men suspect anything?”

“No, lotta them threw up when we jumped to Gettysburg, but that’s about it.”

“And you?”

“I’m tough as they come baby.”

“You haven’t been shooting at anyone have you?”

The click-clacking toy and lights’ hum overhead filled the silence.

“No. Baby did you call me to grill me or talk to me?”

“Sorry Sweetie. I just know how you love to shoot.” He leaned in close to the microphone. “I just want us back here as a family.”

“I know baby, as a family. Have you looked outside yet?”

“No, I haven’t come up from the lab since you left.”

“Why not?”

“I was thinking we would do it together.” Ananias heard her rolling over in her sleeping bag. He stopped the toy’s motion. “Its late boo, you need to be fresh in the morning.”

“Mmmmmm.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon your time, okay?”

“Okay, baby. I love you.”

“I love you too.” Ananias unplugged from the system, took a sip of coffee an ran his hand over the top of his head.

***

It was raining and thundering. That is why no one moved. Lee had already given the orders to withdraw to the Rappahannock. The deceased still littered the field from little round top to Culp’s Hill and those whose flesh still encased their souls would witness the horsemen’s ride. But for now, no one move with the urgency that knowledge of an assured end brings.

Regina had let them shred themselves and today she would pick up the pieces and burn them. She sat in the back of one of the six Bell Super Cobras in a clearing north of York Pine. Her helmet was a size too big, so she twisted her hair into a bun. She hung her locket on the fuel gauge with the face open. Her son’s smile, the goofy one he did when he was embarrassed, swung back and forth before succumbing to the motion of the copter’s vibrations.

He was probably wearing that smile when that girl came to Janie’s house. Damn girl!

“All strapped in back there Major?”

“Ready to go.”

“You sure you want to do this Ma’am? It can get a little hairy out there if their using live munitions.”

“You lose this bird Sgt, and I’ll stay alive long enough to court martial you.”

“You mean to tell me I’d have to find a real job instead of this fun stuff Ma’am.”

“They are always looking for qualified operators for the Dumbo ride at Disneyworld.”

“Yes Ma’am, don’t lose this bird.”

The flight lasted only four minutes, but it was long enough to drift while looking out over the dark green foliage, that dusk turned into twilit clumps. The copter blades’ steady beat drilled her thoughts and brought forth the events that she believed unfolded in her son’s last moments.

The girl his cousin introduced him to while visiting Tuskegee was pretty. Ananias taught him no one was out of his league and so showed his son the swagger, the look, the smoothness that never went out of style. And if he needed proof that his suaveness worked, he would point at Regina and say, ‘look at who I got,’ even though it was she who picked him.

Regina had pouty lips that were small enough to not be ridiculous with her heart-shaped face and slightly slanted light brown eyes, which made her look like a dark Polynesian. She was beautiful, so her son was accustomed to pretty. This would have been the reason he had the girl so enthralled the first day. Regina’s only regrets in life were letting him go to visit that summer, and not teaching her son the all-important lesson, that Pretty and Trouble are lovers.

It would have been easy to teach him. He was an obedient kid, much too innocent for seven-teen; his father programmed him to “mack on girls.” He was too innocent to understand what it meant when Trouble caught him sneaking away from his Aunt Janie’s house to make out with Pretty. He was too innocent to understand what Trouble would do to Pretty, too innocent to understand the rope and that Trouble would set fire to his swagger.

The parlor tried to do their best to cover the smell, but it seeped out the casket. It became overbearing like the gargantuan crucifix behind the pulpit that questioned the faith of the bereaved with its grief laden face. Regina did not notice the charred smell at all. What turned her stomach was the flowery perfume Pretty wore and the fact that she had the gall to show up. She had come to Denver to pay her last respects. Regina walked up to her, supported by Janie and her sons, to get a closer look at the skirt that was too short for a funeral, and to make sure that it was her smell that sickened her. When Regina stood in front of her, she was sure of it and slapped her. Pretty and Trouble together again.

“Major, we’re coming up on our hot-sector.”

