I Believe

Kansas. Summer, 1936. The bluffs above the Missouri.
The river didn’t look dangerous. Wide and brown and slow. Trees leaning over the banks. A boy could stand on the bluff and think he understood what he was looking at.
He was fourteen. Watching a man jump from the railroad bridge.
Everyone did it. You climbed the trestle. Leapt. Hit the water. Swam to the bank. He’d done it himself, twice. The shock of cold. Hard swim to the shallows. You came up laughing.
The undertow you couldn’t see. The surface looked the same everywhere. Brown and slow and safe.
The man jumped. Hit the water clean. Came up once. Twice.
Didn’t come up again.
People were shouting. Someone ran for a rope. The boy took a step toward the edge. Stopped. His hands were shaking. He didn’t jump.
They found the body two miles downstream. Tangled in the roots of a cottonwood, water still pulling at his legs.
The man’s face looked surprised.
There is the Leviathan.He moves in the deep,in the playground of God.
He waits for his foodin its season.
God asks,Can you draw him out with a fishhook?Put a cord through his nose?Make a covenant with him?

Act I. The Floorboard
Copenhagen, spring 1945, three weeks after the Germans left.
He talked too much. He knew it.
The city was full of people who’d spent four years learning to be silent. How to walk past soldiers without being seen. How to keep their faces empty. Voices low. Thoughts locked behind their teeth.
He moved through it like weather. Big hands, loud laugh, American uniform. They’d won. The Germans were gone. What was everyone so quiet about?
She was sitting alone at a table in the jazz club. Blonde. Thin in a way that made him look twice. She held her glass like she wasn’t sure she had permission.
He sat down without asking.
“You speak English?”
“A little.”
“More than a little, I think.”
She didn’t smile. Didn’t leave. Touched her hair.
He talked. Couldn’t help it. The silence in the room pressed against him like something physical, and he pushed back the only way he knew how. Words. Noise. The sound of his own voice filling the space.
He talked about the war. His unit. The things they’d seen. He talked about Kansas. Bluffs. River. Sky that went on forever. He talked about what he was going to do when he got home. Big plans.
She listened. Let him talk. She was good at that. Later, he’d understand. She had learned to be invisible. He had learned to be impossible to ignore.
By June, the city remembered itself.
The canals turned silver in the long northern light. People sat outside, chairs scraping on cobblestones, glasses catching the sun. She laughed too loud one night and heard herself and didn’t stop.
They walked the city. The parts the Germans hadn’t touched and the parts they had. Fresh paint on corner shops. New glass in old windows.
She walked close to the buildings. Kept her voice low. Moved like someone who’d learned not to take up space.
He walked in the middle of the street. Talked loud enough for people across the canal to hear.
She didn’t ask him to be quieter. He didn’t ask her to be louder.
One night, by the lakes, he put his arm around her. She let him.
It happened the way those things happened. He had cigarettes. Real ones, American tobacco. She had a room with a window that faced the harbor. The city was broken. They were young. Enough reason for anything.
He kept talking. Couldn’t stop. She learned to let the noise wash over her like water. Sometimes she’d surface long enough to ask a question, and he’d be off again. Kansas, the river, the bluffs, what he was going to build when he got home.
She didn’t talk about the occupation. Didn’t talk about her father, taken in ‘43, who never came back. Didn’t talk about what she’d done to survive. The decisions no one should have to make at nineteen.
One night, she showed him the emerald.
She kept it in a box beneath a loose floorboard. German boots had walked on those same boards. She pulled back the rug, pried up the board, lifted it out like something holy.
It was small. Cold. Cloudy. The color of ice under green water.
“Family,” he said. Not a question.
“My great-great-grandmother’s.”
He turned it over in his palm. Felt the weight of it. If he wanted it, it could be his. Cloudy. Old. Probably not worth much.
She was watching him. Waiting. The way people wait at the edge of water.
He handed it back. “Nice,” he said.
The man came up once. Twice. Not again.
He reached for a cigarette. Lit it with the Zippo. Started talking about Kansas.
She put the stone back in the box. Back under the floor.
He shipped out in September. They stood on the dock. He held her hands. Said the things men say.
“Keep that emerald safe,” he said. Trying to smile.
“I will.”
He kissed her. Walked up the gangway. He saluted the flag, and the Officer of the Deck gave him permission to board. He turned to look for her.
She was already walking away.
He sent letters. November. December. Snow in Kansas. Frozen river. Winter silence. A long one in January that said he meant it, he’d come back, she should wait for him.
She folded it carefully. Put it in a drawer with the others.
He waited until June.
The silence wasn’t an accident. It was an answer.
Once, he was not vast.Once, he was small.
He swam among other creatures.He learned hunger.He learned taking.
No one remembers when he grew too large.No one remembers the first timeno one could stop him.

