We lock eyes for a moment and you smile knowingly. Target-fixed, you trip on your feet to get to my friends and I.

I hold my breath and brace myself for the worst. These aren’t the encounters I hope for while stranded on the platform. Other people are huddled in the pale light, but they neglect to interfere. It must not be their place. You walk into the light, now fully illuminated in your tumultuous glory. You want to know where my friend is from. Northern California.

You knew it. It had to be that or Texas.

You comment on her tights. I avoid looking at you. She tries to edge away, but you persist. I still hold my breath, tighten my fists and the muscles in my stomach involuntarily. It’s almost like during those thriller movies when you know something bad is about to happen.

Your alcohol-laden spittle is fired off in many directions — one direction being mine. You regale us with your stories of others from warmer climes and your time in San Francisco. You terrify me, you’re taller and probably stronger than we are. You have the jaunty look of being out of control. But at the same time, I want to know why. Why are you here now, in a hazy stupor, stumbling after a group of college girls?

Your sticky, snot-encrusted moustache makes its way dangerously close to my face. It puts me at risk of getting stuck, drawn in with the scent of alcohol.

You followed as we tried to evade your dizzy gaze. Now, waiting on the other side of the tracks for the purple line which refuses to arrive. Shifting from foot to foot, I try to stay warm, but also try to stay a few steps away.

You ask her where she lives. I clinch my teeth as she answers “Evanston.”

Surely you’ll follow us home.

You respond “Oh, so you’re going north.”

You’re going to Wilson. We tell you you’re on the wrong side of the tracks. I breathe for the first time. Hopefully you don’t notice my massive exhale. That’s all it took? You oblige and enlist the help of a CTA worker to find your destination up the stairs. In a zig-zag manner, you leave us, cold and still waiting on the platform.

The back stairway was blue, the paint peeling from the combined assault of the weather and our young, mischievous hands. My sister and I stood on the fire escape having too many freezer pops, tossing the wrappers to our cousins in the opposite building and blowing bubbles toward them that valiantly fought the opposing breeze. Few survived, and then our mother called us inside for lunch.

2

My fingers figure-skated across the smooth surface of the table. I tried to do triple Lutz jumps like Kristi Yamaguchi but settled for half of a camel spin because wrists just don’t twist that way. My mother came in from the kitchen with the telephone held tight between her shoulder and her ear and two plates of rice and curry for my sister and me. The telephone cord stretched, and this time she placed the plates in front of us without pulling the telephone off the wall. Patting our backs, she told us to put our ice skaters away and eat up, and then she slid back into the kitchen and her phone conversation. My sister ignored her spoon and ate her rice by hand, grain by grain, avoiding the ones yellowed by the oily curry. I finger-skated one last figure-eight and took a spoonful of my lunch, biting directly into a hidden green cardamom. Jumping out of my seat, I ran to the kitchen and spat the pod and seeds out into the garbage can, continuing to spit until the bitter taste was gone. I yelled at my mother, “I told you not to put those in there!”

3

I walked into the kitchen with my plate, empty except for green cardamoms and whole black peppers that somehow always snuck onto my plate, and my mom finished up her conversation. “It could only have been someone in the family,” she said. I washed my hands and flicked the drops of water from my fingers into the air like fireworks on the fourth of July.

4

My sister and I stood elbow to elbow at the window, our eyes squinting in the sunlight as we searched for our father among the passersby. By the left side of our building, our downstairs neighbor was bent over, shaking, his hands on his knees for support, his bald head reflecting off the afternoon sunlight like a second sun. I noticed my father’s brisk walk before I had a chance to recognize his face. His steps, long and quick strides, were reminiscent of my gym teacher’s demonstration of power walking; he was a confident man who knew where he was going and had no time to waste. That day he had no time to catch our eyes in the window and wave.

