Waiting for the Invasion
Rent from DeepDyve- Waiting for the Invasion
In other years I watched the sky for birds flying south in formation. This year they pass in unbroken lines through my sleep, driven down on machine wings.
I know the voice you use for telling children not to fear every droning sound that scatters their play like shrapnel or shattered ice across asphalt; every approach sends them into piles of limbs under trucks, sends the youngest under your breasts that ache like the unmilked she-goat bleating somewhere, ache with the waiting.
Every child has waited for death angels: I listened at night for the Russians, who would know our little town by its twin water towers. Someone, believe this, painted the towers black hoping to save us. And even now, fear is a night-time animal, winged engines pulsing and the drone of my mother praying in the bed where she died.
No one slipped through a lake of night sky in search of our secret towers. No one. I know this now, but some believed and believing still, prepare the massacre. [End Page 30]
Barbara Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, received the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work, and in 2010 won Britain’s Orange Prize for The Lacuna. Her novel The Poisonwood Bible was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