Act II. The Vault
Copenhagen, April 1949. A palace room full of signatures and glassware.
Four years since the war ended. The city had rebuilt itself. That’s what people said. Stone by stone, street by street. The canals ran clean. The shops had glass. The streetlights worked.
He knew better. He’d seen the ledgers.
American steel in the bridges. American wheat in the bakeries. Thirteen billion dollars across sixteen countries.
He didn’t resent it. You don’t rebuild a continent because you expect gratitude. The Soviets were already in Berlin and Prague. Pushing their iron curtain further. Reaching for anything that wasn’t nailed down.
You rebuild because you’re watching the water, and no one else is.
He wasn’t a sergeant anymore. He wore a suit. Good wool. Italian shoes. He had a firm handshake. He expected his calls returned.
He didn’t expect to see her.
She was standing by the window when he walked in. Blonde. Older. The softness of girlhood gone. She was talking to a Belgian. Something about transit routes. She held herself like a woman who belonged in the room.
He stopped.
1941. The Germans. Denmark couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t hide. Couldn’t fight. A small country with a long coastline and not enough friends.
The Americans came for the emerald before the Germans could take it. Took it to Washington. Kept it safe.
But they didn’t just keep it safe. They used it.
Greenland. The rock and ice at the top of the world that everyone forgot about until they needed it. The Americans built runways on the ice. Radar stations in the mountains. Weather posts that tracked the storms. They watched German submarines from the rock. Guided convoys through the North Atlantic.
The emerald wasn’t in a drawer. It was in a command center. It won a war.
And when the war ended, they gave it back.
That was always the deal. Keep it safe. Use it well. Give it back.
She turned, mid-sentence, as if she felt it.
Four years of silence. No letters. No explanation.
She excused herself from the Belgian. Walked toward him. Unhurried.
“You came back,” she said.
“I wrote.”
She didn’t look away. “I know.”
They talked. He asked about her work. She was part of the Danish delegation now. Her family had old connections, a name that opened doors even after an occupation.
She asked about his. Defense. Contracts. Building things.
“You’ve done well,” she said.
“I got lucky.”
“You got rich.”
He laughed. She didn’t.
She reached for her glass. Water, not wine. He didn’t know why he noticed.
A ring. Gold. Simple. He looked at it too long.
“Married,” he said. Not a question.
A brief ceremony.
Twelve nations. Twelve signatures. Simple language. An attack against one is an attack against all.
He signed with a fountain pen. Blue ink. His name, large. Confident.
He thought about what America had already done. The Germans were coming. Denmark couldn’t stop them. The Americans came for the emerald before the Germans could take it. Kept it safe. Used it well. Gave it back.
That was always the deal.
She signed after him. Small letters. Neat. The ring caught the light.
Afterward, there was champagne. The murmur of diplomats pretending the world was safe.
She stood across the room. Holding a glass she hadn’t touched.
Their eyes met. The way they had in the jazz club, in the room with the window. Something passed. The shape of what he didn’t take. And what she didn’t give.
She looked away first.
He didn’t. He couldn’t.
They thought they could build a cage for him.
Twelve of them. Stone and iron and promises.
The Leviathan watched. Patient. He learned to wait.

Act III. The Commitment
Copenhagen, winter 1951. The vault is finished. The paint is still wet.
Men in work clothes carried crates through a side door. The air smelled like sawdust and cold stone. Someone tracked snow in. It melted into small dark puddles on the floor.
He came back. To see it done. To place his treasure.
They moved the table from the palace. The chairs. Hung their photograph on the wall. Twelve faces, young and certain. Put it in a room in the back of the vault. The flag room. Fabric and thread. The original documents, behind glass.
He went in first.
He carried a torch. Bronze. Heavy. Cast from the same mold as the one in the harbor back home.
They gave him the center case. Best glass. Best light.
He stood there a moment after they locked it. Hand on the case.
She went last.
He watched her from across the room. A guard opened a case in the back corner. Furthest from the entrance. Smallest case.
She carried the emerald herself. Wrapped in cloth. Cloudy even under good light.
She set it down. Adjusted it once. Stepped back.
The glass closed. The lock turned.
She didn’t look at him to see if he noticed.
He noticed. The torch in the center. The emerald in the corner. For a moment, something…
He paused.
That seemed right to him.
There was a reception. Chandeliers and champagne. Twelve flags on the wall. They congratulated themselves on what they’d built.
He looked for her across the room.
She wasn’t there. Someone said she’d left early. Her boys.
He stood by the window. Watched the snow fall through the streetlight. Finished his drink. Set down the glass.
He thought about the torch in its case. The emerald in its corner. The photograph on the wall. Twelve faces who believed in their commitment.
Watching the snow fall on Copenhagen, he believed.
That night, he walked alone.
The canals were black, cut by thin lines of light from the streetlamps. Somewhere, a radio played jazz behind a curtain. The sound came and went as he passed.
He stopped on a bridge. Leaned on the stone rail. The water moved beneath him without hurry.
He heard footsteps. Didn’t turn.
A man beside him. A shadow in a gray coat. An East wind.
“You believe it?” the man asked.
He didn’t answer.
“You think they’ll come? When the undertow pulls?”
The undertow. He hadn’t used that word in years.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
“And her? If they came for your torch. Would she come?”
He thought about the woman by the window. The ring on her hand. The silence.
“Yes,” he said. “She would.”
The man looked at him. Didn’t nod. Didn’t agree. And then the man was gone. Footsteps fading over wet stone.
He stayed on the bridge a long time. The water moved beneath him. A man laughed somewhere under an awning. A cigarette burned down to his fingers.
He thought about the promise. Twelve nations. Twelve flags. No one drowns alone.
For forty years, they stood together. The wolves circled, but they didn’t attack. The covenant was a vault, and the vault held.
They stood with him. Flags, full.
Then the wall fell.
He watched it on television. People with hammers and champagne. Strangers kissing on rubble that used to mean something. The wolves dissolving, retreating, eating themselves.
The world celebrated. And he celebrated with them.
He thought about the man on the bluff. He came up once. Twice. The face that looked surprised.
The undertow. It never stops. The surface looks calm. Brown and slow and safe.
One by one, the others climbed down from the tower.
Peace dividend. That’s what they called it. The money they saved by not standing watch. They voted for schools. Hospitals. Pensions.
These were good reasons. Weren’t the wolves gone? The wall was down. The war was over.
He kept paying.
Alone now. The flags still hung on the wall. But the watchtower was empty. Except for him.
Then the wolves came for the torch. Not from the east. From a cave. A desert. A clear blue morning when the sky fell down.
An attack on one is an attack on all.
She sent her sons.
He went to the first funeral. Thomas. Twenty-six years old. The mother at the grave.
He stood in the back. Didn’t speak.
What could he say? Thank you wasn’t enough. I’m sorry wasn’t either.
But the ice was melting. The emerald in the back corner. The rock and ice at the top of the world.
He saw what was there. What it was worth now.
God asks, Will he make a covenant with you? Speak to you soft words? Keep his promises?
No. He will not.
He grows hungry.He forgets the covenantshe made when he was small.
He sees what he wants.He takes what he sees.

