the-perchlorate

    When your team reached the camp, the air attack had already begun.    First the Canberras, laying down a blazing screen of cluster bomblets – you’d seen them out the Paradak window as the formation assembled, two-man bombers coasting over the scrubby hills, mottled green and bulbous – then the Hunter and Vampire fast jets, shrieking down from above the cloud layer and lobbing high explosive right as their pilots hauled them out of the high-G dives. The K-car helicopter gunships came in moments later, hot on their heels just as rehearsed, gunners hanging on in the open troop bays, gloved fingers hovering over the 20mm c

       I pulled open the fridge’s flimsy glass door and just stood there for a few seconds, resting my hand on the handle, letting the cold air pour onto me from the racks of cans and bottles. It was 5 PM, and the afternoon sun was stuffing the little convenience store full of stale, sticky heat. According to my tabula, the high today for Charlotte-Gastonia had been 42 degrees, and I was well inclined to believe it.       The storekeeper, a bald, red-bearded white man with a stomach and a thick American accent, gave me a pointed look. “Hey, honey. You know what you’re buying?”       “Oh. Yeah,” I said. &#

the thing pushing broken glass into my heart is not a hypothetical dropout with a Semtex belt. it’s the miserable certainty of future graves Kalashnikov chatter in cobblestone alleys guided missiles into clinics and supermarkets. it’s the bleary cubicle faces of the martyrs (morgue drawers of meat and filthy ash), and it’s the friends who lack the luxuries of carrier groups and joint strike fighters, who watch from bleeding homelands as foreign flags drape the world.

        “Mia?” I called.        “You’re drunk.”        The heater rattled. I raised myself up on the couch, gazing towards the hallway and my sister’s bedroom. “Mia?” I said more quietly.        Her voice was harsh and fragile. “Fuck off. She’ll answer me.”        Winter Storm Lauren was still dumping snow on us – really thick swathes of it, grayish and indistinct in the late-evening lights, sweeping the dirty concrete buildings in a thirty-mile-an-hour wind that was probably dropping the outside temperature to something near zero. The heater was clattering and chokin

i’m supposed to be finding my voice as everyone finds theirs, like it’s some mystical grail of sound or thought, a fixed jewel lodged hidden in my chest. a voice, they say, is a thing of power – weaponlike – one of those things whose discussion instigates a list that begins with something mundane and ends with “topples empires”. find my voice. i must. if i can figure out just how i want to scream the precise height and length of each shimmering soundwave (or how i want to scratch each graphite line, the frequency of sparks in the finger nerves, time between dry-eye blinks) then they say it’s a gun