The Originals

Dear Mr. Andropov,

My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old.

Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying

about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear

war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren’t

please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war.

This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to

know why you want to conquer the world or at least our

country. God made the world for us to live together in peace

and not to fight.

Sincerely,

Samantha Smith

Modern Women

We aren’t original, PK says, so how come we feel so alone? I ponder this as we shuffle through Olivia Newton John and Skinny Puppy records, play them on his Walt Disney record player that he found in the trash. He takes another cigarette from our short stubby pack, leans his back against the wall on

his vermin-infested mattress. This is the hole that he calls ‘Livin’ Easy’, although it isn’t—atop Sing’s Convenience, with its broad, striped green and white awning and wooden blocks piled high with fruit and flowers. There’s nothing convenient about PK’s sink filled with butts and rusting Spaghetti-o’s cans. Or the hot plate perched on his makeshift counter and the tiny gash of a closet smeared with clothes. And even his lamp—the naked woman arching upwards with breasts like oxygen masks—is not exactly wholesome. But we aren’t really alone. Everyone we know lives the same way.

When I was ten there was this older guy who hopped around talking to the older girls who had, to say the least, a little more on top than me. He hopped because he had this full-length, hot as hell leg cast and when he wanted to get places more quickly than Sweeney (the garbage picking oldtimer who lived in a cardboard box beside our tenement, and in the foyer during the coldest months) he had to hop.

Me, I was this skinny little thing, the kind who wasn’t going to develop anything even if you drew them on. I wore nothing but my brothers’ hand-me-down soccer t’s, cut-off shorts, Oilers and Leafs jerseys, Harley t’s, my brothers’ jeans with holes in each extravagantly ripped knee. So of course I didn’t understand it when he paid so much attention to me, called me his little sweetheart, his little girlfriend. I didn’t

understand it when he would say, out of the hearing range of my brothers, “Hey sweetiepie, when you gonna grow up and be my girl?” I liked his eyes. Dave had these chocolate-brown eyes that never blinked when he was looking at someone. And Dave sure loved to look, smiling away at me as if we were on one of those stupid soap operas.

He hung around but I never did find out where he lived. Then there was this day Dave came around wearing a pair of jeans that didn’t have one of the legs cut off.

“Hi sweetie,” he said to me. A handful of girls were playing double dutch, and I was watching on the sidelines. On the front steps of the building a bunch of the guys were smoking doobs and watching the girls jiggle. Dave grinned and waved his cane at them.

“Did ya get your cast off?” I asked him.

“Yeah. C’mere and give me a hug,” he said. I did, and he squeezed me so hard I couldn’t breathe for a minute.

“Show me,” I said, and he rolled up the cuff. I could see from the corner of my eye everyone was trying to catch a glimpse of it, and when the jean came up far enough I could see why. All the skin was this prickly goose skin. It was just like the skin of a supermarket chicken, loose and pasty. “Can I touch it?”