Act IV. The Silence
From the tower, he could see. The ice began to melt.
He noticed it before the others. He was always watching the water. Passages that had been frozen since before there were maps, opened. The rock and ice at the top of the world. Waking up.
The wolves noticed too.
He went to her.
“I need the emerald.”
“No.”
“You can’t protect it. Dog sleds. An island the size of Western Europe.”
“It’s not yours to protect.”
He stood at the window, watching the snow fall, and he thought about 1941. The Americans who’d come for the emerald before the Germans could take it. Who’d kept it safe. Who’d used it to win a war. Who’d given it back.
For safekeeping, the note had said.
He’d built the radar stations. Maintained the base. Watched the water while they built schools.
“The wolves are circling,” he said. “You won’t protect it. You won’t let me protect it.”
She didn’t answer.
He found her again at a reception. Marble floors. Champagne. The same room where they’d signed the covenant. Different faces now. Younger. None of them remembered what it cost to build the vault.
“It’s not safe,” he said.
Something crossed her face. Not anger. Exhaustion. The weight of sons who didn’t come home.
“I’ve been protecting it for eighty years.”
“Protecting it.” She looked at him. “Or waiting to take it?”
He didn’t answer.
“The emerald is not yours.”
“And you’re holding a piece of paper pretending it’s a wall.”
She set down her glass.
Her answer? Silence.
She walked away.
He watched her go. The woman who’d survived by being invisible. Who’d shown him the most precious thing she owned and never forgiven him for not wanting it enough.
For a moment, he wondered if she was right.
She still didn’t understand. The most important piece of geography America didn’t own.
He’d given it back when it was worthless. Eighty years, he’d kept it safe. Now it was worth something, and she acted like he was the thief.
If she refused to protect it, he wasn’t sure it was hers to keep.
Even the Leviathan owes God a death.We all do.But not yet.Not tonight.
The Leviathan does what he wants.Who can subdue the Leviathan?

Act V. The Night
The watchman does not know the hour. He knows only: the proud one’s core is crooked within.
The Leviathan feeds. Grows. Forgets that even it arose from the same depths.
We all owe God a death. The Leviathan does what it wants. The watchman does what he must.
From the tower, the watchman sees…

Late, after closing. The vault is quiet. The flag room, unlocked.
He came in through the back. The old door. The one they never used anymore.
He had a key. Of course he had a key. He’d paid for the locks. The guards were watching the emerald. The others were watching the emerald. Everyone was watching the emerald.
The sons she’d sent were still in the ground.
He was done talking about the emerald.
He walked past the room with the emerald to the flag room. A hallway no one guarded. He walked slowly. No hurry. He had time. The door was unlocked. Who would steal flags?
He stepped inside. It smelled like old cloth and paper. Twelve flags hung. The promise behind glass. The photograph watched from the wall. Her face among them. Small. Neat. The way she signed her name.
For a moment, his chest tightened. Something he didn’t want to name.
He thought about the boy on the bluff. The man who came up once. Twice. Not again. The room with the window. Emerald in her palm. The moment he handed it back.
The curtains were old. The paper was dry. Seventy years of certainty, boxed and filed and forgotten.
From the tower, the watchman sees…

He reached into his pocket.
The Zippo. Black crackle metal. Rounded edges, worn smooth. He’d carried it since the war. Since Copenhagen. Since the room with the window and the woman who’d shown him an emerald he didn’t take.
He ran his thumb across the worn edges. Held it in his hand.


