Quarters

I want to talk about war.

You heard me. This thing must stop. Where we all fall to circling, scattered discs; wobbling on our flat sides in concentric waves. We like the way a quarter falls to the ground when it ceases to spin fast enough to stay on its edge, but have the hardest time describing it without the use of metaphor.

It will always begin again.

Someone will pick it up and use their delicate, ashy fingers. Someone will place one finger firmly on the top of the quarter at the twelve-o'-clock position, pressing down and leaving a little skid-mark row of lines in the soft flesh of the fingertip. Someone will steady this quarter with one hand and use the other, pulling the index or middle finger back behind the thumb to tighten the tendons that hold the fingers together and release the thumb to send the finger it was holding nail-side first into the side of the quarter. The quarter will spin. Knuckles will become bloody if we play this game long enough.

I want to show you something.

Put your hand here, baby. Right there, and hold your four fingers spread apart with the thumb on top of a quarter. Now slide the quarter with your thumb along the table, through the arch created by your middle and ring fingers. Now do it faster. Harder. At my knuckles. See? That's how it works.

If it were easier, you'd already have been doing it.

Now let me do you. No, you have to. That's the way it works. I know, it looks like it hurts. It does. It does hurt. But I won this time. It does hurt, but that is the rules. Hold your knuckles steady, dear. Hold them steady against the table. Because you didn't flick the quarter fast enough. It spun off the table. You have to finesse it. I'll show you how later. This only stings for a minute.

I know, I know, the bone hurts; it's supposed to.

I didn't make up the rules, honey, I just do what I have to do. To win. Well, the winner is whoever doesn't quit first. So you can quit if you want, but then you lose. Don't come crying to me, though, after you've lost and all you've got to show for it is some bloody knuckles. It's a penalty for being the loser. But you have to pay the penalty before you quit; that's just the way it is. Hold still.

There, that wasn't so bad.

See, you got me. If it was all bad no one would do it. Now you get to do me. Go ahead. Go ahead. I deserve it, I lost. I wouldn't pull any punches for you; remember how the last one felt? Go ahead and give it a good plug. Ow. Wow, you really did it. Damn. Damn, girl.

If this is the way we talk about war we will never overcome it.

If we haven't the vocabulary to sleep under bridges then we avoid that scenario. You need to know things. You need to know people. You have to have seen something. You can learn. What can't you learn? Will there be a test? This is the test, and you are living it.

I don't want to talk about it.

The war can never stop. We rage on and on against the promulgation of this unholy terror, we collect our quarters and you walk in one direction. I walk in another. We will not greet each other on the way home. We will never wonder why our paths only cross when we stammer out machine-gun fire, why our eyes search for bright lights in the darkness, our quarters glinting as we flip them over and over like little beacons waiting to bring us to some home of our reckoning.