A Fresh Hanky
Friends, fans, and foes
I have decided Barack Obama is right. We need change. Too many of you were made furious by my most recent stint at the keyboard. You wanted to tell your side of the story, but you couldn’t, so you name-called. I therefore volunteer to tell not only my side of the story, but yours, too.
We are going to write a novel. You and I and the world leaders. There will be no need to call anyone a liar, because a novel is all lies. It‘s fictitious. As a famous writer once said, the novel tells the truth through lies.
This novel is different in that it is not yet written, but will happen, like life, surrounded by the sights and sounds of “today.”
If any of my characters make you angry, you can talk back, and I will put your words in someone‘s mouth. You can send them to me at hankharwoodhere@gmail.com.
Aghast Over Syria
He left the car running in the driveway and the door open, ran around the front, opened the other door and grabbed the two grocery bags from the passenger seat, ripping one on the edge of the door-frame. Then he strode up the flagstone walk, took the three steps in one, transferred the bag in his right arm to join the other in his left, fumbled in his pocket for the key, and opened the door.
She wasn’t there. He could tell by the silence. No, wait. What was that? A splash. Splish splash, she was taking a bath - the old lyric popped into his mind. He set the bags down on the hall table and ran up the stairs. Banged open the bathroom door and yelled, “Did you hear what he did today?”
A woman, her hair piled up on her head, turned toward him from the bath. Nothing was visible below the billow of suds that bubbled at her shoulders. “Who, dear?” she asked.
“Your boy, your lover, your president.” He entered the room, slammed down the cover of the toilet seat, and sat.”
“No, dear, I don’t know what he did.” She picked up a bar of scented soap and began long strokes up and down her arm. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“He put off whatever the hell he said he was going to do to Syria, till he hears from the UN. Same damn thing Bush did in Iraq.” He put his hands around his mouth like a megaphone and mutedly shouted, “Okay, guys! You’ve got a month to get your nukes, your poisons, or whatever you’ve got, somewhere the hell else. We don’t want to find anything when we come in there. You hear that? Now get going!” He dismantled the megaphone and set the two halves, clenched, on his knees. “So damn stupid.”
The woman stretched her arms in the air, the top of her breasts breaking the surface. “Well, dear, we can’t all be as smart as you.”
He wished to hell she’d stop with the “dear.” The most sarcastic honorific in the English language. Nothing endearing about it. Nothing you could do about it, either. You had to pretend she meant it.
He felt cruel. “Have you seen that picture of the children, lined up in beds as far as the eye can see, like an elementary school dormitory, or a children’s hospital, only they’re all dead?”
“No, dear, I haven’t seen that picture.” She was trying to stay calm, but he could sense her body stiffen in the water.
“No, you wouldn’t have, because the New York fucking Times wouldn’t print that picture. I saw it in a Wall Street Journal someone left on the subway.
“I didn’t know anyone who read the Wall Street Journal took the subway. Don’t they all have limousines?”
Don’t take the bait. Just keep going. “Barack Obama killed those kids.”
She rose up out of the tub, as if torpedoed, the water sloshing off her as she whooshed up, splashing his shoes. She stood there, Angelina Jolie playing Grendel’s mother, shine sliding down her shanks, a full-bodied goddess, mad as hell.
“You! Are! In! Sane!” She grabbed a towel from the rack and wrapped it around her pulchritude, then tidal-waved out of the tub and huffed out of the room.
He followed her into the bedroom. “We should have gone in long ago. When it started. When it was really the people, before the Islamists moved in. Now both sides are our enemies.”
She whirled on him. “You barbarian! Everybody is your enemy. You want to go all over the world killing people who don’t see things your way. YOU’RE the killer!” She opened a drawer so hard it came completely out of the dresser and banged onto the floor. They ignored it.
“He drew a line in the sand,” he yelled. “He said if they used poison gas, we’d get ’em. He said he wanted to make it perfectly clear. They used poison gas! And he does nothing. For Godsake! The whole world is watching.”
“How the hell do you know who used that gas?” she screamed, as she got into a pair of underpants from the dump on the floor.
“Oh no, oh, no, not that! You pick up every damn line from party headquarters. Where do you get it? From the fucking air?”
“Stop cursing,” she ordered.
“That’s not cursing,” he said. “Cursing involves God, and wishing people ill. I don’t wish anybody ill.
He watched her put on her bra. How did they do that? Arms bent at the elbows, behind their backs. She went to the closet, calmed by the thought of clothes. As she slipped a jumpsuit up her legs, over her hips and onto her arms, he thought about how it used to be, before there was politics, when they were just two normal people having an extra-marital affair. What did we talk about then? We didn’t. That was the beauty of it.
“Thanks for picking up the groceries,“ she said. “And now, I think you should leave. Billy will be home soon, and I don’t want him to hear any of your garbage.” She swept out of the room.
He gathered the ejected underpants, hefted the drawer and put it back in the dresser. Everything was falling apart. On every level – the personal, the national, the global. Everywhere he looked, he saw a bad scene.