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There is the Leviathan.He moves in the deep,in the playground of God.
He waits for his foodin its season.
God asks,Can you draw him out with a fishhook?Put a cord through his nose?Make a covenant with him?
Once, he was not vast.Once, he was small.
He swam among other creatures.He learned hunger.He learned taking.
No one remembers when he grew too large.No one remembers the first timeno one could stop him.
They thought they could build a cage for him.
Twelve of them.Stone and iron and promises.
The Leviathan watched.Patient.He learned to wait.
God asks again,Will he make a covenant with you?Speak to you soft words?Keep his promises?
No.He will not.
He grows hungry.He forgets the covenantshe made when he was small.
He sees what he wants.He takes what he sees.
Even the Leviathan owes God a death.We all do.But not yet.Not tonight.
The Leviathan does what he wants.Who can subdue the Leviathan?

Music byArtist: Jon BjörkSong: Dwell Upon



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There is the Leviathan.He moves in the deep,in the playground of God.
He waits for his foodin its season.
God asks,Can you draw him out with a fishhook?Put a cord through his nose?Make a covenant with him?

The Zippo. He ran his thumb across the worn edges. Took it out of his pocket.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Act I. The Affair
Copenhagen, spring 1945, three weeks after the Germans left.
You could still smell it. Smoke, petrol, something sour underneath. The city was learning how to breathe again. Nobody knew what to do with their hands.
She was twenty-three. Blonde. Thin in a way that made people look away. She’d spent four years learning to be invisible. How to walk past soldiers without being seen. To keep her face empty. Make herself small enough to survive.
He was American. A sergeant from Kansas. People thought all of Kansas was flat, but not where he was from. Huge houses on the river bluffs, oak trees. Nearly every year, someone drowned. They jumped off the bridge, knowing they could swim out of the great river. They could not.
He had a wide smile and big hands and he talked too loud for any room he was in. They met in “Glasshall in Tivoli.” A Danish jazz club. Defiant of German rule to the end. Jazz was Allied music. The Nazis despised it.
She was drinking alone. She knew she shouldn’t, but the Germans were gone, and she didn’t feel afraid.
He sat down across from her without asking.
“You speak English?”
“A little.”
“More than a little, I think.”
She didn’t smile. But she didn’t leave. She touched her hair.
By June, the city remembered what it was.
The canals turned silver in the long light. Sun sat on the water like a thin sheet of metal. The sun only pretended to set, hovering just below the horizon, turning the sky the color of bruised peaches over slate roofs and church spires. People sat outside again. Chairs scraped on cobblestone. Glasses clinked. Bicycles hummed past in steady lines.
They drank beer in Nyhavn. Watched the boats. She laughed too loud. Heard herself. Didn’t stop.
She showed him the city. The parts the Germans hadn’t touched and the parts they had. Street corners, the paint still new. Shop windows. Fresh glass that didn’t quite match the old panes.
The gardens, gates open again, lights coming on one by one. The fountains, running with joy. Shopkeepers repainting their signs with careful strokes, making the letters bold again.
They walked along the lakes at dusk. The air cooled and smelled of water and grass. Swans drifted in the half-dark, white shapes sliding over black glass. He threw bread. She told him not to, said it made them aggressive. He did it anyway, and she didn’t mind. A couple passed, arms linked, moving slow like they had nowhere they had to be.
One night, he put his arm around her. She let him.
It happened the way those things happened. He had cigarettes. Real ones. American tobacco. She had a room with a window that faced the harbor. The city was broken. They were alive. Enough reason for anything.
He talked a lot. She learned this about him early. He talked like he didn’t know the precious silence. It was something to be filled, like the world would forget him if he stopped making noise.
He talked about the war. His unit. The things they’d seen. Friends he’d lost. Kansas. The bluffs. The river. The fields. The sky that stretched out forever. He talked about what he was going to do when he got home. Big plans, big dreams. Like he had a key to the future.
She listened. He was kind. Happy. Funny. She didn’t talk about the occupation. Didn’t talk about her father, who’d been taken in ‘43 and never came back. Her father had believed in things. Agreements. Treaties. A league of nations. He’d been wrong.
She didn’t talk about what she’d done to survive. The humiliations. Decisions no one should have to make at nineteen.
Some things you don’t say. Not even to the man in your bed.
One night, she showed him the emerald.
She kept it in a box beneath a loose floorboard. Her grandmother had given it to her before the war. Before everything. It was small, cloudy, the color of ice under green water. She had hidden it from the German searches. Always worried she would lose it.
“Family?” he asked, holding it up to the light.
“My great-great-grandmother’s.”
He turned it over in his palm. Squinted at it like estimating its value.
Then he handed it back.
“Nice,” he said. Reached for a cigarette, a Lucky Strike. Lit it with his Zippo. Black crackle metal. Rounded on the edges, where the color of the rubbed metal shown through.
She watched him light it. He glanced towards the window. Still talking. He had already forgotten the stone in her hand.
She put it back in the box. Back under the floor. Didn’t say anything.
He had a pocket full of stones. She’d seen them. Sapphires, rubies, a diamond. He was twenty-four years old, and he’d already had someone’s lifetime.
Her emerald was cloudy. Sentimental. Not worth much.
He didn’t want it.
He shipped out in September.
They stood at the dock. He held her hands, looked into her eyes, said what he thought were the right things men say. I’ll write, I’ll come back, this isn’t the end.
She nodded.
She didn’t believe him. But it cost her nothing to let him say it, and it seemed to cost him something, so she let him.
“Keep that emerald safe,” he said, smiling like it was a joke.
“I will.”
He kissed her. Walked up the gangway. Didn’t look back.
The letters came for a while. November. December. A long one in January that talked about home. Snow. Missing her.
Then February. Nothing. Nothing again in March.
She didn’t write to ask why. She already knew.
She wasn’t the kind of woman he’d marry. She’d known it that first night in the club and every night in the room with the window. She was what happened during the war. She had loved him anyway.
She went to the floorboard.
The emerald was there, where it had always been. Where it hadn’t always been.
A flashback. The stone, in her palm. Cloudy green. Cold. Her grandmother’s hands had held it. Her mother’s. Hers.
Not only hers.
She remembered the day they came. Spring, 1941. Germans had searched her room. They knew about the emerald. They just came in. Moved her aside.
Later that week, two Americans on the stairs. Their uniforms didn’t fit the narrow turn. They were polite. Professional. They spoke English to each other, slow Danish to her.
For safekeeping, ma’am. Just until things settle down.
She was nineteen. The occupation was a year old. Her father was still alive then. He still believed in agreements. He told her to cooperate. He said the Americans were friends.
She handed it over.
They wrapped it in cloth. Carried her grandmother’s stone down the stairs and out into a street full of German soldiers. The Germans didn’t stop them.
Americans were still neutral then.
She said thank you. Standing in the doorway. Thank you to the men taking her inheritance because she could not keep it.
Four years. The emerald spent the war in a vault in Washington. Safe. Dry. Far from the Germans. Far from the Danes, who couldn’t stop them. She spent the war in Copenhagen. Learning to be invisible. Learning where to look and where not to look.
Her father was taken in ’43. She didn’t think about the emerald that night. Or the night after. Later, she did. A small green stone. What it might have bought. Passage. A bribe to the right man at the right time. She told herself there was no chance. The stone couldn’t have saved her father. She would never know.
They gave it back in the summer of ’45. A note on American paper about Danish American friendship. They handed her the cloth like a gift. We kept it safe for you.
She knew they were right to take it. That was the part she couldn’t forgive.
She said thank you again. Smiled. That night she put it under the floorboard. Didn’t look at it for months. Until she showed it to him. The man in her bed.
Once, he was not vast.Once, he was small.
He swam among other creatures.He learned hunger.He learned taking.

