Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing AmericaSills, Steven David Justin
General
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America
Sills, Steven David Justin
Fiction
As one of her long arms stretched and she grabbed one of his baby bibs that was
folded on an end table, dabbing herself with it, she thought about how the two
of them were family because of a sexual indiscretion. Fate had backed into her
earlier thinking that family was nothing but war games. At one time she
believed that husband and wife soldiers of the same side often acted as if they
were enemies; and as they played with each other they often forgot about the
children, inadvertently or deliberately rolled their tanks over them, or
abandoned them entirely to pursue a second honeymoon. At one time she believed
that all good soldiers (all military families) did the same thing as this. Her
pregnancy (fate) had flattened her notion that an individual only had herself
in this world. It had rolled over her idea that a collective unit was a
neurotic delusion like the concept of God. She had been rolled on by a tank a
second time and had been forced to reassess earlier conclusions. Motherhood was
beginning to make her fully aware of the extent by which there was an
interdependence of the social members of society and she was beginning to think
of her son as a gift from God since the birth of a baby was such a miracle. And
here they were tucked away in their home in a scantily lit morning. The trailer
was the fortress from artillery shells, taps, and scrapes. For a moment she
listened to its splendor with her usual intensity: the taping of it, the
refrigerator mysteriously clicking into life with a hum slightly like a ticking
heart of a great body in hibernation, and the heater that didn't work so well
exhaling in dreaming snores through the mouths of floor vents. She listened
until it all abruptly ended by his cries. She then thought that she was
becoming overly sentimental if not completely and loathsomely maudlin in the
scramble of impressions that spewed out from her subconscious. She wondered if
she could shut him up in time to perform aerobics with the television
instructor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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