wildscape. literary journal

Camouflage
by Christina Tudor

After Agustín Fernández Mallo

           You were born when Obama was about to be president. You were a toddler crawling on your palms, on your knees while I watched the first Black president get inaugurated on a TV my social studies teacher rolled into the classroom. You pronounced soldier as shoulder once (I did too) and now I'm on a metro train going home and there you are. You are just following orders. You are doing what you're told. You cannot say no. What are you doing here? I want to walk up and tap you on the shoulder. No one wants you here.

            You have your own questions. Where is the Chick-Fil-A? Am I taking this red line train in the right direction? I want to go home, you say. Good, I think but don't say. You've got braces on your teeth and you look like you're twelve but maybe you look like a child because I'm thirty and at the soccer game we hold up yellow cards that say Free DC during the 51st minute and, when the game ends, there you are milling about right outside the gate. You've got a gun strapped to your chest that I watch you cradle with both hands. Go home, I want to tell you. But you've got a gun on your chest and all I've got is a crinkled yellow card. You are just doing your job. You are just doing what you're told. A stranger I pass in the street says these words, they slip into the air and make their way towards me through the crowd like a game of telephone.

            When I exit the U Street metro station, you're doing high knees down the sidewalk in rows of two. Your feet drumbeat on the pavement, I turn back, watch you loop in a circle and go nowhere. I walk by the bookstore where men sit out front with grocery carts full of their lives and every single one of them asks me for money. I hand out all the cash I have, which isn't much, isn't enough while you stand across the street. Your hands in your pockets. Your hands idle on your phone. You never look at us. It costs a million dollars a day for you to be here, I call across the street, to you, to myself, to anyone.   

            In the park on K Street near my office, you climb out of an unmarked white van. You cradle sandwiches wrapped in butcher paper, weave in and out of park benches holding out the sandwiches to strangers. No, we say. You've still got your gun, tucked inside your belt this time. No, thank you. 

            I turn away so I don't have to face you, wonder when I'll stop seeing you, wonder if, wonder when, you'll slip into the background and I'll forget you're there at all. 

about the author // Christina Tudor