Act II. The Vault
Copenhagen, April 1949, in a palace room full of signatures and glassware.
Four years since the war ended. The city had rebuilt itself. Stone by stone, street by street. Pretended the scars weren’t there.
He came back with a delegation. American money rebuilding Europe. He was one of the men who decided where it went. Defense contracts. Airfields. Ports. The stones from his pocket had bought his first contract. The contracts bought everything else.
He wasn’t a sergeant anymore. He wore a suit now. Good wool. Italian shoes. He’d learned to shake hands like a man who expected his calls returned.
They met at Christiansborg Palace. Twelve of them sent someone. They would build a museum, they called it. A vault. Somewhere to protect what mattered. A symbol that civilization still meant something.
He didn’t expect to see her.
She was standing by the window when he walked in. Blonde. Older. The softness of girlhood gone. She was talking to a Belgian, something about transit routes. She held herself like a woman who belonged in the room.
He stopped.
She turned, mid-sentence, as if she felt it.
Their eyes met.
Four years. No letters. No explanation. Just silence, and now. Her face in a window across a room full of diplomats.
She excused herself from the Belgian. Walked toward him. Unhurried. Like she’d known he would come, sooner or later.
“You came back,” she said.
He tried to smile. The old smile.
“I told you I would.”
She looked at him. Just looked.
“Yes,” she said. “You did.”
They talked. Small talk.
He asked about her work. She was part of the Danish delegation. Her family had influence, old connections. A name that opened doors even after an occupation.
She asked about his. Defense. Contracts. Building things.
“You’ve done well,” she said.
“I got lucky.”
“You got rich.”
He laughed. She didn’t.
She reached for her glass. Water, not wine. The light from the window caught her hand.
A ring. Gold. Simple. The way the sunshine gleamed from it.
He looked at it too long. Blinked. “Married,” he said. Not a question.
“Three years.”
“Kids?”
“Two boys.”
He nodded. He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to ask: Does he know about me? About Copenhagen? About the room with the window and the emerald under the floor?
He didn’t ask.
Instead, he said, “He’s a lucky man.”
She looked at him. That same look from the bar in 1945.
“Yes,” she said. “He is.”
The ceremony was brief.
Twelve of them signed. Simple language. What we place here, we protect together. No one takes. No one sells. No one walks away.
The document sat on the table. They raised their glasses. They believed it, that afternoon. Every one of them.
He signed with a fountain pen. Blue ink. His name large, confident.
She signed after him. Small letters. Neat.
He watched her write her name. The ring caught the light again.
He thought about the emerald. The cloudy stone he’d handed back without looking. That green. That cold. That far north.
He knew she still had it.
Afterward, there was champagne. Handshakes. The murmur of diplomats pretending the world was safe. Someone lifted a camera. They held their glasses up and didn’t move.
She stood across the room. Holding a glass she hadn’t touched.
He was talking to someone. A minister, or a general. He didn’t remember. He kept watching her.
She didn’t look at him.
Then she did.
Their eyes met. Just for a moment. The way they had in Tivoli, in the jazz club, in the room with the window.
She looked away.
He didn’t. He couldn’t.
No one remembers when he grew too large.No one remembers the first timeno one could stop him.

