Fourth

“Jeb!”

Çebrail Eleutheros Aydinlisoy (Eleutheros, because his father just had to add Eleutheros after the family fled to America) was having a freak-out.

Last night, he and his girlfriend, Beth, had been cuddling and kissing in bed, and things had gotten hot and heavy, clothes removed, mutual expressions of love stated and passionate interest exclaimed, and at what was surely the worst possible moment, he’d sucked her breath out of her and murdered her.

Well. Maybe not murdered. Her pulse never went away.

But it took her three whole minutes to start breathing again, and eight more to come back to herself. After she did, she was white and shaken, and of course, no amount of “I love you’s” and “I’m sorry’s” could ever be enough to fix that. She’d left his dorm room in a panic, and Jeb suspected that was the last he was ever going to hear from her again, which would make things awkward on Monday, since they had a psychology class together.

His virginity was still safe, at least for now.

What was more alarming to him, aside from the fact that his girlfriend had broken things off with him due to his apparently very nearly killing her after accidentally (accidentally!) stealing her breath, was the way he was now buzzing all over. He had never felt this way before. Now, his skin was tingling. His head was light, but not in a dizzy sort of way; this was more like being full of so much energy that it had to spill out of him to the point where his eyes felt like they might crack open and glow. Things around him were glowing, too, and people, even more so the people. And he felt full of energy, almost as if he could run outside and jump from the ground and land on the roof of his dorm - which would ordinarily be an improbable feat, given that Leebrick was twelve stories tall.

He’d heard that acid could make a person feel this way, but he’d never taken any drugs, so it couldn’t be that.

He supposed it served him right for not observing Shabbat. Friday night should have been spent studying the Torah, not turning off the overhead light in his dorm room (his roommate Ken had carelessly left it on before vacating the room for the night) and getting busy with Beth, with the electric fan on full roar to alleviate the unseasonable heat and cover the sounds of their lovemaking. But at the time, it felt so right. It was love, and love, to him, felt like praying.

“Jeb, how did it go? Did you get lucky?”

If Ken only knew.

“That is a very personal question.”

“In other words, no. Oh, well. Maybe next time. Want to grab some lunch with me?”

“I’m not that hungry.”

He wasn’t. That was another odd thing. Usually, he could eat just about anything that was put in front of him, at any time - he was always hungry, there was never a time that he was not hungry - but now he felt almost sated. For once, his appetite was at peace.

What on earth was going on?

Ken left to make the short walk to the rotunda cafeteria, and Jeb went back to reading Hesiod. Yes, Theogony was assigned reading for his Greek class, but he already spoke Greek well and didn’t have to work too hard to understand the text, so he had decided not to count the assignment as real work, not the way studying for his Latin and psychology exams would be.

And he needed to distract himself before he went nuts worrying.

He would figure out all this buzzy weirdness later.

At least he’d missed the student riot in town the night before. Saturday night, however, the riot came to him.

He’d heard someone talking in the hall about some kind of plan to burn the ROTC building down in symbolic protest. This did not seem like a good way to stop the war, although it was certainly a good way to get attention, some kind of attention, at any rate, and it would probably be an easy building to burn down, all things considered, since it was just rickety wood, unlike the other buildings on campus.

He did not support the war in Vietnam, and he would not have supported it even if his draft lottery number hadn’t been 58. The war was barbaric. More civilians were getting killed than communist partisans. “You can’t tell them apart - they all look alike, even the women and children are probably all VC” wasn’t survivalism, it was racism. Even the Green Beret down the hall from him (honorably discharged a year ago, attending Kent State on a G.I. Bill scholarship) opposed the war. If veterans opposed the war, surely that said something.

The war was one reason he wanted to make sure he got straight A’s and stayed in the Honors College. If he got kicked out of school, he’d be draft bait. His heart murmur might keep him out of the army, but he didn’t want to risk having to rely on it, especially when his family doctor also just happened to be his father. Although he supposed he could also get a second opinion, if it came to that. It wasn’t like he needed to fake having a heart abnormality the way some other guys did.

After the sun went down, he headed toward the southern part of the Commons, which was where the ROTC building was. He had no intention of joining any group of people who might be intent on burning down East Hall. He was just morbidly curious.