5

My mother’s generic, convenience-store perfume permeated the dining room with its plastic jasmine scent and mixed with the smell of the masala she tried to mask, creating a new scent that was even more difficult to bear. Sitting cross-legged on the ground with a board game, my sister and I were able to breathe better-smelling air, leaving our parents to the other. From my position facing the table, I saw the no-nonsense expressions on my parents’ faces as they ate lunch together, and I went through my mental inventory of things I had done recently that I shouldn’t have. Nothing came close to be deserving of the looks on their faces — was my sister to blame? “We’re going to your uncle’s tonight,” my father said. “Behave.”

6

I sat on the too-plush sofa and stared into my cousin’s still-clear brown eyes trying to absorb the watery tears back into my eyes by opening them wider. The struggle was futile — my cousin was the undefeated champion in the staring contest — and I blinked, trailing tears down my cheeks and into my lap. As I entered the bathroom to wash up, the constant murmur of voices from the living room came to a quick crescendo with my father’s booming voice. I slinked down the hall to peer into the room: My father, his back straight as he tried to stretch his short five-foot frame to its full advantage, facing my uncle as one hand pointed to my oldest cousin in accusation; my mother behind my father leveling an angry glare at my cousin; my uncle leaning his body down towards my father, his eyes bulging out like dead fish eyes and my aunt taking up the space behind my uncle with an arm held out protectively in front of her son.

7

That night in bed, I stared into the dark and the apartment was still. I couldn’t hear my father’s thundering snores, always as reliable as my parents’ goodnight kisses and my ensuing big-girl disgust.

8

My sister and I snuck out onto the fire escape first thing in the morning, many colorful freezer pops in our hands, and we waited for our cousins. Their back door, the dark wood faded and scratched like ours with nails sticking out in inconvenient places, remained shut even after we woke the man and his dog downstairs. The faded curtains of their kitchen window fluttered, but no one answered our calls.

T M Stringfellow (Tara Stringfellow) is an Weinberg ‘07 alumna and a budding poet living in the Chicago area. Her first book of poetry is entitled More than Dancing and is published by Third World Press. Her other work can be found at Voice and Vision: An African American Literary Magazine, decomP: a literary magazine, and Prompt Magazine. She is gathering up enough courage to attend more open mics and you can usually find her bouncing/dancing/shopping around Chicago.

The view around me was all gray as the rain finally began to clear up. Having wandered outside, I was now staring off into the great inland gulf, where the clouds still extended all the way to the horizon on this spring afternoon. I was 12, and still too young to understand why my family made us come back here every year. They all told me it would never make complete sense to me — it happened three years before I was born after all. Sometimes they marveled at how I was already eight, or 10, or 12 and had only ever known a world like this. I still didn’t know what to make of that.

Soon everyone was outside, and the cheerless ritual commenced. Uncle Mike was staring at his compass. “St. Louis used to be 113 miles in that direction,” he said, pointing out to sea. “They said that this year, since the water’s been a little lower, if you go out there, the top of the arch is now partly exposed.” There was a gentle enthusiasm from the rest, and these form of remarks continued for a while. My parents, as they had done countless times before, tried to explain to me exactly where our family had lived, where the Mississippi river used to be, where Max had died.

Gradually the tone of the conversation shifted. My younger cousins and I were made to listen to the familiar stories of those of us who hadn’t made it out alive. Grandma Wanda was with us. By now she could barely remember her own name, but never ceased to recall the three grandchildren she had lost that year, and the two that had survived. Next, as always happened, my parents began to talk about the war. It seemed like they needed something to take their anger out on. I didn’t understand them much when they talked about politics, but the more riled up they got, the less complicated their words became. “It’s 15 years since this happened, and all that our government cares about is stealing from what remains of the rest of the world.” “There is not a single politician in Denver willing to stand up to the president.”

By this point I was tired, cold, depressed and wanted nothing more but to return inside and watch TV or find some other diversion. But, as always, everyone was now walking along the coastal debris, and somehow I knew it was my duty, my responsibility to follow along complacently.

It was a sight I was familiar with. I made my way through the rotting wood that covered the ground — wood that used to be part of the houses that had once stood around here. Occasionally, the fragmented skeletons of old cars poked through, which had only a marginal effect in dulling the boredom that pervaded this somber pilgrimage.

