Free The Cast Stone by Harold Johnson

you’re better than someone. Someone or something will come and put you in your place.”
    The room stirred, legs crossed, backs straightened, legs uncrossed, arms folded, unfolded.
    â€œDon’t worry about it. Learn from it. The same thing is going to happen to the Americans: someone is going to come along and put them in their place. Doesn’t matter that they have the world’s biggest army, doesn’t matter that they have robot soldiers, or half-robot soldiers, doesn’t matter they can kill you from outer space, that they have lasers that can fry you, or Bolts From Heaven to kill you in your hole. They’re still humans. They only believe they are God.
    â€œThat is what supremacy is about, that’s where it came from, from people who thought they were more Godly, the chosen ones. They were given a flaming sword by their God to beat down the other. And, with that flaming sword they became part of their God, the hand of God, doing God’s work, bringing light to the darkness. Little Gods.”
    Ben had not intended to start speaking so strongly. The notes in his shirt pocket, scribbled on a single sheet of paper, folded into a tiny square, held an outline of an academic lecture on the premise of colonization. He had wanted to talk about Albert Memmi and The Colonizer and the Colonized , how that book had started a revolution in academia. Albert wasn’t wrong. He had written about what he saw, what he felt, his truth; he had put a name to the oppressor, the colonialist. Then when people around the world began to see that Albert’s truth was their truth, the academics followed with their papers and journals until the discussion had become dominated with the dichotomy of colonization. But, even though the academics had imagined such things as a postcolonial period, nothing ever really changed. Colonial discourse never captured the heart of the phenomenon. People still died of hunger, of AIDS, from bombs, and loneliness.
    Ben had wanted to tell these people, this gathering of children of colonists sprinkled with children of the people of the land, that colonial discourse was about the symptoms of a doctrine of supremacy, that supremacy needed analysis. But his grandma spoke instead. He heard her laughing and the sound of that almost forgotten tinkle filled him and he laughed. He stood in front of the people and let his laugh rumble; it came up from his belly and out into the loft. It spread. Magic. Someone tittered. Someone else chuckled. Then the loft rattled with the laughter of everyone. It was funny that Canada experienced its own oppression, ironic and irony needed to be laughed at, to be laughed away.

    On the quarter section of land to the south of Abe’s place, Ruben Weebe looked at the silent cell phone in his hand. The phone had died in the middle of his conversation with his daughter in Saskatoon. It squealed for a full second, sharp and shrill in his ear, then died. He put the phone in his shirt pocket and tried the landline, the old-fashioned phone. It was silent, dead. The screen on the computer in the den was blank. “Ruth, Ruth.” Ruben walked through the house calling his wife. She was in their bedroom, putting clothes into the closet. “Ruth, something’s up.” She looked to Ruben’s face for the answer, ignored his words. The face said urgent and she followed him out of the house, to the shelterbelt where the caragana grew thick, to the spot they had decided upon, created, a spot with a hollow where two people could hide. Ruth sat silent and hugged Chico, a spaniel who squirmed but kept silent as though he too knew something was coming.

    Ed Trembley leaned against last year’s straw bale, enjoyed the sun in his face, on his shirt, heating his legs through the denim. He read from a little blue book that he had read many times, started over at the first page. He spoke the words to the sky.
    â€œThe people of Venezuela, exercising