“The time for discussion is past! The time for action is here!”

There must have been hundreds of people on the lawn near East Hall. All of them were screaming.

“Burn it down!”

It was insanity.

There were burning road flares sliding off the roof of the target, and Molotov cocktails flying through the air, hitting it on its wood plank sides, and failing oddly to ignite anything, not even the lawn, thank God. Rocks were flying, too. Jeb decided he wanted nothing to do with that crowd, so he skirted around it carefully and made his way to the top of Blanket Hill, where he could see a few people standing and watching the mayhem from a safer position.

He half-walked, half-jogged. He saw a guy with a camera get knocked down, kicked, and trampled. He hoped the photographer survived.

When he made it to the top of the hill, he was relieved to see Barry and Allison there.

Barry and Allison weren’t in the mob.

They were safe.

Barry and Allison had been an item forever, probably since five minutes after they all met at freshman orientation. If Barry hadn’t asked her out first, he might have - he was half in love with her himself - who wasn’t? Even some of the girls he overheard talking in his art class longed for her. But she belonged to Barry. It was known. When they met, it was love at first sight.

And anyway, he lacked nerve. The only reason he’d been with Beth since January was that she had asked him out to a Sadie Hawkins dance that they’d skipped out on fifteen minutes after the band started playing. He’d never have been able to make the first move himself.

He’d road-tripped to Washington with Barry and Allison last October to march in the moratorium protest. They had all walked silently, rank on rank, each of them holding a white candle that had been inscribed with the name of an American soldier who had died in Vietnam.

This mayhem was not the protest march they had been a part of. Not even remotely.

“Crazy, isn’t it?”

“Jeb? You’re here? You’re not studying?”

“I thought I’d take a break. I’m glad you’re not part of that mess.”

Allison rolled her eyes and pressed herself closer to her boyfriend.

“You know I don’t think it’s right. This isn’t going to accomplish anything. It’s just destruction. It’s like what went down last night in town - whoa!”

Where the Molotov cocktails had failed, a lit American flag tossed through a window had got the job done. The ROTC building was aflame.

A distant wail of sirens competed with chants of “Burn, baby, burn!”

This is not going to end well, Jeb thought.

It seemed only a few minutes later that the troops rolled into town and took over the campus.

“You are in violation of the Ohio Riot Act! Disperse at once!”

The National Guard troops didn’t give the rioters any chances to disperse, but the rioters probably wouldn’t have dispersed anyway.

“Omigawd! Are those bayonets?”

“Let’s get out of here, Al.”

Jeb was inclined to agree.

They ran as far as they could from the tear gas and the sounds of bellowing students. Since the tear gas and cries of “Fuck the pigs!” and “RUN!” were everywhere, this was no easy feat, but eventually, they found themselves running through sticky heat toward the Tri-Towers complex, where Jeb’s dorm was. Safety.

“You can stay with me for the night,” he said with a wheeze, once he’d got them in. “I don’t think it will be safe to go anywhere until the morning.”

Tears streamed uncontrollably down his face. Tears were streaming down Barry’s and Allison’s faces, as well. They’d all had a bit of the gas.

He could not stop coughing.

“Eh… Ugh… Excuse me...”

The wastebasket was only a few feet away.

A few dry heaves later, the coughing stopped, although he still had tears running from his eyes.

“I think you must have got more gas than we did,” said Allison.

He nodded. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he tried to talk.

Water, he thought, he needed water, both to pour over his eyes and to alleviate the nausea. His parents talked quietly sometimes about what it was like in Istanbul just before they left for America to escape the pogroms. He’d picked up a few things. Treatment of tear gas poisoning was one of them.

He tried to get enough breath to ask for water, which started another fit of coughing, and gave up and pointed toward his door instead. Fortunately, Barry and Allison seemed to understand what he was asking for, and Barry got up, coming back a few minutes later with some wet paper towels and a porcelain teacup he’d grabbed from Jeb’s desk, full of water that must have come from the drinking fountain down the hall.

He gulped it all down at once.

“Thanks,” he gasped.

From not nearly far enough away, there was a whop whop whop of helicopter rotors.

And outside the window, more screaming.

