Free The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder Page B

holding hands with Juliet’s father, swings him into a circular dance, pulling him towards Juliet so that she can join too. Juliet, right hand in her dad’s left, feeling his strong, thick fingers wrap and squeeze her own, thinks she will cry.
    “Do you have to go to the campo , Dad? Do you have to?”
    He can’t hear what Juliet’s asking over the music and the laughter. He smiles down at her, though he is breathing heavily. “Isn’t this something else?” he puffs, but he is ready to stop. He is a man of bulk and solidity, not made for whirling.
    They are still holding hands, the three of them. Juliet is the first to let go, stranding them together, her father and Charlotte, but only for a blink. Their hands swing back and forth once and then they drop each other.
    Bram says, “If you want, you can come along to the campo . Why not?”
    Juliet thinks he is talking to her, and something leaps like a small furry animal inside her chest.
    “Oh,” breathes Charlotte. “How can I thank you?”
    Not Juliet. Charlotte. Charlotte can come with Bram to the campo . The small furry animal in Juliet’s chest curls around itself, a weight heavier than before.
    Bram shrugs, smiles warmly. “We’ll keep you safe.”
    “I’m going somewhere,” cries Charlotte. “We’re going somewhere!”
    Charlotte grabs for Juliet’s hand and kisses it. Her cheeks shine wet in the firelight. She twirls Juliet like a ballerina. “Come. Let’s go!”
    And now the two of them, Charlotte and Juliet, are on their way, together. Together, they are dancing away from Bram, who mops his brow with a handkerchief,
and from Gloria, whose fingers find rhythm no matter how asymmetrical. They are living, really living. They step lightly, delicately, weave invisibly over blankets and past backpacks, out beyond the forest of bodies lit by sparks, through deep and heavy grasses where the shadow of a tethered horse flickers in the dark, stamps its feet, and whickers soft and low.
    “Oh!” breathes Charlotte, like they have passed into another world, like they may never find home again.
    Maybe, thinks Juliet, we never will.
    Her mother’s music drifts from the other side of the field, sending them off, and the sky is dusty with stars — the blackness of a sky unlit by electricity, a long-ago sky in which no planes could ever fly, from which no bombs could ever fall. Charlotte pulls Juliet by the hand, dreamily, two train cars rolling silently down a track.
    Rolling, rolling, rolling, and we ain’t never coming back .

SHE WILL LEAVE A MARK
    Across Managua, election posters flutter, graffiti is sprayed, car windows are plastered with slogans, and beautiful murals are painted on walls in honour of the ruling Frente. For five years the country has waited to vote, and in two months — on November 4, 1984 — the people will go to the polls, observed by a legion of foreigners, including those from the Roots of Justice.
    With a handful of volunteers, the Friesen family attends a massive rally held before the Palacio Nacional. The building is decrepit and magnificent, its huge white pillars faded grey and spotlit under a humid, porous sky. Daniel Ortega, the slender leader of the ruling party, appears onstage in his olive-green uniform, to a collective thrill.
    Juliet and Keith raise their voices deliriously in the party’s official song: “ ¡Luchamos, contra el yanqui, enemigo del humanidad! ” We will be victorious over the Yankee, enemy of humanity!
    Juliet and Keith relish the shared joke: that they themselves are Yankees, enemies of humanity. Ha! They haven’t considered taking the words seriously. They haven’t considered that it might change them to straddle borders this way, that they might be forever altered, forever unable to choose a side, unable to respond to even the most obvious warning, so utterly confident, so utterly believing themselves to be who they are: multiplicities containing worlds, unpinned by definition,