Circle

Grooming

61 Grooming In 2004, four American contract workers were killed, mutilated, and hung from a bridge in Iraq. The woman at the Orange County Airport picked at the man’s shirt and its overgrown dust. She took pieces off with such patience, holding each up like a prized gift. When she finished, the man picked loose hair off her sweater as if selecting figs for a deserving bowl or zucchini bread. On TV, the bodies hung like wash in a wooded yard. I kept thinking the sun would eventually hit their crispness and they could be worn. But the bodies were bodies, charred and weathered. The men chanted through their throats some alphabet. And when I came back to the woman, the man, and the airport, we all had the faces of operatic masks, we picked and picked parasites and salt crystals with our clumsy fingers, as if we cared, hundreds and hundreds of us, arms raised, toothy white grins. ...