He heard from somewhere above him, “Get away from the windows! We’re looking for snipers!”

Suddenly, his room was full of gas.

He wished he lived on a different floor.

“Out in the hall! Quick!” Barry cried. Allison threw the door open and ran; he was still sickened and wobbly from the tear gas, and Barry had to half-push, half-drag him out of his room and slam the door shut for him.

“Block the door, Barry!”

“I’ve got it.”

Barry ripped off his T-shirt and rolled it up against the door in a way that showed he was no stranger to rolling things up against the bottoms of doors, or to rolling things in general. This was probably the first time he had ever needed to put a rolled item at a door’s bottom on the outside of the door, though, Jeb thought.

The halls were starting to fill up. They were already hot and stuffy, but it was bound to get worse. There were just too many people.

“I can’t believe it,” he heard a woman exclaim. “Those fascist pigs! We were watching a play, Garden of Eden, and when we got out, they chased us in here. Why? Why? One of them hit Jill on the head with his rifle butt, just because she wasn’t moving fast enough. She can’t walk now. She’s seeing double. We had to carry her.”

“Did you hear? The ROTC building’s been blown up. Maybe it’s revenge.”

“Aw, come on… I think I would have heard a great big boom if a building got blown up.”

“You mean you didn’t hear it?”

Eventually, though, people started to quiet down. Maybe they ran out of things to say. Maybe it was just too hot to talk. Jeb figured the temperature inside the unventilated interior hallway must have been at least ninety degrees, maybe higher. He wondered if things would be worse on higher floors due to heat rising, or a bit cooler due to people feeling safer having their windows open. He wondered if the girl with the concussion had been helped into a bed somewhere safe, or at least somewhere halfway comfortable, until she could be taken to an emergency room. He wondered if he should help… The point was moot. He was too hot to even think of moving. Also, his knees still felt rubbery.

It was going to be a very long night.

“Barry? Barry, are you awake? I can’t sleep.”

“Yeah.”

“Jeb? Jeb, how about you?”

“No. I can’t sleep either.”

“You feeling any better?”

He supposed he was. His eyes didn’t hurt so much. He could breathe again. On the other hand, the heat was making him sick and dizzy.

From somewhere further down the hall, he heard the sound of a woman crying. Maybe Jill with the cracked head.

If only there could be a breeze!

He remembered a hot day in late July, when he was very little. His mother had sent him to bed for his afternoon nap, but it was too hot to sleep then, just like it was now, and so instead of sleeping, he’d watched the curtains at the open window, and through them, through their thin blue cotton, the willow trees in the garden. How he’d loved those willows! They were perfect for playing hide and go seek, for sipping mint tea under, for sitting against. You could even climb one of them, sort of, by wedging yourself into the cleft of its trunk. And the branches swayed so, just so, when the wind blew, almost like the way the cotton curtains by his bed would sway in the wind - and there, there was a wind breathing.

He reached for that memory, reached for the wind he felt waiting

and exhaled

and then suddenly there was a cold gust, blowing out of nowhere, a blessing on the hallway, roaring, bouncing off walls, turning corners.

Gasps.

The wind calmed down to little, lingering eddies, but where it had been, there was no hint of furnace heat stoked by too many baking bodies. Now the hallway was cool. Now they could sleep.

He noticed that his body was no longer buzzing or tingling, the way it had been since he’d eaten Beth’s life and breath. Inhaling, meanwhile, had turned into a painful, mustardy exercise. He tried as deep a breath as he could, and heard himself wheeze.

Was that wind his doing?

How could that even be possible?

But it was obviously so. There was no other way it could be.

I will praise Thee, he thought with amazement, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

He would put his trust in God. There was nothing else he could do, really.

Shortly after dawn, the hallway started to empty as people left Leebrick for their own dorms. Allison and Barry left with them.

It was still cool in the hall, although the floor had been too hard to sleep on comfortably. He’d passed out anyway.

He forced himself to stand up.

His dorm room door was unlocked, and Ken was asleep in the top bunk. The window was open again, and the fan on, but the air seemed safe to breathe, aside from an odd lingering scent of burnt onions that might have been left over from the night before, so he deemed it safe to collapse into bed. He fell asleep before his head had a chance to settle into the pillow.

