Free Alligators of Abraham by Robert Kloss Page A

forgotten our arrangement in their grief. Now stay down. I believe she senses you there by your rustling.”
    And in those days your mother remained ever at her desk, dressed in mourning, her soft grunts as she composed, the murmurs she made and her tongue lolling along her grayed lips. Remember the letters your mother wrote and folded over, slow and delicate, and how she tied these with pink and blue ribbons, and how she hid these in a split tree trunk outside your house. Remember how she glanced around as she did so, never suspecting you watched through the window. Remember how she found you running your fingers over the kitchen table as if you could read the imprints of her message, as you imagined what she must write to the man who gathered these letters, who left those letters your mother read in the bathroom, giggling and sighing to herself. And remember the night your mother woke you with a hand to your mouth and whispered, “If you tell your father, he will kill the both of us. And I will never speak to you again.”
    *
    â€œWho was this man?”
    Then silence. And there were those who believed the war was finished. And while the last of the bands played, and the last of the church bells clanged, and the confetti gathered along the walks and in the gutters, and the last of the lovers within the crowds kissed, and the gas lamps swelled—
    Now a crackling, and a sweltering, and a long buzz, and a low hum and fathers along the land collapsed with blood streaming their ears and eyes and noses, and the mothers of the land fell, moaning and wailing, their inky hands clasped to their skulls, and glass pictures shattered and windows fractured, and dogs bayed, and cats hid, and boys such as you cowered against the cold floor boards, and the workers on their licey bunks gagged on molded bread, and your teachers and neighbors in their prisons crumpled and cowered in the midst of shaved heads and burlap, black sunken eyes and skeleton arms, and those children imprisoned who were not dead of dysentery, and the curled and maddened figures of all the men and all the women and all the children along the landscape, lost in this sound.
    The speakers glowed and the crackling coalesced into words and these words seemed more a language of screams and explosions and rottenness: ABRAHAM ZZZZZZIS SHOT ZZZZAMABEAZZZZZZZZZZZOUHAFOUGIS SHOT THAOUGZZZZZZZE—
    And now Abraham was dead.
    Militias stampeded horses along the avenues and shot out the speakers as they passed, hooting and screaming, their horses neighing, and the speakers exploded when shot, and white sparks flared and gusted into ditch grasses and these caught into flames, and the night fell to gun blasts and explosions and the crackling of half-dead speakers against the roads, until, finally now, only silence lay beneath.
    â€œThe judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether”
    And how quietly a bolt gun fires in a room of human sounds, of laughter, of singing, and how immediate the red hole blossoms, the cloud burst of blood, the dumb silence of the crowd, the swelling wail, and screams of “death death death.” And Abraham’s near-corpse slouched, and eyes gathered, ears pressed to his chest, and there were those who touched the back of his head and felt into his skull and when black clots were pulled he gasped, “HUUUUUGGGGGH” as if drowning. And then the frenzy of the theater, the iron stink of murder, the animal screams, and how those who so long wanted him dead now wept for their Abraham, who lay sobbing black blood. And there were those who shouted “hang him!” although the assassin had scampered into the night.
    They laid Abraham to bed across the street, near death and raving in tongues, and all those who stood present said he agreed with their final requests, their battle plans, their amendments to proclamations, and soon all sounds drew shut, and soon his face swelled to gray, and soon the final clicking