“All units hold Alpha flight pattern. Engage at will.”

“Switching to infra-red. Opening a can!”

Regina saw the smoky campfires. They were colorful blotches on her display before the napalm’s swathes of orange and white streaked across the screen. The pines catching fire illuminated the rows of teepee-looking tents and created a fire wall that encircled the jarred Southern forces. Sgt. Brown switched the chain gun’s control to Regina’s terminal

“Ladies first Major.”

“Why, Sgt. Brown, I thought you’d never ask.”

***

Private Benson laid motionless in the medical tent on the south side of the encampment with the scores of coughing, bleeding, and dying men. His leg was swollen from the bullet lodged in it and needed amputation. The shouting and rumbling earth distracted him from the pain. He moved to sit up in his cot, even though hot needles shot through his hip from doing so. Others less injured groped for crutches in the dark. Soldiers stood at the entrance and looked at the fires raging on the far side of the campsite.

“What do you see?”

“There’s a buncha shootin,’ fires a goin,’ but I don’t see no – whoa! What in the hell…”

“What? What?”

“Fire jus’ streaked out the sky and blew up! It’s Armageddon!”

“What ya mean ‘out the sky’.” Private Benson eased his bad leg from the cot. “Move from the door and lemme see. That’s the craziest soundin’ gun I ever heard. They ain’t reloadin’ or too fast for me ta tell.”

The soldiers would have moved, but the air itself began to pump in their ears. The tent’s walls began to breathe. Its heartbeat descended from directly above. Everyone was awake now, but no one moved.

“The – There’s something out here, in front of the tent.”

“What do ya mean somethin’?”

The infirmary’s tie-downs were not strong enough to keep out a mid-summer shower, let alone stout enough to keep whizzing bullets from exploding dirt clods, pulverizing lamps, splintering wooden cot legs and quelling curious minds. All laid silent soon enough, but Private Benson would not be denied the answers to his questions and took his portion in the throat. He wriggled like a fish almost out of time, clasping the ragged hole in his neck, but once he fell back onto his cot, he laid still and did not struggle against the blood draining into his lungs. The tent was blown from its moorings, and he was able to look into the red, incandescent eyes of the first horseman. War is not Pretty; it is what happens when Trouble and she have a spat.

***

Ananias checked the diagnostics of the twelve bands being quantumly tethered to the choppers’ gas tanks. He had set them to siphon fuel from tankers in his present strand. The tingling and buzzing was constant as he pulled further from his native strand. Today he popped two pills to calm the anvil’s song between his temples. After sending more ammunition and supplies to Regina’s base camp, he laid on his lounger and prayed for her to end her operation for the day. When he awoke the air was still. He staggered to his terminal to check his wife’s progress.

The operation was a success. The Air Force’s 141st Helicopter Brigade encircled both forces and smothered them with T.O.W., napalm, and chain-gun fire throughout the night. The morning found losses of 50,000 men from both Confederate and Union sides, piled high at her doorsteps and bloodstained tears shone on her cheeks. Remnants of the armies of the Potomac and North Virginia congealed into tattered filaments across south-central Pennsylvania. Each of them riding hard in the direction of home and being accosted by cacophonous killers on the wind, who stopped for neither rest nor drink.

Regina was just outside of Richmond and the corps was not on the move. Soon she would make both government kowtow and a true democracy would be installed. A democracy without the necessities of civil rights movements, Supreme Court decisions, boycotts and sit-ins. A democracy without the legacies of Garvey, Dubois, King, and Shabazz. A democracy without the idiosyncrasies of Forrest, Wilson, Duke, and Limbaugh. A democracy without the tragic sacrifices of Emmitt Teal and Solomon Scapegrace.

Ananias decided against disturbing this delicate process and trudged back to the chair after having a glass of water. His head still ached.

I need some air.

Ananias rose from the recliner again and walked down the bare halls of his underground lab. At the hall’s end was an elevator with a keypad. He punched in his code and the elevator’s low drone echoed in the corridor. The doors hissed and opened to a burgundy marble panel lift. When he reached his house’s basement, the dank smell of dusty boxes and mothballed clothes rushed his nostrils. He made his way through the dark and climbed the stairs to his house’s ground floor and open the door.

