We were in the attic, the home was located in one of those neighborhoods at the very beginning of the gentrification process, so if you stepped back trying to take in the large view of things, using your imagination with as sharp and precise a frame as possible, albeit most homes were draped in two decades of crud, rot, and irrelevance; this particular home seemed a fixer-upper’s prime choice. All of the windows remained in their frames, and the only evidence of time and tragedy was the leaning tower of Pisa, more leaning than towering of a two-story fireplace. This house was also minus the typical government graffiti, announcing the usual warnings of no trespassing, property of the Eastern Confederacy of the Soviet Council, and hardly noticeable, that was, until one actually entered the hallway leading to a circular set of stairs, and found the decades-old initiated symbol of the red sickle joined at the handle by the white cross announcing the joint venture of the New Evangelical Nationalistic World Order. Most homes declared the property of this newest religious force, those whose ownership came later in the rebellion only had modest icons, as if submission of a property was more of a gift than a given. Let the people imagine they are the struggle and not victims of the struggle, were the prayers and thoughts provided as each homeowner gravely removed one set of luggage to board the busses to the lands Jesus used to avoid, but now felt compelled to drill, dig, blast, and pollute. This new group of demographics was referred to as the Pioneers. The Confederacy of Soviet property loved to throw in some sentimental Patriotic verbiage as a form of motivation.
This neighborhood’s usefulness had a lifespan of about a decade, beginning with the 2018 election. There were enough powerful political players living in a 5 mile area to fuel newly formed the Trump/Nunes Campaign, and money was the key, as it paid for the Lobbyists, the laundering, the offshore accounts, and with the Supreme Court deciding that the amount of property was the try definition of citizenship (after all, how many slaves you originally had would make you a wealthy man from the Revolutionary War days to the now debunked Civil War), and this Supreme Court with an 8 to 1 Confederacy ration, felt, that reading the Constitution should be as simple and meaningful as reading the Bible. So when the money ran out and the people living in this neighborhood became as outdated as a transistor radio, the government came in and permitted blight and decay to follow.
One decade after the Hazard Kentucky Virus began, and seemed to run rampant, due to the NO restrictions of dumping coal ash into the streams and rivers, kind of bouncing from County to Town from Farm to Market, and during the violent deaths of hemorrhaging coughs, and bloated kidneys, some people began to wonder, and although the official news channel complained it was a virus which could be carried over the twenty story Mexican Wall, (calling for some kind of lid to be placed on that wall), more and more of the minions were dying, and some of those minions were no longer amused with the listing of scapegoats for this newest epidemic. And those who still kept hidden journals understood that when the wealthy, not just the middle class began to die, there was trouble on the horizon. At first the military was called in, but its volunteer numbers decreased as minority populations such as females, people of color, gays and those who seemed at one time or other must have been an immigrant were restricted to enlist, the graduates of Yale, Harvard, and otherIvy League schools were the only pool and they soon moved to Canada.
This house, the one in which I began telling this story, belonged to one of the historians, who was later sent to North Korea to work the poppy fields, and rumor had it, hidden in some of the darkest and deeper crevices was his journal. History had been considered fake, but pen to paper still had meaning, and there was a movement to seek the facts and void the fake. We dug and dug, we moved furniture, we chiseled some brick, and then as the last whispers of a bright day became a bemoaning hush we found a book decorated in the old American Stars and Stripes. Had we found the Holy Grail…I was the lucky one, I was able to touch the journal. I found a rag and gently brushed aside the soot of two decades. Sometimes silence is so loud you actually need to cover your eardrums to keep it from aching inside your brain. It was my exhale that broke the silence, and I opened that journal. The very first page, all in CAPS, said, I knew this was happening, I tried to stop it, but I permitted the foolish to prevail, and for that, a man-made catastrophe has erupted. I thought I tried, but one person at a time was not enough! (The Clicks, Prequel, by Gerry Buncher)