He woke up to a headache and a growling, painfully empty stomach.

He was alone. Ken was gone again, doing whatever he did most of the time. Jeb still hadn’t figured out Ken. Ken kept his own schedule, and he had a part-time job at the local Burger Chef that paid for his textbooks, so he was almost never there. He also almost never talked. Somehow, in what could only have been a happy accident, the university had managed to pair up two of the most silent people on campus.

The rotunda cafeteria would not be serving lunch at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, so he settled for making himself peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Six of them. He was still hungry even after that, but six sandwiches struck him as ridiculous, and anyway, he had run out of bread.

Maybe fresh air would help.

Outside, the sun pressed on him demandingly. He was having a bad bright-light day. He wished he’d remembered his sunglasses. The sunhat helped, but only so far. At least it was cool out, so his wearing his usual long sleeves and wool trousers didn’t result in sweat-soaked misery.

There was also an eerie quiet. Every now and then, a bird chirped, but for the most part, nothing broke the unnatural stillness.

And there were soldiers everywhere.

A hundred guardsmen or so stood in a ring around the still-smoldering ruins of East Hall. Soldiers guarded the buildings, too. He wasn’t sure if they were there to keep students inside or out.

The troops guarding the burnt-down ROTC building didn’t seem very approachable, but he saw students walking up to some of the other guardsmen, chatting with them, it seemed, and there seemed to be worse ways to get information, so he decided to try walking up and striking up a conversation with one of the guardsmen standing outside the student union.

“Hi. Nice day to be standing duty, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. It’s a lot cooler than last night, that’s for sure.”

“Any idea why you’re here?”

“Aw, hell. Beats me. I mean, sure, there was rioting, but usually that’s something for the cops, or the State Highway Patrol if they need reinforcements. All I know is we were in Akron protecting scabs from striking Teamsters, then the next thing we know, we’re ordered up here. I don’t want to be here. I haven’t had any sleep in four days.” The guardsman, a skittery, thin, blue-eyed kid who was a few inches shorter than Jeb and looked all of sixteen years old even though he had to have been older than that, gave the area a surreptitious, nervous look. “Good. My CO isn’t watching. Here. Look at this,” he said, and pulled up the collar of his battle fatigues to reveal a small pin with a peace symbol on it.

“If you’re for peace, why did you join the army?”

“If I’m in the National Guard, I won’t get sent to Vietnam. That’s why a lot of us joined. We weren’t expecting to see combat here in Ohio.”

Jeb could appreciate that.

“That thing loaded with real bullets?”

“Mine isn’t,” the guardsman whispered. “Some of us won’t do it. Can’t speak for everybody, though.”

“Were you part of last night?”

He did not elaborate. There was no need.

“I was only in the rear,” the soldier said softly. “Thank God. Things were sure crazy, weren’t they? I hope my cousin is all right. She’s a freshman. Pledged Chi Omega this year.”

“Is her name Jill?”

“No.”

“I’m sure she’s all right, then.”

They both looked down at the ground.

“The dandelions are always so beautiful when they first come out, aren’t they?”

“Yeah. Spring has sprung.”

Jeb reached down and plucked a few dandelions, down near the base, so their stems would be nice and long. He handed them to the guardsman.

“Here. Have a bit of spring. I hope you can get some sleep tonight.”

“Thanks.”

The guardsman started to put the bouquet of dandelions down the barrel of his rifle, thought better of it, and tucked it inside his shirt instead, hiding it under olive drab canvas.

“What’s your name?”

“Mecklenberg. Mark Mecklenberg.”

“I’m Çebrail Aydinlisoy. Everyone just calls me Jeb, though.”

“I can see why.” The guardsman grinned. “Nice to meet you, Jeb. Peace.”

“Peace.”

He called his parents collect from the phone in the hallway when he got back to his dorm.

“Hello, Annem. How are things in Youngstown?”

“Çebrail! Thank God you’re all right. We’ve been so worried. It’s not safe for you there. I want you to come home.”

“Annem, finals are coming up. You know I can’t leave before I’m done with my exams. I need to keep my scholarship.”

His mother sighed.

