Fallen Soldiers (A Story For Dan That I Hope Won't Give Him Nightmares)

My fiancé collects bobblehead dolls. Tokens purchased only at ballparks, emblems of true baseball fandom. They sit on a shelf in my living room, visible, eye-catching from the moment you ascend our apartment stairs. It’s like a little shrine to artificial happiness, this shelf. An altar of fake, stretching smiles and unsolicited nods. They remind me of a little army. Row after row of tiny fighters with oversized heads and toothy grins, standing at attention, ready to wage war against good taste and flattering home decor.

But they are precious as well. Delicate. So tender. Like infants that must be coddled and protected, I have to carry them with two hands, one palm supporting their heavy bobbing heads, their necks weak and worthless. I must lay them gently on a pile of blankets, a soft but secure surface, when I wish to dust the living room shelves. Their paint is cracked and chipped from times when I was careless, disinterested. Moving from one apartment to another, I placed them too close together in an unlined box, didn’t think twice when I heard their bulbous heads clink and clack as I set the box on the floor, pushed it haphazardly to the side with the toe of my shoe. A chunk of the neck is missing from one, there’s a chip in the arm of another. Their smiles, in light of these injuries, these rough abrasions, have become menacing, taunting even. They don’t beam stupidly like their agreeable peers, but sneer at me when I pass, their enemy identified.

I am more careful now, gentler, seeking redemption for former abuse. The cat leaps from the floor to the shelf and weaves between the tiny ball players, his tail flicking back and forth. They nod their approval, but I disagree and lift him slowly, cautiously from his perch back to the floor, reach out and steady their bouncing heads. I have given up dusting altogether, hardly move them at all anymore.

And yet, there are errands to be run, work to attend, fresh air needed from time to time. It is when I am gone, when I take leave from the base, that the danger sets in. I come home, in the mid-afternoon, my arms heavy with grocery bags and find a massacre laid out before me. The smiling face of a wide-eyed tiger, the bill of his Detroit hat cracked down the middle, stares up at me from the living room floor, bodiless and alone. The chipped, broken red pieces of a cardinal’s smashed head drift down from the shelf to the floor like an oozing wound. The tiny men, with their wide, silly smiles and their great, bouncing heads lie together in a pile, one on top of another, crumpled, busted, maimed. And right in the middle of all this destruction, triumphant and proud in the center of the battlefield, his back long and straight, his chest puffed out, the cat sits. Seeing me, he mews softly and bobs his head to one side.

The Air Mattress

The air mattress—which my mother set up in the back room for my visit, the room that used to be mine—has been leaking. Slowly, throughout the night, air has escaped from some microscopic hole or improperly tightened seal; and now, with the morning sun filtering through the blinds of my east-facing window, I sink low into the mattress’ center and the sides billow up around me, puffed up like wind-filled parachutes.

Every movement of my body, a roll to the side, a stretch of my leg, sends a rippling wave of motion through the deflating bed, and I rock back and forth, as if floating on the ocean. I dream, first of being stranded on a boat. The sun beats down on my tattered clothes and bruised skin. The wind around me is salty and burns my eyes. I have long since eaten through the better part of my rations, and all that remains is a fat, juicy, perfectly cooked steak. It was a Christmas gift, from someone who didn’t know that I don’t eat red meat, or that I’d be lost at sea without a fork and knife. I smiled when I opened it, thanked him kindly, returned it to its box. It stares at me now from across the boat, and as my stomach gurgles and churns, I can see the steak pumping in and out like a beating heart. I hear it grumble softly, vibrate, purr.

My parents’ cat makes his way across the bobbing mattress and settles in beside me. His body, curling into a U, jars the bed and wakes me up. I roll to my side and dip back to the floor. The air, pushing up behind my turning body, lifts the cat onto the crest of a wave and he slides down and rests against the small of my back. His purring vibrates my spine.

A new dream, I am in an airport, awaiting a last minute flight. The mayor of Baltimore—whose name and gender I don’t even know—has called me personally. “There are chickens loose in the city, Claire,” the mayor tells me. “We need you back now!” So I book myself on the first available flight, and take my sister with me, because she knows how to speak to chickens.

They’re running amok when we arrive. From BWI to Hampstead and all the way over to Highlandtown, chickens fill the neighborhoods of Baltimore like a poultry-themed Where’s Waldo. We find one dining at Acropolis in Greektown, eating Spanakopita and drinking a beer with a drawing of the Parthenon on the label. We stuff him into an over-priced garbage bag that I purchased at an airport newsstand and I carry him over my shoulder.

There is another one in the Inner Harbor, shopping for sports gear. He pauses in front of store window and adjusts the bill of his new Orioles cap. “Why don’t any sports teams have chickens as their mascots?” I ask my sister, and she has no idea. “What are we?” I cheer. “Chickens!”

“Sounds good to me,” my sister says, and we can’t fathom why the chicken, of all birds, has been so long ignored.

It takes us three hours to round them all up. Two have spent the afternoon barhopping through Fells Point and stumble up my apartment steps wobbly and hammered. I make them rest on the couch, place trash cans on the floor beneath them, just in case. Clucking fills my small apartment, feathers float around my head. “We should make them some nachos,” my sister says. “Chickens like that.”

I lay tortilla chips on a cookie sheet, cover them with black beans, shredded cheese. “There,” my sister says. “Now just put them in the oven to bake. Nachos, oven, make,” she adds. “Stair, cool, lake. Hey Claire are you awake?”

I blink my eyes open, and my sister’s face hovers before me like a mirage. “Claire,” she says. “Claire, it’s time to wake up.”

“Did you feed the chickens?” I ask her.

“What?”

“Did you feed the chickens?”

“Uh…yeah. I did,” she plays along. “Come on and get up.”

“Okay.” I roll onto my stomach and push up with my arms. The mattress collapses beneath my weight and sends a wave of air up and under the sleeping cat. He hisses and races from the room.

“I think this thing might be leaking,” I say. It is almost noon.