At length, we decided it was time for a break and found an appropriate place to sit down for a while. As a small relief, Aunt Karli distributed some trail mix (FEMA issued). I was content to sit alone as I ate — there wasn’t much to talk about. That was when the shoes caught my eyes.

To be sure, old shoes were a relatively common sight amongst the debris, and most pairs were in far worse shape than these two sneakers sitting some 10 feet from me. But there was something different about these shoes, something at once great and terrifying. Looking at the back of them, rising up out of the ground, I could see an austerity and grandeur to them, as if they were the shadow of some great edifice. They had been soaked, but they were still completely sturdy, as if daring to defy the forces of time. Their hard gray surfaces looked like stone — stone with various shapes and inscriptions carved into it. All at once it occurred to me—these shoes resembled the ruins of the Mayans I had studied in school. These gray towers some 10 feet from me were nothing less than ancient Mayan temple — or so I almost believed for a second.

It was on that dreary spring afternoon that I first began to understand the world that had perished before my time. It felt a little confusing; after all, I had seen countless pictures of St. Louis, New York and Los Angeles in their prime, but none of them had ever resonated with me. It was an image of ruins — of artifacts that survive the destructive powers of time but leave the civilizations that created them behind — that made me begin to understand just how much my family had lost.

“STOP!” Seema screamed from the backseat.

Natasha’s laughter filled the car. “I told you she’d be the first to break!”

Seema swore under her breath, slumping in her seat and adding, “I hate scary stories.”

“They’re not stories,” Nikki said, swiveling in the passenger’s seat to grin at Seema. “They’re urban legends. That means they actually happened.”

Seema shrieked again, pulling her knees to her chest and burying her head in her knees. Natasha rolled her eyes and mouthed, “drama queen.”

“Stop screaming, you’re distracting the driver,” scolded Anchal, who was in fact driving.

“From what?” Natasha snorted sarcastically. “The millions of other people on the road?”

“Just because there’s no traffic—”

“Where are we, anyway?” Seema asked, emerging from her terrified crouch.

“Somewhere between Indiana and Evanston,” Anchal said.

“You don’t know where we are,” Nikki stated simply.

“I know that we have to follow this road until we hit the expressway.”

“Watch that motorcycle,” Natasha pointed towards the bright white light approaching them from the opposite direction.

“I’m watching it, I’m watching it,” Anchal muttered. “Jeez, you guys treat me like I don’t know how to drive.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why is that idiot driving on this side of the road?”

Anchal flicked the bright lights on and off, on and off to warn the rider, but the rider apparently hadn’t seen because he kept coming towards them.

“Horn,” Nikki suggested. Anchal blared it, to no avail. She swore under her breath and swerved to the other side of the road.

“What the—?” Natasha said loudly.

The light was still approaching, now apparently from the other side of the road. Anchal swore and hit the brakes hard. They could see nothing but the scalding white light.

“That can’t be a motorcycle,” Nikki said, awestruck.

Seema closed her eyes and swallowed hard. When no one said anything for a few moments, she opened them again. The light was filling the windshield.

“Drive out of its way,” Natasha urged, surprised at the calmness of her own voice.

Anchal was trembling. “There’s nowhere to go,” she heard herself say. “It’s everywhere.”

“Drive through it,” Nikki suggested.

Nodding, Anchal stepped on the accelerator.

Seema screamed.

The light didn’t stop. It penetrated the windshield and cleaved through the car, blinding them.

Nikki swore loudly.

No sooner had it come than it was gone. As their eyes adjusted to the darkness again, all of them turned around to look through the back window.

It was gone.

T M Stringfellow (Tara Stringfellow) is an Weinberg ‘07 alumna and a budding poet living in the Chicago area. Her first book of poetry is entitled More than Dancing and is published by Third World Press. Her other work can be found at Voice and Vision: An African American Literary Magazine, decomP: a literary magazine, and Prompt Magazine. She is gathering up enough courage to attend more open mics and you can usually find her bouncing/dancing/shopping around Chicago.