In the doorway stood a slender young man, no more than twenty-one years old. His face was sunken in around the cheeks and eyes, but this looked as if it was a part of his natural features, not caused by illness. His eyes were lively below the hoods of brow, his lips were full, surrounded by a thin goatee. Ananias stood there staring at him, unable to mouth a word because of the large pistol like weapon the stranger had pointed at his liver. He had accepted that he was about to die when the young man let a slow, creepy smile spread across his face.

“Hi Dad. Where’s Mom?”

***

Regina gripped the pistol by the barrel and held it out to Rufus, who just stared at it. She nodded and he took her sidearm, sliding each long finger around the smooth pearl handle.

When Regina and her men crossed the tobacco fields of Norman J Wiley two weeks ago, they found this mute with his arms tied above his head to a tree, receiving twenty-one of Calvin’s best. Regina took out Calvin’s kneecap in mid stroke. After the ensuing chaos died down, she learned Rufus was receiving lashes for thieving a chicken and since he could not deny the charge it was determined he was the guilty party. Rufus’s shoulders bore most punishments due to his inability to speak and to keep the backs of his children and the plantation’s young free of scabs. Regina had become close with the quiet man over the past few days. He was 53 years old, and it was she who gave him his first taste of chocolate and beer. It took her four tries to get him not to swallow his gum. Regina looked into his rheumatic flat face. She marveled at how placid his eyes were, how child-like light still danced in them. It was then she understood how General Mcgillacutti could ask ‘How’s that boy of yours doing?’ and when she told him he was accepted at M.I.T., how he could say ‘I was talking about the energy project Major.’ She knew for things to be right in the world, this was a light that had to be stripped away.

Calvin was sprawled on the ground not able to put any weight on his bullet shattered knee. His breathing was labored, and dark blotches of sweat appeared on his chest and streaked from his armpits. His red hair was matted and infused with hay, dirt, and manure. His chubby face contracted with pain every time he shifted to see what the soldiers were pouring around the house. When Rufus took the pistol from Regina, Calvin’s eyes were fixed on him even though the whoosh of a hungry fire ignited under the house that held Wiley and his family.

“The hell with you - you nigger she-devil! I’ll see you all in hell!”

A champagne cork sounding shot ended Calvin’s rant. An eerie calm chorused the burning house’s breathy murmurs.

***

“Sorry about the gun Dad, but she won’t stop you know.” Solomon blew a whirl of steam from his coffee and took a sip. “She’ll just keep marching across continent after continent. She’ll take Europe and Asia, uniting Africa along the way.”

Ananias sat on a white couch in a home he did not recognize as his except for the wall placement. He poked at the opaque holographic screen before him, and pictures and articles flashed and zipped into focus.

“But why – I mean this is unnecessary.”

“That I don’t know, but I do know she becomes the first world conqueror and dooms us all.”

“What do you mean?” Ananias lowered his hand from the screen and it disappeared.

“Although the advances she brought to the past fast forwarded technological achievements, by her implementing global genocide she thinned mankind’s gene pool leaving us at the mercy of genetic diseases. In short, no one lives over thirty-three years.

“What?” Ananias grabbed his forehead.

“My wife’s in her last days at thirty-one.”

“Your wife? Son you’re only –”

“Twenty-one, with one foot in the grave.” Solomon put his cap on the table and sank into his chair. “Some people say I was silly to marry someone so late in their life, but these past two years have been the happiest of my life.”

Ananias watched his cup of coffee in silence. The table noticed a temperature drop in his beverage and promptly reheated it.

“Would you like to see her?”

“Yes – yes I would.”

Father and son walked to a door near the front of the house and entered a room where a woman laid covered by a silver sheet. Hovering nickel-sized pyramids probed her body with thin purple lasers. Her face was more distorted than Solomon’s and looked like the extreme features of a Dogon tribal mask. Yet Ananias could see beauty in the strange face framed by flowing ebony hair.

