Our Pointy Boots

234 235 The reporters stand between all fourteen of us and our transport; they put their microphones and cameras in our faces and say, “You’re going home for Christmas. What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” We ask, “What are our choices?” “The usual two,” the reporters say. “Are you going to hold your babies and sweet babies real tight? Or, are you going to lay your fallen comrade to rest while the chaplain conveys the gratitude of the president and the entire nation and then prays to God for the state of your comrade’s immortal soul?” Then they consult their notes and ask, “You do have a fallen comrade, don’t you?” “Yes,” we say. “Saunders.” “Well,” they say. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home? Are you going to bury him? Or, are your going to hold your babies and sweet babies real tight?” “Neither,” we tell then. “The first thing we’re going to do when we get home is put on our pointy boots and parade around the Public Square.” Before we graduatedfrom high school,before we met and married our sweet babies, before we had babies with our sweet babies, before we got the jobs that we didn’t want to work at for the rest of our lives, before we realized that we probably would work at them for the rest of our lives if we didn’t do something about it, before we did something about it and joined up, before we went to Iraq, before what happened to Saunders, before any of this happened, we were sitting around on a Friday just before graduation, skipping school, which, as graduating seniors, we were of course expected to do, feeling bored, feeling like we were missing something in our lives. And so we decided to go to the FICTION Our Pointy Boots BROCK CLARKE 236 Ecotone: reimagining place Public Square, to the Bon Ton, which had a little of everything, to see if they had what we were missing. They were terrified of us at the Bon Ton because we were young and noisy, and we seemed even noisier than we were because we were the only customers in the store, because the store was the only store left on the Public Square that hadn’t pulled out and moved to the mall, and they were terrified of us because we couldn’t, at first, find what we were missing, and this disappointed us and so we let them know about it. They tried to sell us fedoras in the Men’s department, and we put our fists through their tops and then wore them around our wrists like bracelets They tried to sell us stirrup pants in the Ladies’ department and those of us who are Ladies said stirrup pants were an abomination and so we all liberated the stirrups with our hands and feet and teeth and then reshelved what remained with the other, normal pants, thus diminishing their retail value. We wondered what the people at Bon Ton had to say about that. The people at Bon Ton didn’t have anything to say; they scattered, hiding in dressing rooms and locking the slatted doors behind them; or crouching behind checkout counters, armed only with their bar code guns. And so there was no one to help us when we entered Footwear and saw the rows and rows of boots, their pointy toes pointing at us, as if to say they wanted us as much as we, we realized, wanted them. Once we’ve finished talking to the reporters, we get on the transport that takes us to Germany and then another one that takes us home. We get off the transport and there, standing on the base’s tarmac, are our sweet babies, waving at us. We can see that our sweet babies don’t have our babies with them, for which we are grateful. Because that means there’s one fewer person between us and our pointy boots. The tarmac has been cleared, but the snowbanks surrounding it are ten, fifteen feet high...