Act III. The Commitment
Copenhagen, the winter after, when the vault is finally finished, and the paint is still wet.
Men in shirtsleeves carried crates through a side door. The air smelled like sawdust and cold stone. Someone tracked snow in. It melted into small dark puddles along the floor.
She came back. To see it done. Place her treasure.
They moved the table from the palace. The chairs. Hung a photograph on the wall. Twelve faces, young and certain. Put it in a room in the back of the vault.
The flag room. Fabric and thread. The original documents behind glass.
He went into the vault first. The American. He carried a torch. Bronze. Heavy. Cast from the same mold as the one in the harbor back home.
Liberty, he said. Loud enough for everyone to hear. They gave him the center case. Best glass. Best light.
He stood there a moment after they locked it. Hand on the case. Admiring.
She went last.
The emerald. Wrapped in cloth. Cloudy even under good light. A stone you could lose in a pocket if you weren’t paying attention.
A guard opened the case in the back corner. The hinges creaked. Small sound. She set the emerald down herself.
The glass closed. The lock turned.
She didn’t look at him to see if he noticed.
That night, there was a party. Chandeliers and champagne. They congratulated themselves.
He looked for her across the room.
She wasn’t there. Someone said she’d left early. Her boys.
He stood by the window. Watched the rain streak the glass. Finished his drink, set the glass down, and didn’t look for her again.
Later, he walked alone.
The canals were black. Cut by thin lines of light from the streetlamps. Somewhere a radio played jazz behind a curtain. The sound came and went as he passed.
He stopped on a bridge. Leaned on the stone rail. The water moved beneath him without hurry. It had seen Germans. It had seen Americans.
He heard footsteps and didn’t turn.
A man beside him. A shadow. He rested his hands on the rail, like he belonged there. Plain face. Gray coat. They stood in silence.
“Who keeps the keys?” the man asked.
He didn’t answer.
“If you needed them,” the man said. Quiet. Like he already knew. “Would they come? Would she?”
The man was gone. No name. No farewell. Just footsteps fading over wet stone.
He stayed on the bridge a long time. A stranger. A cold night. A man laughed under an awning. A cigarette burned down to his fingers.
He looked back once. The bridge was empty. He wasn’t sure it had ever not been.
Years passed. The vault got new locks. New rules written in language that looked like safety.
He kept the question anyway.
She raised her sons. Watched them grow tall. Watched them learn to shake hands and stand straight and look men in the eye.
She didn’t talk about the American. Didn’t talk about the room with the window.
Then. Someone came for the torch. Men who hated what it meant. Who wanted to melt it down, snuff it out, prove it was never real.
They didn’t get it. But they got close. Close enough to crack the glass. Close enough to draw blood.
He didn’t call the others. They came the next morning. Before he could ask.
What we place here, we protect together.
She didn’t hesitate. She sent her sons. Her kitchen. Early morning. Gray light through the window.
Coffee on the stove, gone bitter. No one had touched it.
Boys at the table. Not boys anymore. Men. Her men. Uniforms pressed. Bags by the door. One of them kept adjusting a strap that didn’t need adjusting. The other ate without tasting.
She didn’t cry. Didn’t make it about her.
She reached across the table and flattened a wrinkle on a sleeve with two fingers. Quick. She stood in the doorway until the sound of their boots faded to nothing.
He didn’t need them. Not really. He had enough men. Enough money. Enough guns.
But she sent them anyway. For his torch. For the promise. For the name she had signed in small neat letters.
The others came too. For a while.
Then they drifted. Other priorities. Other problems. His torch was his problem now.
She stayed. Her sons stayed. For eighteen years, they stayed.
Some of them didn’t come home.
They thought they could build a cage for him.
Twelve of them.Stone and iron and promises.
The Leviathan watched.Patient.He learned to wait.

