Kiss Me, Stranger. Ron Tanner

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      I wish he hadn’t because it gets Lon thinking of his brothers and sisters who used to sprawl alongside him while watching TV, so many of them he felt he was floating in a pool of children. Our house was crowded with PC processors and cases and keyboards and motherboards, all of which Lon’s brothers and sisters couldn’t keep their hands away from, busy little hands, tearing through and taking apart any and everything, curious to know what’s inside, what’s working, what’s this?

      They were always asking, What’s this? he recalls.

      All that activity at home, all those kids, it was a relief to get away, Lon admits to himself, but now after eight months in the field relief means something very different.

      He and his Squad are listening to Captain rant his Captain speech, all of them gathered on the roof, in plain sight of snipers, when up pops a hand grenade tossed from the street: it rolls like a warped tennis ball to Captain’s duct-taped foot—the grenade looks Russian-made, the casing a nice shiny handful of green pot-metal. The Captain glances down at it, blinking his kind twenty-year-old fatherly eyes, he’s got maybe five seconds before he’s blown to bits. Hellofa nice throw, don’t you think? he says, the way he might have complimented a teammate, then he kicks the grenade off the roof and it soars (he was a semi-professional footballer before the war), the rest of the Squad collapses in a panic, folding into the fetal-tuck they were taught in basic training, grip your knees to your chin and wait for the blast. Which doesn’t come.

      Life is full of surprises, Lon recalls his Poppi—my Marcel—saying.

      Like Lon, Poppi is in the Militia but which one? He’s somewhere on the frontier, which is a horror, Lon has heard. It’s so bad the Captain won‘t tell Lon and the others everything he’s heard because he doesn’t want them to worry, though they worry plenty: we’ve got to keep our eye on the sparrow, the Captain sings to them when they are depressed, keep your eye... dancing around, chucking them under the chin, wagging his finger at them like he was their old man.

      Lon’s own old man is no fighter, too kind, too easy. Every night Marcel would turn on a couple of PC screens in the front room, where he and I workshopped equipment, and the children would gather at his feet in the blue-green light to hear him tell stories, some scary, some funny, his voice like warm water running over them. Lon’s thirteen brothers and sisters would fall asleep before Marcel was finished, then he and I and Lon would carry them up to their pallets, one after the other, precious cargo, little gremlins, their tiny hands still at last, their pony breaths galloping through cartoon dreams which Lon now wishes for every night.

      The Captain leads them down the bombed-out stairwell. They are strung at intervals, automatics ready. They have to be careful where they step because none of them has boots. When the Revolutionary Militia Recruiters came to their school nearly a year ago, to sign up everybody over fourteen, they were the handsomest people Lon had ever seen, with their shiny automatic rifles and their newly cut bright-blue fatigues with silver buttons and sky-blue berets. Nice haircuts too, some colored in checks of red and yellow, the RM flag. And knee-high leather boots with a shine like the Presidential Fountain at high noon. Oh, yeah, Lon wanted to look like that.

      Later, after being painted, tattooed, and finger-printed, he felt stupid when he learned he’d have to wear a pot for a helmet and, instead of a jacket, a bright blue sweatshirt whose dye came off on him when he sweated and he’s sweating a lot, you can be sure. For shoes, they taught him how to construct a shiny silver kind of sandal using duct tape and cut-outs from plastic milk cartons. These make a rain-puddle splashing noise whenever he’s trotting across asphalt or concrete. Slip-slap. Slip-slap.

      But the RM is winning! Captain insists.