Victor was driving, his eyes outlined with red from staring at long country roads and sleep deprivation. Dani sat in the passenger seat staring out the window, imagining what the world would look like if she could see in the pitch-black. The darkness pressed down on them as they both noticed the absolute contrast of golden lights in distance. Unconsciously, Victor sped up, anxious to escape the insecurity of not knowing what lay in the surrounding shadows.

Coming upon the neat columns of familiar lights on each side of the road, they simultaneously released the breath they hadn’t noticed they’d been holding. The quiet whisper of air leaving lungs sounded harsh and raspy in the painful silence that had been lingering between them for hours. They looked at each other and away again, the armrests acting like a barrier, separating the car into two halves.

Victor’s eyes relaxed, not having to strain to see in the cones of light his headlights gave off. He wondered why their problems couldn’t be solved as simply as lights illuminating a dark road.

She had been bored out of her mind for hours. The car had become a prison cell, boxing her in, barring her from the outside with a cellmate who refused to talk to her. With the coming of the light, she was relieved to see a little farther out of the window. Cornfields had been filling her vision for hours, so instead she examined the lights. Victor had driven up to the lights so quickly that the poles flew by, but he had slowed down, reluctant for the illuminated road to end, savoring the gift of light.

Dani had grown up in the suburbs and was used to skinny metal streetlights, so the irregularly-shaped poles were new to her, and she assumed they were normal for the country. The first thing she realized was that the lights were not electric, but threw flickering shadows on the road. She concentrated on one of the lights the car was slowly approaching and discovered they were in fact lanterns, suspended poles with hooks around the top, like a shepherd’s staff. She traced the pole downward, trying to decipher why the shape was not skinny and straight the whole way down to the ground. Slowly, the car and pole became level.

She screamed.

“What?” Victor slammed on the brake, tires squealing replacing her yell. The sound of her scream had pierced the long silence, leaving a ringing in his ears. Tears were streaming down her face and her lips were moving, but only whimpering emerged. “What? What is it?” Her words were still incomprehensible and he was starting to lose his patience. He grabbed her tear-streaked face and forcing her to face him. “What is it?” he said more quietly, but his tone was harsh. She took no notice, gasping, “Drive! Just Drive!”

He was going so slowly she became desperate. Now she was pleading between bouts of crying, “Please Victor, please drive faster.”

“Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

“P-p-eople. Th-there are people out there,” she whispered and everything that had been precariously resting within exploded out of her. She started screaming hysterically, her whole body shaking with sobs.

He stared at her in shock. Fifteen hours of driving and three hours of sleep the past two days had slowed his reaction time, but when his emotions arrived, they were a tremendous force that consumed him.

He stopped the car.

Victor rolled down the window and eyed the man closest to him. The chill that ran up and down his spine like a cold wind should have been enough warning, but somewhere in between the third gas station and the twentieth dead corn field, malice stepped into his heart.

Like all of the others he was garbed in a black cloak that covered his entire body. The shadows cast from his lantern played under his hood, suggesting the outline of a face. Hidden hands beneath long sleeves grasped the pole.

“Hey. You know there’s no point in you guys being out here. People have things called headlights. Nobody needs you.” The man’s hood fluttered in the chill air, but he did not move. Victor stared, fury pulsing through his veins, when a pounding penetrated his trance. The sound seemed far away at first, then slowly, as if waking from a dream, he realized the noise was close to him. He broke his gaze and looked into the car at Dani, who was pounding her fist upon the side of the door.

Victor rolled up the window muttering “freaks.” He put his foot down hard on the gas, making the tires scream. His skin prickled as series of what-ifs crawled across his body, all the harm the men could have caused while they were stopped.

Only thirty seconds had passed when all the lights went out at once.

Purple afterimages burned in his retina. Dani stopped crying, but moaned a sick sound of agony. The wheel was moist beneath his hands, but his whole body was so cold he felt numb. The electric headlights of his car seemed tiny and he searched the road for signs of the men rushing at him or throwing things at the car.

His mind began use logic to try and reason with fear. The faster something is moving, the harder the object is to hit. He thrust down on the accelerator until pedal was touching the floorboards. The engine was whining after a minute of full power and the woman had stopped shaking enough to look up at him.