Act IV. The Change
Years later, at receptions with marble floors and too much champagne.
He found her by the window, the way he always used to.
“That emerald of yours,” he said. Like it had just crossed his mind.
She looked at him.
“It’s not safe back there. In the corner like that. Anyone could take it.”
“No one’s going to take it.”
“You don’t know that.” He set the glass down. Looked past her.
He started asking questions. At meetings. Dinners. In hallways where people pretended not to listen. Acting like he had forgotten.
That emerald of the far north. Whose is that again?
She heard about it. She always heard about it.
Then he sent his son.
Just a visit, he said. Friendly. The son walked through the vault with his hands in his pockets. Lingered by her case. Asked the guards questions they didn’t know how to answer.
She wasn’t there. But she heard about that, too.
He started talking about wolves.
“The wolves are circling. If I don’t take it, they will.” he told her.
“I’ve been seeing wolves my whole life.”
“Not like these. You can’t stop them. Not with what you have.”
“I’ve protected it my whole life.”
“Your security?” He laughed. “You know what you’ve got? Two dog sleds. That’s it. Two dog sleds.”
People laughed with him. She heard about it. She thought about her sons. The ones who didn’t come home. She didn’t laugh.
He named an envoy. Made it official. A man in a suit who showed up with a leather briefcase and a pen that clicked when he smiled. He smiled a lot. Used words like partnership. Protection. Mutual interest.
He offered to buy it. Named a price. More than a cloudy green stone could ever be worth. More than sentiment. More than memory.
She refused. “It’s not for sale.”
“Everything’s for sale.”
“I could keep it safe for you. Just until things settle down.”
She refused. “Things are settled.”
“They’re not. And you know it.” He said, “The wolves…”
She refused. “There are always wolves.”
He leaned forward. Same big hands. Same confidence. Older face.
“The vault isn’t enough. You know that. I know that. I’m the only one willing to say it.”
She refused. “It’s not yours to take.”
She reinforced the case. New glass. New locks.
The others saw it, too. She didn’t need to remind them. What we place here, we protect together.
He kept pushing.
“We’re going to do this,” he said. “Whether you like it or not.”
She looked at him. The man from the bar in Copenhagen. The man who’d handed back her emerald without looking. The man whose torch she’d protected for eighteen years. She thought about the boys who didn’t come home.
“The easy way or the hard way,” he said. “But we’re going to do it.”
He stared at her.
She didn’t look away.
“I am not for sale,” she said. “And neither is the emerald.”
She was ready for him to try to take the emerald.
She had guards. Glass. She had the others, or some of them, standing with her. She thought she knew what he wanted.
God asks,Will he make a covenant with you?Speak to you soft words?Keep his promises?
No.He will not.
He grows hungry.He forgets the covenantshe made when he was small.
He sees what he wants.He takes what he sees.
Even the Leviathan owes God a death.We all do.But not yet.Not tonight.
The Leviathan does what he wants.Who can subdue the Leviathan?

Act V. The Night
Late, after closing, when the vault is quiet, and the flag room is unlocked.
He came in through the back. The old door. The one they never used anymore.
He had a key. Of course he had a key. He’d paid for the locks. The guards were watching the emerald. The others were watching the emerald. Everyone was watching the emerald.
He walked past the room with the emerald to the flag room. A hallway no one guarded. Nobody ever guarded it.
He walked slowly. No hurry. He had time.
The door was unlocked. It was always unlocked. Who would steal flags?
He stepped inside. It smelled like old cloth and paper. Twelve flags hung. The promise sat behind glass. The photograph watched from the wall.
He stood in the center of the room. The place where they had laid the first stone. Where they had believed.
The curtains were old. The paper was dry. Seventy years of certainty, boxed and filed and forgotten.
He reached into his pocket.
The Zippo. Black crackle metal. Rounded edges, worn smooth. He’d carried it since the war. Since Copenhagen. Since the room with the window and the woman who’d shown him an emerald he didn’t want.
He ran his thumb across the worn edges. Took it out of his pocket.