“Kent. My son just had to pick Kent. He couldn’t have gone to Yeshiva College, that nice college up in New York, far from here, oh, no. We could have afforded the tuition, but no. He had to go to Kent.”

“You were fine with keeping me close to home until this weekend happened. It could have happened anywhere, Annem.” Well, anywhere that didn’t have James Rhodes as its state governor, anyway. Rhodes was notorious for being pro-violence, if the violence was being meted out by his own palace guard. Even Jeb had heard about Rhodes. Who had called the governor and asked for him to call in the big guns this time, though, was anybody’s guess. “So things are calm back home?”

“Yes, yes… How goes the studying? Are you doing well with your classes?”

“Latin is hard. Greek is easy, though.”

“I should hope so! How is Beth? Tell her I said hello. We should have her over for dinner again.”

“We’re not together anymore.”

“No? Oh, that’s a shame. She seemed like such a nice girl… Your father wants to talk to you.”

There was a sound of shuffling on the other end as his mother passed the phone receiver along.

“Hello, Çebrail.”

“Hello, Baba.”

“Çebrail, your mother and I are very worried about you. Are you in a safe place?”

“Safe enough. My dorm got tear-gassed last night, but other than that, we were okay.” We were okay, so long as we kept the windows closed and stayed in the interior of the building. Also, I worked a miracle. Or possibly I’m just a monster. I’m not quite sure. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen. Girlfriends didn’t die in your arms and then come back to life. Strong winds didn’t appear in unventilated hallways. Your classmates didn’t burn down buildings. Soldiers didn’t occupy your campus.

“Listen to me, Çebrail. Light of my life, comfort of my old age. You must stay safe. Don’t go anywhere near any demonstrations, if there are any more demonstrations. This is too much like Istanbul in 1955. We have seen this before. Those soldiers are there for one reason only. Your protection is not that reason. If they are given orders, they will beat you, they will gas you, they will arrest and disappear you, and yes, they will shoot to kill. They are there to follow orders. They have already shown that they have been ordered to commit violence on the enemy, and that enemy is the student body; what do you think is to stop them from committing more violence? There is nothing. Stay away from them.”

“Yes, Baba.”

There was nothing much left to say after that, so they said their goodbyes.

Jeb took a couple of aspirin for his headache and went back to his room to study. He decided he would try to translate some of Hesiod’s Theogony from Greek into Latin. It seemed like a good way to practice his Latin.

Following the advice of his parents, he did not leave his room, except once briefly to go downstairs to grab dinner. He was still hungry, despite the six sandwiches he’d made for himself only a few hours ago, and the two helpings of turkey tetrazzini (or turkey tetrachloride, as the students liked to call it) were gone before he was even aware of having eaten them.

He worked on his translation without paying attention to what was going on around him.

He did not notice when Ken got back from his shift at Burger Chef, changed into a tee shirt and a pair of orange bell-bottoms, threw on his jeans jacket covered with flower patches and peace symbols, and left to take part in the sit-in a handful of students had staged at the corner of East Main and Lincoln near the entrance by the old library.

He did not hear the chants of “Here we come!” and “Guards off campus!” He did not hear the students singing “Give Peace a Chance,” or see them sitting down on the street, linking arms in solidarity. He did not notice when the sun went down. He heard rotors when the helicopters started coming, and as a precaution against more tear gas, he closed his dorm room window. Then he went back to studying.

Therefore, he did not hear the fight break out when some of the students in the crowd started lobbing pebbles and brick fragments at the guardsmen, nor did he hear the screams when the guardsmen replied to the volley of small rocks by stabbing students with their bayonets.

Someone was pounding on the door. Since Ken was still nowhere in sight, he got up to see what the pounding was all about.

Barry and Allison stood before him, ashen and drenched, tears running down their faces.

“Fucking pigs those fucking pigs wouldn’t let us in and never mind the damn weekend warriors beating us and shoving us at knife point telling us to ‘get inside or we’d be sorry,’ your stupid jerkass RA wouldn’t let us in. Someone else finally opened the door. God damn them and their damn guns and their damn war, you know we’re the enemy to them? They were laughing as they clubbed us and stabbed us. Laughing!”

