Ben Bedard - The World Without Flags

I hear a flapping sound and the music stops. When I look over, I see the belt has slipped off the aluminum block. I look over to Franky and we both laugh, sweating from the exertion of cranking. We laugh for a bit before Franky starts coughing. When he stops, he smiles again.

“Well,” he says. “It ain’t much now. I got to figure out a way to amplify the sound and keep the power steady.”

“You need a battery,” I tell him.

“Don’t I know it,” he answers. “Batteries are hard to come by.”

“What is that?” I ask him, pointing to the aluminum block that the rubber belt was hooked to.

“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.

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.

I sit up, wanting to say I didn’t mean anything by it, but Eric is already too far away to stop and I sigh and lay back down. I don’t know why I say things like that or why I feel that way toward Eric sometimes, angry, but for no reason. I wish that I didn’t make things so complicated. Sometimes I wish that Lucia had lived and so hadn’t their baby, and Eric had a real child and no one would assume that I was his daughter. It would make things clear. Even between us. Then I would be. I would be…I don’t know who I’d be. I'm too tired to think about it.

Without wanting to, really, I imagine Eric and Lucia, holding a baby, and it’s obviously their baby. It has Eric’s eyes and Lucia’s hair, and they’re happy and laughing. But I don’t feel altogether happy about it. I feel strange and distant and even a little angry. I’m a horrible person. Sometimes I think I’m relieved that they died. Maybe if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have a place with Eric any longer, not with my frizzy black hair and brown eyes and scrawny, black body. I breathe in deeply and I’m so ashamed of thinking such a horrible thing. It’s like a terrible weight inside me, like I’ve swallowed something unwholesome that’s rotting in me. I loved Lucia. But the horrible feelings continue and I open my eyes and sit up.

I need to run.

I’m tired, but I have to run. Actually, I’m more than tired. I’m whatever comes after that: beat, bushed, spent, wasted, exhausted. But like I said, I have to run. I get up and launch myself forward, away from Eric, away from the goon squad, away from everything. As I pick up speed, jogging down toward the fields, I feel lighter. I don’t really feel my legs. They’re just moving underneath me. By the time I reach the fields and I’m running past the goon squad and ignoring Pest watching me, I’m not tired at all. I’ve gone beyond tired into some other land. I feel light and invulnerable, so I run faster. I run past the farmhouse where Crystal is cooking. Artemis is probably with her, maybe even watching me through the window, though I don’t turn my head to see. I run past the fences which Norman and Anthony are fixing. I wave and they stop for a second to wave back. People are used to me running, so they don’t think anything of it.