She watched the sweat pour down his face, moistening his shirt. He sat with a back unnaturally straight, and his knuckles were gripping the wheel so hard they were white; his arms were trembling. She opened her mouth to say, “Maybe you should slow down a little,” when the road stopped.

Before he had even taken his foot off of the accelerator, they had covered the ten feet of ground before the cliff. As the car drove off the edge, the light from the headlights was lost in the empty air before them. Victor’s eyes raced to his rear-view mirror as the flash of the lights bursting back on caught his attention. They illuminated the almost ninety degree turn that he had missed. He turned his head to look out the back window as the car dropped into darkness, but all he could see were the stars above them.

Once upon a time

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm were born one year, one month, and twenty days apart.

Their home was Hanau, Germany. Two years before Jacob’s birth, an older son, Friedrich, was born but died in infancy.

Compared to modern standards, infant mortality rates in Europe at this time were relatively high.

I am certain knowing this would not have qualmed the pain of Dorothea and Philipp, the Grimm parents.

I assume, though am not certain, it also did not allow Jacob and Wilhelm any comfort, knowing a ghost child lived among them.

By 1796, three more members of the Grimm family had died: two more sons, both in infancy, and Philipp Grimm, the children’s father and Dorothea’s husband, plunging the once prosperous family into poverty.

Many children are fatherless in the Grimm Brother’s tales.

Cinderella

Snow White

Or experience horrible (grim) circumstances:

The Handless Maiden

Hansel and Gretel

With the support of family members, Jacob and Wilhelm acquired excellent educations.

At an expense: the family often lived in miserable conditions and ate very poorly.

Resilience. A near fairytale-like quality.

Middle

At the University of Marburg, Jacob and Wilhelm began to collect and transcribe old tales.

A vanishing culture, German peasantry, could thus be preserved allowing for the first edition of Kinder und Hausmärchen to be published in 1812.

Several problems arose:

Both Jacob and Wilhelm used the introduction to their first collection as a platform for German nationalism: “Everything that has been collected here from oral traditions is (with the exception of ‘Puss in Boots’) purely German in its origins.”

Unfortunately many of the stories have counterparts in French and Italian culture: Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Many Furs.

Social critics also had problems with the stories’ treatment of sex, violence and incest.

In the original Rapunzel, the princess’ clothes get progressively tighter after the prince has visited several times in the night.

At the end of Cinderella, the evil stepsisters get their eyes pecked out by birds.

One cuts off her toes, the other her heels in an ill-fated attempt to fit into Cinderella’s slipper.

The witch in Snow White dances to her death in white hot shoes.

In Allerleirauh, a lesser known tale, a widowed King attempts to force his daughter to marry him. She runs away disguised as a kitchen maid.

Many children are also abused in the stories.

In The Poor Boy in the Grave, a starving orphan boy is abused and betrayed by his master. In a final effort to live, he steals honey and wine to eat, before dying, alone.

Hansel and Gretel lose their loving mother and are tricked into visiting an evil witch by their father’s new wife.

Two tales are openly Anti-Semitic: The Jew Among Thorns and The Good Bargain.

This encouraged Adolf Hitler in his campaign for German nationalism in the mid 20th century, an outcome one hopes neither of the Grimm’s desired.

Both during the Grimm’s lifetime and after their deaths, many of these unpleasant themes were phased out.

A project meant to restore national identity to Germany transformed to entertainment for children.

End

After several subsequent publications of their story collections, the brothers focused their efforts on linguistic scholarship.

Jacob published the first volume of German Grammar in 1819.

By 1840, both are awarded professorship at the prestigious University of Berlin and began working on a comprehensive dictionary of the German language.

At this point, their new editions of old tales had been modified to “eliminate every phrase not appropriate for children.”

Modern thinkers have interpreted the original tales in a variety of ways.

Many feminists argue against the passive, weak role of female characters.

Princesses are saved by their Princes, kings are tyrannical, powerful, patriarchal, and women are self-sacrificing, obedient and patient.

Others celebrate the ingenuity of women who escaped their circumstances: Hildebrand, Rapunzel.

