Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,9

but I decided to buy a whole box, which has twenty bags. It was more than I’d ever bought until then and I felt a slight reeling in the deepest part of my abdomen. I took the fan and the box up to the register and paid. It started to rain really hard and they let me hang out inside to see if it would let up.

I was leaning against the gumball machines by the front window and trying to stay out of the way. Outside, under the awning was a red metal newspaper stand that had been tagged and dented. Through the glass and wire grid holding the paper I saw a picture of a woman crouching, aflame. A man and a young girl were running down a street. Behind them was a wall of smoke. On the side, down in the corner of the photo, was the person crouching. All around her fire, like a corona, spread into the black ink. She was as dark as an eclipse and held herself still and burned. Chinese characters ran in lines down the page around her. That reeling came again, only deeper, like something was shaking loose in a place that nobody had ever been before. The doors of the box-mall-church flashing like mica. The cook with the burnt hand, flailing. The glitter of progress; the sheen of nostalgia. Out by the older malls are huge Asian markets with the HDL screens by the register. They play videos of Filipinos running through Scottish castles in jodhpurs and trailing lace. He has a riding crop and she, an empire waist. Unagi. Bonjour! Dónde está el arroz? But it’s not some vibrant, new, glittering incongruity. I know. I see glittering incongruities. I see people on fire. Right there on the front page of newspaper, leaning against the gumball machine because it was raining so hard, I saw the girl on fire in the corner of the photo, crouching. Then I felt the panic like I do always when it’s like that, like it’s happening right now, like they’re dying in front of me.

I turned to get help, to ask the man at the counter or the woman in back what had happened. They said it was just sports. Apparently there was a big game and some jocks set some stuff on fire. It happened days ago. Everyone is fine. But they’re not. I can see from their faces. I can’t speak Chinese but I can tell they are not fine.

Sports. Sports riot.

I took a few breaths and tried to calm down. Raina says nothing’s ever really wrong it’s just the story we tell ourselves. I think it’s the other way around. But I tried anyway. I rewrote the events in the picture. The woman crouching in the smoke had pockets full of bobbleheads. The man and the young girl had just shared a hot dog and arena nachos. It wasn’t the war. It was just a game. But of course it was the war, I could hear it breathing under the net.

Down the street I heard some kind of blast or crash. Following the Law of Superposition it should be: sound> association> meaning> rxn—but it isn’t order because the meaning never changes and the sound can be anything. There was a rumble that I couldn’t place—step out on to the broadening path! On even the brightest days when everyone is shining in the sun-flooded world what’s wrong with a golden retriever playing with a pink child on a green field? A red Frisbee cutting through the blue sky under a white cloud? Nothing. It makes watching it all get blasted to tendons and fur so life-like. Sports riot. Terror is a chemical storm. The events are static, not the meaning. Sports. I left the box of fortunes by the register, said I’d get it later.

In front of the Asian market I could hear for a thousand miles. The rain was getting lighter and the streets shone. On the corner was a sports bar. I know because it had a poster of a rabid dog tearing some other animal apart and a co-ed with team color panties on the door. The parking lot was full of tanks and The Game reflected off their windshields…I dreamt one thousand basketball courts, nothing holier than sports…I’m going to make them feel what I feel. I went to a payphone by the bus stop. I mean what it’s like to be fucking scared all the time and