A fit of coughing interrupted Allison’s invective. She’d had a bit of gas.

“Can we stay in your room tonight?”

“Yes. Yes, of course, you can.”

Jeb left to get them some wet towels and water to drink.

He hoped Ken was okay, wherever he was.

They sat in a circle nibbling chocolate chip cookies and drinking tea Jeb had made in his electric kettle, cradling blue and white porcelain cups in their hands. It might have felt like a slumber party or a night at summer camp, were it not for the sound of helicopters circling overhead and the occasional scream in the distance as the campus was “secured.”

Allison was still ranting.

“Those fascists. It was a peaceful protest - well, mostly. There were a few outliers who wanted to start something, and they were throwing rocks, and one of them had a baseball bat, but what the National Guard did then was totally uncalled for. They were beating us, stabbing us, throwing us into open windows, closed windows - it didn’t matter. Get inside, they said, get inside. Go directly to your dorms, you’re violating curfew. Fine. Barry and I were walking across the football field and out of nowhere, there was a line of guardsmen, there must have been at least thirty of them, and they all had their bayonets out and pointed at us. They charged us, so we ran… And then we couldn’t get inside. Your RA absolutely refused to open the doors. I thought we’d get bayonetted to death just for being in the wrong place!”

Friendly by day, brutal once the sun went down. Jeb wondered if the nice guardsman with an unloaded gun had managed to be “only at the rear of the action” for a second night in a row.

“So, are you going to be at the protest on the Commons with us tomorrow?” asked Barry.

“I’ll be there.”

He wouldn’t tell his parents about it. There was no need to make them even more worried than they already were.

“It might get ugly.”

“Might?” Allison grimaced. “I guarantee you, it will get ugly. We might not stick around for the whole thing. We’re planning on staying on the outskirts. That way, we can bug out if we have to.”

“I won’t let you face the ugliness alone,” Jeb said. “I promise.”

They stood together on top of Blanket Hill, by the architecture building, on the periphery of the crowd. The day was bright and sunny, and there was a nice, strong breeze, perfect for blowing away clouds of tear gas. It was a lovely day for a protest.

It was not yet noon, but already the chants of “Pigs off campus!” and “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” had started. The Victory Bell was already being rung: dong, dong, dong. About five hundred protesters surrounded the bell, some waving handmade flags. Jeb saw a couple of Kent State football pennants being waved, too - student pride, perhaps.

And it did feel like a football game, in a strange sort of way. There were at least as many spectators as there were participants. They were here for the show. They wanted to see who would win the match: would it be hippie students, or armed soldiers?

As if the answer to that question could ever be in doubt.

Jeb had a bad feeling about this.

“Wind’s blowing my hair in my face,” Allison said cheerfully, and pulled out a rubber band. Last night’s rage seemed a thing of the past. “Oh. I have wet towels in my bag. We’ll probably need them soon… Pigs off campus! Pigs off campus!”

From a jeep somewhere nearby, circling around, someone with a bullhorn was announcing, “This is an illegal assembly. You must disperse.”

Peaceful protests were not even remotely illegal, not from what Jeb could remember from his civics classes, and he could have sworn the First Amendment covered the right to assemble peacefully and express grievances, so how could this assembly possibly be illegal? The thought was absurd. On the other hand, the protesters were not the ones with the guns.

“Those guns can’t be loaded,” Barry muttered.

“No way would they use live ammo on students. They just want to intimidate us. They’ll stab us, they’ll gas us, but they won’t kill us. No way.”

Jeb wasn’t so sure about that. From what he knew of soldiers, they were all too ready to fire real bullets.

“Who’s that guy standing out in the middle of nowhere waving the black flag? The short guy with long hair?”

“Oh, him? That’s Alan. He’s in our psych class, actually. He’s cool, but he’s a little nuts.”

The chanting grew louder.

No more war! No more war! Guard off campus!

And then the rocks started to fly.

Rocks. Whoever thought rocks could be effective against guns and bayonets?

And then it was on.