Psychoanalysts believe the stories reveal unconscious fantasies, like those in dreams.

One scholar even suggests that Sleeping Beauty’s prick on a spinning wheel is symbolic of a young woman beginning her menstruation cycle.

She only awakes once a mature sexual love, the Prince, finds her.

Wilhelm Grimm married Henriette Wilde in 1825 and had four children.

Jacob remained a bachelor until his death.

The two brothers appeared inseparable as they lived together even after Wilhelm’s marriage.

Wilhelm died on December 16, 1859.

Three years, nine months and four days later, Jacob joined his brother in the grave.

Various movies, books and biopics have been made about the Grimms and the tales they collected.

Even in death, some shred of their lives continue, ghosts of their stories live, happily ever after or not.

Giving up, the child turned to the table next to her and picked up the glass candy bowl. She rummaged through the various treasures in the bowl and pulled out a round orange hard-candy. She pulled on both ends of the wrapper so that the gem twirled out of its wrapping and landed in her hand. Happily, she shoved the candy into her mouth and moved it around with her tongue. Eventually forgetting about it, she settled the candy at the side of her mouth so that it made a little bubble in her cheek.

Ashley’s mom, Ms. Ackers, jolted open the door to the waiting room. “Sweetie, there you are!” she said to Ashley with a hint of reprimand. “Is everything ok?”

“Yeah, fine,” Ashley said.

Ms. Ackers nodded but said nothing, waiting for her daughter to elaborate. Ashley folded her arms and clicked the hard candy against her teeth. Shoulders slumping, Ms. Ackers asked, “Well, why was I called here?”

“Counselor Julian wanted to meet you is all,” Ashley said evenly.

Ms. Ackers fumbled through her purse and pulled out an almost tan colored lipstick. She ran the tube along her thin lips, then smacked her lips together. “I’m glad that the two of you are getting close. I’d just like to know why she wants to see me.”

“Well actually,” Ashley said, undoing her lopsided braid, “It was my idea that you talk to Counselor Julian. We’re just gonna talk about my friends.”

Ashley’s mom looked up from her cosmetic mirror. “Your friends?” she asked. “Which friends? Your school friends?”

Counselor Julian popped into the waiting room. Ms. Ackers did not react right away, still waiting for an answer from Ashley. The counselor sought Ms. Ackers’s eyes but could not get a hold of them. After a moment, she said, “Hi, Ms. Ackers? I’m Jenny. It’s nice to finally meet you.” She smiled at Ashley. “Hey girlie, how are you today?” The counselor directed her attention back at the mother. “Let’s go into my office.”

Ms. Ackers frowned as she followed Ashley and the counselor into the office, where the counselor’s desk took up most of the room. A Mondrian print hung on the far wall.

After sitting down, Ashley picked up a stress ball from Counselor Julian’s desk. She began to squeeze and stretch the red and orange ball.

The mother and counselor shifted in their seats to get comfortable. Ms. Ackers examined the magazines on the counselor’s desk: Parenting, Life and Style and Bon Appétit. With a deepened frown, she looked at the counselor, and the two caught each other’s eyes. Quickly, they both looked away, Ms. Ackers’s eyes settling back down on the magazines and Counselor Julian’s on Ashley.

After a moment, the counselor’s eyes returned to the mother, and she began, “Ms. Ackers, I’m sure you’re aware that your daughter has created some imaginary friends.” She gave Ashley a little smile when she said the word imaginary. But Ashley missed the smile because she was staring determinedly at the stress ball.

Ms. Ackers folded her hands in her lap, taking a moment to think. “I see.” She looked at her daughter pointedly. “Ashley made me think that we’d be talking about her classmates.” Counselor Julian nodded at the mother but seemed like she was waiting for more of a response, so Ms. Ackers continued, “Of course, I know that Ashley has an imagination and that she has some imaginary friends, as you call them. Jim and I have talked to her about them, but we’ve agreed that it’s not really a big deal. As an afterthought, she added, “seeing as she’s only 12.”

