The first time she YouTubed how to make a bomb she laughed. The second time she cried.

Gun on her desk and head in her hands Attica ponders what order a woman seizes her life and leaves it in this collective mass grave. Twirls the card in her fingertips for her appointment. Spins the card atop the desk with her face on the plank of wood.

She wrote something. More for herself. Not sick. Not a victim. All forms of identity erased. Pronounced dead a long time ago. What am I missing? This is a philosophical decision. Joke’s on you. Atty.

Saw a doctor yesterday. Attica could not afford to see a doctor. Doctor said, you’ll go blind. First in one eye then in both, if you have another drink. You’ll feel a pain in your upper abdomen. That’s your liver crying. Your body is crying, Attica. If you have another drink, you’ll die. The doctor wanted to say a prayer. Attica wanted to prey on his tongue.

An empty bottle and makeshift bomb lay beside her over an unused prayer rug. She could have stopped having a drink if she cared. If anyone cared. But she didn’t see much point in caring and neither did anyone else. When Attica was young, she wondered why it seemed as though nobody cared if she was around. Then she didn’t much care about being around.

She considers the undetectable twirls of this world and in it everything washed away into one perpetual chaotic metronome. Kids at play, laughing beneath her building. They set off firecrackers over the white clamor. Attica thinks maybe to go out another way. To go out like a firecracker in her kindred fleeting. Her confetti soul burst of fervent color and flame.

The room is a livable version of a place too small. Books serve as a versatile tool with lamps stacked atop them. The isolated dragon spun a corner upon the east coast desert. She stands in the middle. Hands trembling as she fashions the ghetto bomb around her hips. Profundity lay claim in the feeling of her body recalibrating itself. All senses leave her save one. There is no temperature and no smell. Only the feeling and weight of the act. Attica thought she squeezed every tear away, a levee spilt and broken.

She gathers her things. The catharsis of letting go. On the move. Frantic ticking animated all around her. The notion of never coming back confuses her. Body in motion. A mind and heart and soul anchored.

She regards her posture and takes in her home. Considers the prayer rug at her feet thinking it seemed a time for prayer. Different religions each day, never ascribing to any creed. Any nation. She stopped finding much use for the thing. A vibrator and empty bottles lay around it. She figured if she wasn’t going to pray, might as well have an orgasm.

Deadweight, dragging, she stops at the door and presses her forehead against it. She stops and leans on cold brick as sickness seizes her. Not substance sick but simply universe sick. She takes out her phone and hits a phantom number.

“It’s me,” Attica says.

“What do you want?”

“I’m going”

“Okay.”

“Will you meet me there?”

“Why? It isn’t right. Nobody should be carrying.”

“Please.”

“Okay.”

“How was your day?”

“Fine. Yours?”

“Good.”

“You feeling good?”

“Stop asking me that.”

“Why you get so stirred up by it.”

“Because nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong with me.”

“How’s the new job? Last time I was in a school it looked like there was a switch on them kid’s backs. Just sort of turned out. Like the dreams in their eyes were replaced by the bags underneath them. Something like a sickness. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Like you say. I’m just looking for fulfillment.”

“I say stupid shit. I’m sorry.”

“I wanted to help these kids. Make a difference. Find some purpose. Need a reason to get out of bed in the morning. The other day. I don’t know. Was rough.”

“All these days seem a little coarse these ones. Do you see any… fuck… normal kids in there? Healthy? Happy?”

“Remember that girl I told you about. Destiny. Comes from a removed home. Removed because they found her dead three-week-year-old sister. Shaken and bitten to death by one of the people watching them.”

Attica can hear him close his eyes and drop his head trying to rid the words entry into it through those small holes.

“She came in yesterday. Just sort of mashed to bits. Dead tired. The father was arrested the night before. She just started yelling in class and walking around just screaming. She’d been biting other kids and shrieking at the sight of overweight women resembling her mom. Met her before. Real sweet gal. Destiny is almost thirteen. Can barely speak. Pinches at her privates all day standing, sitting, anywhere.”

“Enough.”

“No. It gets better. You need to hear this. At around age four or five, the mother regained custody. Gave birth to her high. Report says folks would have to bring Destiny to see her and she would protest the entire way there, shaking violently. The literature’s words, not mine. Said she would return with a blank face and blank eyes and would remain silent for long periods of time. Often referencing dead cats and dead babies. Certain items would terrify her, causing her to tremble. When shown a picture of a sleeping baby she shouted ‘dead baby, dead baby.’ She would pierce her skin with any sharp object. Began drawing pictures of naked adults with blood on their mouths dripping down the pages. We have to escort them to the bathroom and wait on them. They told me Destiny has a diffused urinary stream when I was hired. That her vagina was stretched well beyond the limits of her years. They fucking told me that. These fucking people. That’s what the fucking paperwork said. Her fucking urethra so scarred it needed a meatotomy. Fuck.”

