Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,58
eyes on a single point.
The bus pulled sharply to the side and the engine made a loud stuttering sound. People who were dozing woke up and looked around as the driver edged us onto the shoulder. We were there for about twenty minutes then the driver got back in and said we were going to have to find somewhere to stop for a while. He limped the bus a couple of miles ahead to a truck stop right off the main highway and tried to fix it there but he couldn’t so we had get out and wait for a new bus. People started calling their friends and trying to get rides. The rest of us set up camp in the truck stop.
The Farm was only about four hours away but it was on the other side of the mountains and the woman behind the counter said the pass was getting worse and would probably close by nightfall. The cell reception was bad and I had an address not a landline number so I couldn’t have called anyone at Breaker’s Rise anyway. I found a place near the showers on the driver’s side of the truck stop, a waiting room with black vinyl seats, a television and three courtesy phones. I curled up there near a window and watched as the rain turned to flurries, a white line moving down the mountain.
There were tanks on television rolling through the snow somewhere far away. It was night there and everything looked green on camera except the icy ridge they were climbing. Tanks disappeared over it like seals into water. Then there was an explosion. I could tell by the way the sky lit up. After that they just showed maps.
I got up and got a cup of coffee. The snow was falling thickly. I looked out at the bus parked at the far end of the lot. Soon the wheels would be buried. Already the roof and windows were covered. I sat back down and pulled out my notebook. A man with a belt buckle the size of a steak got up and switched the channel for a weather update. More snow. Early for this time of the year. Pictures of flooding roads in the valley. Pictures of giddy jocks on the slopes. A reporter in a pink fleece with a cup of hot chocolate. The trucker changed it back.
They were showing footage of the fires for anyone who missed it and then Newscaster Ken’s Black Friend Garth interviewed the minister of Higher Ground of Africa Baptist, then back to the fires. For a second I couldn’t tell if it was really happening or not. Like the first time I ever heard a bomb when I was four and I didn’t know what it was. It was on TV but there was no screen between the fire and me. There were all these apartments burning and I couldn’t understand where it was because the newscaster kept saying Philadelphia but then people talked about how they bombed Africa. I couldn’t sleep. Grace and Miro stayed with me. I remember Grace talking. She walked back and forth trying to explain something. Some things she said again and again but it didn’t get any clearer. We were in a war, but not really a war. Not everyone knew about it. Some people did but pretended they didn’t. But it was going on all around us all the time and we must never forget or we’d lose. Everything depended on that. Miro sat on the bed while she talked with his heavy hand on my leg. I woke up in the afternoon. I’d been dreaming of dead birds.
A man nudged me.
“Hey, are you Della?”
Then I heard the page.
“Della Mylinek. Della Mylinek. Please come to the convenience store counter. Della Mylinek.”
“Never mind,” someone said, “I see her.”
Tamara tromped in wearing a big green coat with a fuzzy hood. There was snow on her shoulders and boots.
“Come on, quick. The others are in the car. We’re going to try to make it back through the pass before it closes.”
She grabbed my bag and we ran out the back and climbed into the car. There was a guy in the front passenger seat and a girl in the back. We took off with the chains ticking as they dug into the snow.
“I called Mirror to see how the party went,” Tamara yelled over the rattling engine, “she said you were coming,” she looked back at me and grinned.