“But it is a big deal because these imaginary friends are affecting the way that other kids treat Ashley. I mean, when she was first sent to see me it was because she was being picked on during recess.” Counselor Julian turned towards the girl for confirmation, but Ashley would not look up. The counselor continued, “Just because these friends of Ashley’s are imagined, Ms. Ackers, does not mean that they are not a real problem. Luckily, we’ve made progress,” the counselor said, giving Ashley a friendly shove. “She’s now admitting that she made up Amber, Jackson and Paul.”

“So that I would not be bored,” Ashley cut in.

“Or lonely,” continued the counselor. “Now that we’ve gotten Ashley to acknowledge that these three characters are her invention, she’ll have an easier time making real friends.”

“I already have an easy time making friends,” Ashley mumbled, folding her arms.

“This way you’ll have an even easier time,” Counselor Julian winked at Ashley. The two smiled at each other again.

The mother stared at Ashley for a few seconds, then shifted her gaze towards the counselor. She pressed her lips together, opened them as if to speak, and then pursed them again. With a forced smile she said, “Well. This is good news. It sounds like things are going in the right direction. I’m so glad to hear it.” The two woman locked eyes for a moment, and challenged each other with their gazes.

Sensing discomfort, Ashley handed her mom the stress ball. “Check this out mom. When you squeeze it the colors swirl around inside. See!”

Counselor Julian let go of the mother’s gaze and smiled at Ashley. Placing her left hand on the girl’s left shoulder, she squeezed it gently and smiled, “She loves that thing. She’s always playing with it.”

“Well, her birthday’s coming up, so maybe…” hinted Ms. Ackers.

“What a good idea.” The counselor winked at Ashley. Comfortable again, the girl smiled and laughed. She looked at her mom for approval but could not find her mother’s eyes.

Ms. Ackers was busy rummaging through her purse in search of her phone. After pulling it out and checking the time, she said, “It was nice doing this. I have to get back to work.”

The counselor looked up in surprise. “I understand you having to go, but we’ll really need to meet again. I was not quite finished talking to you about your daughter.”

“Yes, sure,” Ms. Ackers said, making to get up. She reconsidered and said, “You know, it’s not like I didn’t know about Ashley’s imaginary friends. I’m perfectly involved in my daughter’s life. It’s just that Jim and I, well, we see nothing wrong with a 12-year-old who has an imagination.”

The counselor nodded and said, “Well, maybe you could bring Jim next time?” Ashley looked down and started picking at her nails.

“Yes—maybe—but Jim works very late, so I’m not sure…” Ms. Ackers said.

“It’s ok, Mom. We can admit these things to Counselor Julian,” Ashley said. She took the stress ball from her mom and started tugging on either side of it to elongate the shape. “Counselor Julian,” she continued, contorting the ball into a knot, “We have something to tell you: Jim—he isn’t real; he’s imaginary.”

It had been a long morning in the cold already: The interfaith minister had delivered the invocation; the chief of the teacher’s union local had offered remarks; the liberal congresswoman had pledged her support, and the head of the city’s peace activism non-profit had inveighed. Now an old writer/artist/freelance political thinker, a grizzled veteran of the ‘60s, gyrated at center stage in the throes of a musically accompanied poem he had created to mark the occasion. His long silver beard and faded plaid smock tumbled in the breeze, in transcendent intercourse with one another and the bongos. He blasted a cascade of notes from his conch shell before bellowing into the microphone, “Tell George Bush he can kiss my ass!”

The members of the crowd around Michael murmured their approval and shifted their weight from one foot to the other. The two-dozen or so police officers on horseback monitoring the scene sat stony-faced, unfazed by the outrage against dignified discourse. Michael wondered whether the organizers would, in fact, be serving hot soup at the conclusion of the oratory like they had promised. He hoped that the rhetoric, already two hours long, would end soon so that the scheduled march on the courthouse could begin, and his numb feet could warm up.

