The World Without Flags

“Aren’t we talkative today?” Franky teases. I blush and frown a little, but thankfully Franky just smiles and answers my question. “That’s an alternator,” he says. “You can find these things in old cars and trucks. If you spin the wheel here, it generates electricity. Well, if you’re lucky it does. I imagine most of them have rusted to shit, excuse my French. I had to re-build this one to get it to work. And it doesn’t make much energy, really.”

I look at it, fascinated. I’m not like a lot of the old people who talk about things they used to have back when, you know, before the Worm, and how they wished they could have it just one more time…but I can see the real use of this! I imagine all those cassettes I have, being able to play them whenever I wanted. Hours and hours of pure, beautiful music! Oh yeah, this could come in real handy. I bend over and look in the alternator. I can see the copper wires in there and I remember some lessons that Eric gave me on electromagnetic fields from those books he hoards.

“It’s a magnet,” I say.

Franky’s eyes open in surprise. “There’s one in there, all right,” he says. “If you spin copper around a magnet—“

“You get an electric field,” I finish.

Franky wiggles his eyebrows at me. “Bullseye, kiddo.”

I feel a thrill. I love when Franky calls me kiddo. Maybe Eric’s lessons aren’t such a waste of time after all.

Then Franky gets serious. “Hey, look,” he says, “do you know what Eric’s going to do about this war thing?”

I look at him and frown and shake my head.

“He doesn’t mention it, huh?”

I feel uncomfortable suddenly with these questions, like I’m talking behind Eric’s back.

Franky smiles at me and stops being serious. “Hey, do me a favor? I want this to be a surprise for Diane for her birthday, so don’t tell anyone about the music, okay?” He looks at me, thinking. “Maybe you could help me out once in a while?”

I smile from ear to ear.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Franky says.

I go home and can’t stop smiling or thinking about that music. I don’t even mind when Eric doesn’t say a word during our dinner of venison stew.

15

I’m so exhausted from work that I can’t eat. Eric and I are sitting on the hill, overlooking the newly-planted fields. The goon squad walks around the field banging on metal pans to scare away the birds. Queen trots next to Pest and barks whenever she sees a bird or a squirrel. What we need is more dogs, but they’re hard to come by. Everyone keeps their dogs, especially the females. We’re lucky enough to have Queen. I watch as she lifts her head suddenly and then Pest points and she goes leaping away, tongue out, happy as can be. I guess Pest has been teaching her to hunt, and it seems as if she likes it.

Eric points at my sandwich to remind me to eat, but like I said, I can’t. Where my appetite should be, there’s only a dull stone. I don’t know how long it’s been, getting up at dawn, working in the fields until it’s too dark to see, and then going home and collapsing for a few hours before I have to do it again. Eric could probably tell me. He’s the one who still keeps track of the days on a calendar that he makes himself every year. He makes a copy for everyone. He gets me to draw for it, which is fun, I guess. I draw stuff like birds and dogs and people in the fields or a pine tree after a snowstorm, stuff like that. I like the drawing, but the calendar itself seems kind of useless. Who cares what day of the week it is? Who cares what year it is? Just a few months ago, Eric got excited because, he said, it was the new millennium, the year 2000. But for me, 2000 is just a dumb number. Right now, tired like I am, I don’t care if it’s Sunday or Thursday. I must be feeling grumpy. The calendar is useful when it comes time to planning for the seasons or remembering important dates, like someone’s birthday. I don’t know, I need to rest.

I lay down in the grass with a groan. Eric watches me with a frown.

“You really should eat, Birdie,” he says. I close my eyes.

“Don’t worry about me,” I answer. I’m so comfortable, I wish he’d shut up and let me rest.

I feel Eric move a little, in irritation. “You’d feel better if you ate.”

“I’ll feel better if you stop acting like my father.” Even as I say it, I hear it coming out a lot meaner than I meant it. I sound spiteful and cruel and I regret it immediately. There’s silence from Eric. In my mind, I imagine he’s looking away, hiding the hurt I know he feels. I feel ashamed of myself, and I’m thinking about what I can say to say I’m sorry without having to say sorry, which is a little too complicated for my tired mind, when I hear Eric get up and brush off his pants.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he says. If I didn’t know him so well, I would think he didn’t care a bit about what I said. But I do know him and I can detect how I’ve hurt him.