At first, it felt almost like a game. Students would toss rocks; guardsmen tossed them back. They played catch with rocks for a few minutes, and then, perhaps because the rocks were too limiting, the things being tossed back and forth were canisters of tear gas. Jeb heard laughter. Just a fine day in May, students and soldiers playing ball with each other, never mind that the balls being tossed could brain someone if they landed on that person’s unprotected skull, or poison a person if that person inhaled gas. Just a fine day with curses and insults thrown like rocks and gas cans, but it was all in good fun.

Except of course it wasn’t.

The guardsmen finally advanced in a mass, bayonets pointing, the gas masks they wore hiding anything of them that looked remotely human or identifiable. They were lizard-men in green fatigues. They were going to take the commons. What they would do with it once they’d claimed it was anybody’s guess.

War always seemed to come down to fighting over small, mostly worthless parcels of land, thought Jeb.

When soldiers advance, pointing bayonets at people armed with nothing but jeers, banners, and small rocks, it is never a good idea to hold ground. Jeb and his friends ran. Where they were being herded, he had no idea, but it was somewhere away from bayonet points, which was fine with him.

More rocks and gas cans flew above. Wasn’t this a lark! Where were the goal posts?

“We have to get out of here now,” he said, but Barry and Allison weren’t listening.

The guardsmen seemed to have come from around the architecture building on both sides, advancing inexorably down the hill; wherever the students were, there were troops at their heels. Everyone was shouting. Tear gas blew in the wind. It was absolute chaos. Amazingly enough, at one point, it even seemed like the students had surrounded some guardsmen and trapped them on an athletic court, but that only lasted so long. The guardsmen reversed course and started making their way back up the hill toward the architecture building and its pagoda.

“Come on,” Jeb said, and when he saw that Barry and Allison still couldn’t hear him, he grabbed Allison’s hand, but Allison just pulled him up the hill in pursuit of guardsmen she saw retreating from her, tag, you’re it. From out of the corner of his eye, he could see the crazy student with the black flag still standing alone, still waving his flag.

He followed the motion…

And saw a group of guardsmen by the pagoda, with their guns pointed directly at them.

“Al! Run away, now!”

Finally, that got her attention. She followed the way his finger pointed, screamed, “Shit!” and doubled back.

“We need cover!”

“The parking lot,” yelled Barry, “come on. We can hide there. Come on!”

They ran. They arrived.

It was all happening so fast.

There was a Volkswagen bug nearby that looked like safety. They dived…

“Fire! Fire them! In the air!” Jeb heard someone bark. “No, you fools -”

Pop! Pop!

“Thank God we’re safe,” said Barry.

At least they had the Beetle to use as shelter. It was better than nothing. The rifles were only being fired in the air, anyway.

“Jeb?”

From where he was lying on the pavement, kissing the dirt the Beetle parked on, he heard Allison’s voice. He turned his head and saw her standing behind him.

“Al, get down. You’re out in the open.”

She shook her head, and then Jeb saw that she was glowing, and behind her was a light so bright that it hurt his eyes to look, and he had to avert his face. He looked at her feet and saw through them to the pavement. Then he knew.

“Poor Barry. I’m here with him, although he won’t know it for a long time. Tell him I love him, would you, Jeb? Please?”

Jeb turned his head.

And there Allison was, her body still half-sheltered by Barry’s, except it was already too late and the blood was starting to pool on the ground underneath her armpit. He heard screaming from all around. Screams of survivors, screams of the terrified, screams of pain coming from the wounded. Barry was screaming. Help, somebody help, somebody please help… Jeb started to unbutton his shirt, until he remembered that Al had already walked into the light and no improvised tourniquet would bring her back. How would you make a tourniquet for an armpit and a chest wound anyway? Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flies by day. But bullets, what of bullets? My God, in Him will I trust. My God, my God. The Lord our God, the Lord is One. My God, dying, she’s dying. She’s left her body. She will never come back. Take care of her for us. Light a candle, this one must be red, cover the mirrors. This can’t be. My God, oh, my God, why?

Why?

This story is dedicated to the memory of Jeff Miller, Bill Schroeder, Sandy Scheuer, and Allison Krauss, massacred by the bullets of members of the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970, in what has become one of the most notorious and one of the most polarizing tragedies in American history.

Rest in power.

I have used the King James version of the Bible for quoting psalms for the sake of expedience: It’s in the public domain.