Trust they would have been. Timing.
Walking home it occurred to me that the great thing about a bomb threat is how much it leaves to the imagination. Like your mom saying you’re in trouble but not telling you why, you go over everything it could be in your mind. There were hidden rivers of guilt running underneath. There had to be.
12 Venus Rodere
In the morning I took a bus out to Four Points of Heaven Mall. We passed the smoking auto shop on the way. Brown figures wandered through the debris. They bent, turning over one object then another, before throwing them onto a pile in the center of the lot. The garage floor was strewn with flowers. Behold the shrine of the last black-owned business on the street! Scorched framing stuck out of the ground like whalebone and notes weighted with charred brick fragments fluttered in the morning breeze. The bus took a left at the light and it was gone. Beyond New Honduras, the avenues widened and bamboo blinds hung in the windows. Cats ran over welcoming porches. A woman trimmed a fuchsia in a light raincoat.
At a kiosk in an ancillary shopping park near Four Points of Heaven I bought nine prepaid cell phones. One for each child the Rat Queen might have had. I named them after the planets. In keeping with the inclusiveness of my new movement, I counted Pluto. I even got shared minutes. The lady at the kiosk called it the Hive Plan. The receipt had little bees all over it.
“The high school girls just love it,” she said.
Because they need to coordinate their torture of each other? Or because it has bees?
“They just think the bees are adorable. And…”
They need to coordinate their torture of each other.
“And it comes in all these colors,” she spread cell phones like cards on the counter. “Like lollipops.”
And condoms.
“Or sweet tarts.”
And handguns.
I paid for it all with cash pulled off my Grand Canyon Visa and spent the rest of the morning looking up FCC cell phone towers online and adding them to my maps. Little colored dots, like lollipops or condoms.
I got to the box-mall-church by late afternoon and the raffle hadn’t started. The shiny red truck sat on the dais behind the velvet ropes like I’d seen it several days before, the coveted Aries Geo Killrover Conquistador. People gathered by its wheels and girls with clipboards circled the perimeter.
“Have you applied for a mall-wide Superland™ credit card yet? You’re automatically entered.”
I signed up the baby rats. Everyone deserves a chance.
The Piazza filled. I made a list of possible terrorist groups. I decided that it’s only fair that with a personal savior you get a personal destroyer, niche terrorism being the obvious next step in identity politics. Narcissism meets the rest of the world. Hi! Howdy do? The market rallies. Satin-covered bullet cases? First-responder kits with your astrological sign etched on the front plate? I spent an hour in the food court by Mandarin Village watching a teenager serve fake rice and fantasizing about the Blackberry Apocalypse.
Just after 5 PM the Pastor of the box-mall-church stepped up on a riser next to the truck and took the microphone from the Human Resource Director who was making announcements. He jangled the key to the truck.
“Now, how come I haven’t seen this many of you in church?”
Grace and Miro say fatherly admonishment is the sand in the cement of patriarchy.
The Pastor moved toward the huge glass barrel where the raffle entries tumbled. The crowd quieted. He put his hands down together in prayer and looked up. They burst into laughter.
I imagined his hand falling on a rat ticket, Venus Rodere. No single mother sobbing on stage about how she could now get to her second job. No honor student with gleaming eyes. No football star. No thankful soldiers whispering the prayers in Spanish.
She moved toward the tumbling barrel, a collective construction of fear and desire. A sexy black rat with vague family loyalties and an enhanced ability to survive on less? The sleek carrier of change and possible disease? The eldest daughter of the Rat Queen, a tall black woman with violet and copper extensions in a tight bronze miniskirt with a GPS in one hand and a machete in the other
Venus Rodere
You redeem others with your strength:
191292709.24
The backs of my hands quivered. I could feel the tiny hairs on my cheeks move like cilia.
It was about to start.
The Human Resources Director tumbled the barrel one final time