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When I was going-on-six we nearly blew up the railroad station. By my birthday, we’d managed it. I only know because it’s gone. The rest, including these scars, is fog in the attic. Back then we got explosives easier than rum. The ten-year-olds figured out how to render the volatile agent from unexploded land mines in boiling water and pack it into cakes they could ignite with an improvised fuse, knowledge I had to earn with heroics. That I remember like a verse. A stand of birch trees loomed like soldiers to our West. We chopped them down with submachine guns cleaner than chainsaws. The woods we defended were chunky with abandoned munitions. Once gathered and sorted, to keep them from rivals, we stowed them under floorboards in a shed outside barracks that were once a country church. We’d meet after school, grab arms, wrestle with their rusty actions, and hike down to the tracks. Grenades were for kids with all their fingers, but I had my own Uzi and a Colt sidearm nobody else wanted with plenty of bullets. If we’d been school shooters, the mothers would have wailed about who armed the killer instead of where he got his motivation. We played with the toys we were given. For the freight station exercise, the older boys set blast cakes beneath the stationmaster’s desk and laid a powder trail as a fuse. They wouldn’t let me see. Survivors say I took it badly, that I fired into the treetops, that something crashed through the branches, that it thudded onto the roof. They wouldn’t let me see. Next they say I threw my pistol to the ground, a round discharged, another thud. Again I demanded to see. But then the blast. Then here. Then now. Wherever whenever this is.

Original Copyright © February 13, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 07, 2026