She lets the story sit before she continues.

“I visited the father in prison the other day and yeah I can lose my job for it. Why I’m heading to where I’m going. Why I want you to come. Badges had to visit him before and have him sign his parental rights away. As if his signature mattered. As if he should have a say. He signed her off. Stated that he didn’t care. His words on the paper. Roughly five hundred cases a month of this I was told when I met Destiny.”

“That’s a terrible story. Just terrible.”

“These kids. We are going to see the big terrible. Live through it. We are going to eat each other. We reached the point of no return and everybody knows it I think. I’ll see you there?”

“Why you doing this then?”

“Why’s anybody?”

A long silence before she hangs up on such. She makes her long descent into the incendiary light.

 

Attica exits her building to more walls. The exit leading to a valley between two decaying structures, everything in this city too close. The cold hits her like another door needing opening. The added weight to her dragging her down. The bomb a separate organ making her a sleeping animal walked by it. Rubs her tired eyes as if to bring blood into them to take on this world. Somber streets ahead. Her block a popular post for water handouts. On the brick walls are photographs of children taken or missing seeking asylum.

Faint human cries coming from the grove up the alley of her quarters. Lilies and fat sunflowers spring around the edges. One of the few places where anything much grows. Tucked between two buildings. A sort of monument in town.

A man kneels in the middle of the destroyed garden. An achromatic cemetery bloom all about him even in its waste. She moves on. All protest within her has spoiled.

She sees beauty in all this need.

Attica moves down the road past rioters and bystanders and homeless. The agency just a few blocks away. People fucking in the streets. Passes a euthanasia factory. Heart fatigue in collision with nihilism and ignorance lined up down a long and narrow curb. All eyes slanted down towards devices.

Beyond her bookkeeping of her own limbs Attica moves at a light jog. She finds a tight and abandoned alley between two neglected homes. She sheds the bomb gibbering a silent prayer.

“What are you doing?” a man says.

She looks over the fence to the house on her left. Seemed impossibly inhabitable to her. A man in the mud near a relic swing set and green swimming pool that grew things laboring over a laundry basket at his side rolling the clean clothes in the mud.

“What are you doing?” Attica says.

“You going to the agency?”

“Yea.”

The man folds the clothes and puts them in the basket and goes inside. She hears rummaging throughout and follows his vibrations through shingles and the man exits his home.

“Headed that way. We don’t need to talk. Sometimes it’s just nice to walk with somebody. Leave that. I’ll bury it out back.”

In the distance across the street a woman perches two pink balloons on her porch. Their label of license glimmering in the silver sun next to where their weekly rations come.

They arrive at the agency in what feels a form of levitation outside of any distinct time or mileage. Arrive in silence. Glass shatters.

“Are you meeting someone?” Attica says.

He’s been smiling dumbly.

The exploding glass came from a woman throwing a chair. She’s quoting what Attica knows to be Warsan Shire.

“That’s my wife.”

She moves adrift the coiling line hoping it will bring her closer to a time of sleep. Thought about just doubling down on that soon with how it had become her favorite part of the day however little she seemed to get. Her favorite time of consciousness was unconsciousness and it was the dreaming over the living where she began to feel alive. Drifting about this hum of human life until one’s just sort appear before her taking shapes of things now lost and all of it in reversal.

“I’m sorry,” the man behind the glass says, “you might not be eligible for license occupation. I can recommend you to a Carrier Agent. You can wait in line to be tied. Or if you can answer the question accurately, and be interviewed, can sign for a license.”

“What question?” Attica says.

The man opens his desk and leads Attica through the labyrinth complex. On autopilot, she follows. The way down these twists and widening gyres of the building hangs anvils on her eyes. Tight and lonely halls. She passes closed doors full of weeping behind them and is brought into her own little room. A perfect square. The lone light hung nearing collapse by way of flickering and dancing around the dark. He escorts her inside and shuts the door and sits her down and takes the seat across from her. Nothing in the room but this cold and metal place of conference.

“Okay. State your name.”

She does.

“This is your formal interrogation.”

“Interrogation?”

“Yes.”

The man lights a cigarette and pulls on it long and hard, looking at her through smoke.

“This will be recorded,” he says, “would you like to pray?”

“What?”

“Would you like to pray?”

“Pray for what?”

“Just would you.”

“What would I even pray?”

“Whatever you’d like.”

“Is this part of the test?”

“This isn’t a test.”

“What’s the fucking question?”

“What you need a license for. Why do you want to have a kid?”