“Honey, Father is here to see you.”

Penelope opened her eyes and saw her husband and her father-in-law, who hung back by the door.

“Hello gentleman. Sorry I’m feeling so tired today.” She gave Solomon a solid smile, but her voice was a wisp.

“It’s okay sweetheart, you just rest. Father has come up with a way to make people better.”

“Oh, that is wonderful.” Penelope smiled again, closed her eyes, and dropped off to sleep. Solomon touched her face, then left the room with his father close behind.

***

Regina had just finished inspecting her newly formed soldier corps, made of former slaves, Indigenous people, and free Black people. They were resting in the makeshift barracks that were the shops along Broadway, while the rest of New York gripped in fear, packed to leave in a mass exodus. The Treaty of Confluence had been signed. Lincoln and Davis figured out Regina was not Apolloyon, but rather a futuristic warrior who would destroy every city in America if not deserted for the ‘new people.’ The loud chattering death machines circling the skies underlined that point.

Earlier that week she had soldiers evaluated. Those whom she felt were wavering in there want to complete their training were told they had been granted a leave of absence and to turn in their wrist bands.

One would believe that a person having their molecular bonds ripped apart would impart a blood curdling scream, but they don’t. A pillar of violet smoke fills the space they occupied, which gets sucked into a dimensional rift which implodes, quietly resealing itself. Regina knew she might catch flak from Ananias about her decisions but was caught off-guard when he actually showed up in her quarters.

“Look, baby, I had to do it. Those men could have jeopardized –”

“I didn’t come back to correct you about something that had to be done anyway.” Ananias walked over to her and slid his hands from her hips to the small of her back. “I came here because I missed you.”

“Oh, but I thought you couldn’t come here once I started changing things here.” Regina softened, like she always did when he talked close to her ear. It had been months since she touched him, and she struggled to think clearly while her lips were so close to his.

“I found a way to come, but we can talk about it later. We have all the time in the world.”

***

The dawn was bright, clear, and crisp enough to sting the nose. Sparrows flitted from tree to tree, scraped their beaks on branches and fussed over avian matters. A pigeon waddled along the ledge, pecked at a moth, adjusted its plumage, and then pecked again to finish off the now wingless bug. Ananias sat backwards in the chair, beside the arabesque dresser and watched all of this through the crack in the curtain he had drawn to darken the room. Regina, deep in the plush folds of a red comforter and satin laced pillows, had not moved all night.

“So, this what it’s come to huh?” She tugged at the handcuffs and the headboard railings.

“You don’t understand, you’re killing our son.”

“I’m killing our son! I’m killing our son! No mister your cowardice is killing our son!” Regina glared at him then kicked a pillow his way. “The people whose asses you kiss all day, who you think will make you a first-class citizen, are killing our son!”

“You killing off half the planet is killing our son. Yes – yes, I know about your plans.”

“They deserve it.” Regina sat up as far as the cuffs would let her. “For every mother who has lost a child, for every drop of blood shed –”

“I wanted democracy. True democracy Regina, not blind vengeance.” He rubbed his hands over the top of his head and brought them to rest on his face. “Now, you’re no better than them.”

“You’re just chicken shit. Why don’t you grow a pair?”

“There is no way back! I’m stuck here forever!” Ananias struck his chest with a closed fist. He saw her jump, then settle down. He had never raised his voice with her before. “I wanted my son and democracy and now I have neither, but at least I can save my son. I can stop you.”

Regina slumped down into the bed as the weight of what he said sank in.

“I’m not going to stop, so you’re going to have to kill me.”

Ananias said nothing, exhaled and stood from the chair.

“There’s my pistol on the table. So, Ananias are you going to kill me?”

“Yes, but I could never shoot you honey” He walked over to her, bent down and kissed her. For a while, she kissed him back before she plunged her teeth into his bottom lip. He was prepared and alleviated the pain with a push of a button and a face full of violet smoke.

The End

Copyrighted 2014