Free Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

only I will stay in New Jerusalem. Only I will be left around to remember.
    â€¢
    The Old City at New Jerusalem still stands, more or less, though it’s been closed to tourists ever since a wooden cutout of a minaret fell over on a kid from Kansas City, causing him a head injury. The well-marker shack and all of the old vacation cabins at the old Hope and Grace Bible Camp were pushed down a few years ago so the church could sell the land.
    Samuel Lincoln and I dated all the way through high school, and we tried to keep it together in college—me at Pittsburg State, him at Missouri Southern—but Samuel eventually dropped out to go roughneck on an oil derrick outside Wichita Falls, though not before getting me pregnant with my beautiful daughter, who is five years oldnow. I don’t feel badly toward Samuel, in the end. As he got older he got eaten up by an anger even he didn’t fully understand, I don’t think. He sent along what I think must’ve been nearly the entirety of his paycheck, all the way up until the day he fell from some rigging and hit his head on a girder and died three days later in a hospital in Dallas.
    Douglas Reeter and Marly ended up buying that old house on my father’s property, and getting married. Three months after their wedding I was at college, and so I wasn’t there at my window to see Marly steal away, leaving him as he slept. Nor was I there four weeks after that, when Douglas Reeter took himself off into the woods, making sure to get clear of my father’s land, and put a bullet through the roof of his mouth.
    Nobody really knows where Marly went, how far away she got. None of us have ever heard from her again, not a single word. I’ll confess that sometimes, when the house is quiet and the light long and blue, I’ll fantasize about the phone ringing, about me picking it up to hear nothing but a familiar breathing on the other end of the line. I want to ask her where she made it to, where she ended up going, what she ended up doing. I want to ask her if she made it all the way to the real Jerusalem, what it’s like there. And I also want to tell her to come here and sit in my living room and dream up those dead boys with me again, Reeter and all. But I don’t know what story I could tell her about how things went to convince her. I don’t know what story there is that could bring her back.

The IED
    1.
    What is he looking at? The maze of light made by the high mud-brick walls of the narrow alley that the line of men, generously spaced, are navigating. It is the early part of late afternoon, the heat subdued into a smoldering focus by a low ceiling of clouds, everything very dry. The dust from the passage of something or someone—recently? hours ago?—floats through the diffuse angle of light at the intersection of two alleyways, giving the air there a sort of grain, causing it to briefly coruscate. But that is only at the border of what Abrams is looking at as he feels the strange texture under his boot, the slight resistance of the rectangular metal contact plate.
    Though it’s not a maze of light he can really see, not completely, at the moment, just one he imagines. The part he can see is, he supposes (or was supposing in the microseconds before registering the change under his foot), only one corridor. Farther along, he can also see the beginnings of a perpendicular corridor, another alley. Together they make one small corner of the maze.
    It is enough: the narrow, dirt-floored alley, cast partially into cool shadow by the obstruction of the high walls on either side. It isalmost pleasant, the quiet at the end of their patrol, the stillness of the village around them, the genial fatigue of the men, which is a kind of gladness, Abrams has always thought. And it is this moment of mindfulness—when Abrams looked up from the ground in front of his feet and noticed the alley half in shadow and the slump of the shoulders of