Bugs, Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

I’ve already sung the national anthem at the top of my lungs, my voice out of tune and ragged.
I’m a disabled vet. Not really—I just feel like one.

Cheryl dreamed she was playing scrabble. She put down the word ‘zulu’ for thirty-two points.
When she awoke, she lay in bed, her limbs sore. She heard the newspaper skid across her porch.

Next to me, John stifles his anger. We’ve been friends for forty years. His career is killing bugs
for farmers.

Cheryl went to get it, barefoot, in her nightgown. Coolness announced that winter was coming.

John’s gotten angrier as he’s aged. He’s now a staunch republican. He likes imagining bugs
writhing in pain as they die. He blames the poor for everything.

She bent to pick up the paper and the giant headline glared at her: Africans Extinct. Overnight a
mutation of Ebola had killed them all.

He’s not religious, but he fumes about abortion. No one should have the right to take another’s
life, he says.

Once the stench of the dead cleared, Cheryl realized, there would be vast resources to exploit,
new countries to found and populate with new, white Africans.

His beliefs come direct from right wing hate-mongers he listens to as he drives his car from farm
field to farm field.

Maybe, Cheryl thinks, to dispel the bad luck, they would burn sage for weeks or months and
rename the continent. She went to pack her bag. It would be like the Oklahoma Land Rush—the
first to arrive would get the plum pieces.

Mexicans are like wrenches, thinks John, or chemicals.

 

© Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois  has had over fourteen-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes, and. was awarded the 2017 Booranga Writers’ Centre (Australia) Prize for Fiction. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To read more of his work, Google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver, Colorado, USA.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Sam

    very clever piece, it shows the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of such views, we should love and care for all and this poem brilliantly captures it without having to spell it out

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