Lee:
Lee Harden stood in the center of a knockoff Persian rug. The soft polyester fibers felt like sandpaper on his bare feet. The seventy-two-degree temperature of the room felt hot one moment and too cold the next. His cotton T-shirt clung to his chest. The walls of the room were cloying and stale. Everything was frustrating. Monotonous. The sameness of his prison buzzed in his ears and drove him mad. His body begged him to break free.
His clammy left hand planted in the pocket of his jeans while his right bounced a tennis ball in front of him. To the side, his German shepherd, Tango, sat and regarded the bouncing ball with quiet intensity, his eyes following up and down with the even rhythm of a pendulum counting the endless seconds.
He closed his eyes and tasted brine in the back of his throat. Sand crunched between his teeth and lactic acid coursed through his legs and arms. His lungs clawed for air like someone buried alive. Words punched through the riptide of blood rushing past his ears: The only easy day was yesterday!
He opened his eyes and the salty sea and gritting sand fled from his mouth, but the words still hung before him, tangible now. Carved into wood. The "plaque" was big, about three feet long, and the words were hacked out, like a convict had gone to work with a penknife. Crude and simple. Like the sentiment it bore. Below the chunk of wood was a large steel door that looked like the entrance to a vault.
But it was Lee who was inside the vault.
The only easy day was yesterday.
He wondered how true those words were going to be.
Lee had spent the better part of the day in front of his computer, reading the same news bulletins that had been displayed for the past week. No one had updated the stories. Images of burning cities, overcrowded refugee camps, and violence on the scale of genocide remained untouched. No turnaround. No good news.
No cure.
He had spent most of the past hour lost in thought, gazing at a picture of a very young Honduran child standing in the middle of the street, wearing no shoes, dirty blue shorts, and a yellow shirt stained with blood. He held a half-empty water bottle, likely given to him by one of the humanitarian aid stations. The look on his face was that of someone recovering from a knockout punch: eyes open but not seeing.
Behind the boy and out of focus was a leg. No body to accompany it. It had been sheared off just above the knee and now lay in some dirty Honduran street. The caption under the picture read, Honduran boy outside Red Cross shelter. The picture was dated June 28.
It was now July 3.
Most articles on the news websites were dated June 28. One or two were dated June 29. The ones from the twenty-ninth were just blurbs. US military recalling all overseas troops back to the homeland. Martial law was in effect.
Frank had confirmed all of this yesterday, but despite the look on his face, he had reassured Lee that it would all be over soon. He even apologized for keeping Lee in The Hole for this long. Maybe another week at most. I'll send you a gift card to Ruth's Chris, he had said. Just hang in there.
Lee realized that he had inadvertently been tempting Tango with the bouncing ball and tossed it in the air. Tango let it bounce once, then snagged it in midair. He smiled and wagged his tail, looking deeply satisfied. Completely ignorant. But that was the beauty of a dog.
Pets were strongly advised as companions while in The Hole, a place where Lee had spent many days. Usually two or three weeks at a time. There had been occasions when national disaster was foretold but averted. Such as when Fukushima melted down after the earthquakes off the coast of Japan. The Washington Worrywarts said fallout could reach mainland USA and cause agricultural collapse, which would in turn collapse the stock market, the economy, and the government.