Michael certainly didn’t consider himself a radical. Super Mario, Pokémon versions Red and Blue, and all the Halo games had provided him and his friends with hours of amusement. Furthermore, he was a fan of cheesy macaroni and Cartoon Network. Despite his sensitive curiosity, he was an undistinguished student at an undistinguished institution; it was tough to stand out among 3,000 teenagers of astonishing diversity at the local city high school, which chronically struggled to make its inadequate allocation of state dollars go a little further. Occasional drug busts and fistfights would bring the authorities to campus, but Michael only ever heard the clipped chatter of police radios in passing. No big shot, he was already wise enough at 17 to leave well enough alone.

His father, who fled civil war as a young man, had long urged him to be wary of authority or at least to not be too friendly with anyone in a uniform. Consequently he would try to steer clear of the army recruiters who would appear in the school cafeteria every week or two as purposefully as he walked on by the police. One day, however, Michael betrayed a grimace in response to one officer’s salutation as he was passing the brochure-strewn table. To his horror, the slighted recruiter strode out after him into the hallway. The towering man caught up to the alarmed boy, sticking an arm against the wall, across Michael’s path, in a mock-casual leaning posture.

“Whoa, whoa, where’re you going so fast, kid?” he demanded.

“To class,” Michael replied, discomfort clear in his voice. “Excuse me.” He took a step to the side. The recruiter grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back against the wall.

“No, excuse me,” he said with a frown. “I didn’t like your attitude back there. You got a problem you want to explain to me?”

“No sir, no problem,” Michael replied breathlessly.

“Let me tell you something, kid,” said the officer. “Little pricks like you aren’t going to make it anywhere. You keep acting like that, and you’re gonna wind up on drugs or in prison. If you wanna be a man and do something with your life, you come talk to me. Otherwise just put your punk-ass head down and keep on walking!”

The humiliation of the experience gnawed at Michael for weeks. His father told him that these were the sorts of challenges a real man must face with resolve. But Michael still felt sore about it one week in early March, when he happened upon a fellow student who was roaming the school one morning before class, surreptitiously flyering the hallways. It was risky business, as the administrators would quickly rip down the unapproved sheets and would punish their audacious distributor if they caught him. Intrigued, Michael asked the student what he was doing. The insurgent publicist responded that he was advertising an upcoming war protest on behalf of the Young Communist League. Michael accepted a flyer from the other boy’s outstretched hand, as he briefly related his own conflict with the aggressive recruiters.

“Wow, you really should come then,” responded the student. “Don’t let them push you around just cause you’re Mexican.” Declining to clarify that he was, in fact, half-Salvadoran, Michael pocketed the contraband flyer.

When the appointed day came, Michael went to join the ragtag band of Communist sympathizers at their pre-march rally. They stood by the side of a busy road, holding signs saying “Students Against the War,” and “Books not Bombs!” Cars whizzed by, headlights bright and windows dark, their occupants insulated from the chilly morning gloom. A handful passing motorists honked their approval, but most were respectfully silent. After about an hour, the comrades tramped up to the main protest in front of the stage. Unable to feel his fingers, Michael stuffed his poster-board placard celebrating socialism into a public garbage can so that he could put his hands in his “made-in-Vietnam” jacket pockets.

Two hours later, he still stood there listening, at the back of the crowd, under the iron-grey sky. He was upset about the recruiters, and he was upset about all the people dying, but he hadn’t found a way to share that feeling with the Communists or anyone else. As the old writer/artist/freelance political thinker wrapped up his presentation, another speaker stepped up to take the microphone. She promised to keep her statements brief and to rile up the dwindling crowd for the march that still lay ahead.

Michael’s whole body shook with shivers. Beyond his feet and hands, his legs were also beginning to disappear from under him. The empty downtown office buildings stood impersonally around the park, their reflective façades as indifferent to the outburst of anger against the faraway war as the dispassionate gazes of the mounted police. There were no water cannons or tear gas, no Molotov cocktails, no flying paving stones, no flowers at the ends of rifle barrels. There was no great all-consuming passion surging through the streets and electrifying bystanders. There was only the persistent dispersal by the wind of pale words. Finally, rising discomfort and fear of frostbite overwhelmed Michael’s nascent spirit of solidarity. He turned his back to the stage and began walking back to the bus, back to his home.