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The banana cost forty-seven cents.
I got it from the vending machine at work. I grab it on my way out to the parking lot. Fifteen minutes of freedom. The break room smells like microwaved fish. I just need to be outside for a minute.
I lean against the wall by the loading dock. Trucks roll past on the 15. The sun’s already down, but the sky is still that burnt orange it gets out here. The smog holds onto the light.
I peel the banana without looking at it. Four bites. I toss the peel in the trash on my way back in.
I don’t think about where it came from. Nobody does. It’s a banana. Forty-seven cents.
Later, I can’t stop thinking about it.
Maybe there’s blood in the fruit.
Act I. The Racket. Scene 1.
My name is Elena. Twenty six. I work at a fulfillment center in Fontana. One of those massive warehouses off the 15 where the trucks run all night. You’ve ordered from us. Even if you don’t think you have. Everyone has.
I’m good at my job. Fast. Reliable. Management likes me. I’ve been there four years now, since I dropped out of Cal State San Bernardino. Couldn’t afford to stay.
I live with my parents in San Bernardino. A working class town on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Railroad, then steel, then military, now shipping. Hot and dry. The mountains trap the smog from LA, but on a clear winter morning, when the wind comes down the pass, you can see the snow on Mount San Gorgonio.
My grandfather bought the house in 1971. He never talked about where he came from before that. None of us asked.
He worked the railyards in Barstow. Saved everything. Bought the house outright. Three generations later, we’re still there. We don’t love it, but we own it. The only security that feels real.
My parents are citizens. I’m a citizen. Born at St. Bernardine’s. San Bernardino County, California. Seven pounds six ounces. Birth certificate in the safe.
But my mother won’t answer the door if she doesn’t recognize the car in the driveway. My father keeps a folder in the fireproof box by the bed. Birth certificates. Naturalization papers. Deed to the house. Just in case.
I asked him once. Just in case of what?
He didn’t answer.
You know what I want. I want to stop living like we’re here on a pass that could get revoked. I want my mother to open the door without checking the driveway first. I want my father to throw that folder away. I want to feel like I belong in my own country, like the word citizen means what it says. I want to be able to drive down my street and not worry about being shot during one of the raids.
Three generations. My grandfather built a life here. My parents built a life here. I was born here. I am an American.
And still there’s a folder in the safe. Still my mother won’t answer the door.
I was home when the news broke. Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. Half watching something, scrolling my phone.
My mother had the TV on in the kitchen. Background noise. She doesn’t really watch. She likes the sound of voices.
The news broadcast cut in. Urgent.
“US special operations forces have successfully captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a predawn raid in Caracas. Maduro, who has been under federal indictment since 2020 on charges of narco terrorism and drug trafficking, was extracted by helicopter and is currently in US custody. President Trump addressed the nation from the White House…”
My mother turned it off. Didn’t say anything. Started wiping down the counter. She cleans things that are already clean when she worries.
My father was in his chair. I said, “Papá, what do you think?”
He didn’t look at me. Pursed his lips. Glanced at my mother. He said, “I think it’s going to be a long year.” Then he went to get a tool from the garage.
I could feel something in the room. Old. Something they weren’t saying.
That night I can’t sleep. I have homework for my history class at Chaffey College. Latin America. Colonial Period to present. A speech by some old dead guy from the 1930s. I hadn’t started it.
I made coffee. Sat at the kitchen table. Opened my laptop.
Started reading.
Act I. The Racket. Scene 2.
Elena: 1935. A Marine Corps general named Smedley Butler. I keep reading.
Then…I was there. A folding chair. Wood seat, cold metal frame. Room smells like cigarette smoke and wool coats. A banner on the wall. VFW Post something. American flags on either side of the stage.
The man at the podium is old. Sixty, maybe. But he stands like he’s still in uniform. Proud. Shoulders back. Chin up. Two medals on his chest I don’t recognize.
He’s looking out at the crowd. Starts to speak. His hands grip the podium. Knuckles, white. Holding on like he might fall if he lets go.
Butler: “War is a racket…at the expense of the very many…a few people make huge fortunes…I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business…
I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914…
Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues...
Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 to 1912…
The Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916…
Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903…
There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes. And the other is the Bill of Rights.
War for any other reason is simply a racket.”
Elena: He stops. Quiet. Someone coughs. Butler looks at a man in the front row. Old. Maybe his age. Maybe they served together. He doesn’t look away.
Marine Corps General Smedley Butler. The most highly decorated Marine in history. The only Marine to earn both the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor. A gangster, he said, for Wall Street.
He didn’t say we should never fight. He said we shouldn’t lie about why we are fighting.
Next morning I go to work. Same shift. Same trucks. Same routine.
On my break I go outside. Banana in the vending machine.
I stand there looking at it through the glass.
Forty-seven cents.
I don’t buy it.
Act II. The Blood in the Fruit. Scene 1.
Narrator: Chaffey College. Health Sciences Building. Anatomy lab.
The room smells like formaldehyde and cold air. Fluorescent lights. Steel tables. A skeleton hanging in the corner like it’s waiting for someone to ask it a question.
Valentina: My name is Valentina. I left Caracas, Venezuela in 2018 with two suitcases and a pharmacy degree.
The suitcases are in my closet. Degree framed on my wall. Neither useful here.
I work at CVS in Rancho Cucamonga. Shift supervisor. Not a pharmacist. I wear the red polo and the name tag. I answer questions about where the cough syrup is. Sometimes people ask me for medical advice. I give it because I know the answer, then I tell them to talk to the pharmacist. I’m not allowed to know the answer.
Three years I’ve been trying to get my credentials transferred. Forms. Fees. Evaluations. More forms. They want me to retake classes. They want transcripts that don’t exist anymore because the university can’t keep the lights on. They want me to prove I am who I say I am, over and over, in a language that isn’t mine.
The bureaucracy isn’t a wall. It’s a maze. It lets you keep walking so you don’t notice there’s no exit.
So here I am. Chaffey College. Twenty-eight years old. Anatomy and Physiology. Sitting in a room full of nineteen-year-olds, learning the names of bones I learned six years ago in Spanish.
Narrator: She’s at a lab table. Skeleton hand in front of her. Index cards.
Valentina: Carpals. Metacarpals. Phalanges.
I know this. I knew this before most of these kids had driver’s licenses. But the paper says I don’t know it, so I’m learning it again.
My phone buzzes. I should ignore it. Lab policy. Professor’s a hardass about phones.
But I see the notification. WhatsApp. Mamá.
I grab my bag and walk out.
Narrator: Hallway. Cinder block walls. The hum of vending machines.
Valentina: I lean against the wall and press play.
The connection is bad. Static. Her voice cutting in and out. But I can hear it underneath. Something I haven’t heard in a long time. Hope.
She’s talking about the news. Maduro. The Americans. She’s saying maybe, maybe, maybe. Mijita, están diciendo que todo va a cambiar. Que por fin. Baby, they’re saying everything’s going to change. Finally.
I play it again.
Her voice sounds younger. That’s what hope does. Takes years off. I remember what she sounded like before. Before the lines for bread. Before my brother couldn’t find work. Before the hospitals ran out of everything and people started dying from things that shouldn’t kill anyone.
She sounds like that again. Just for a minute. Just in a voice message from eight thousand miles away.
I want to believe it. I remember 2019. Guaidó standing in the plaza. Declaring himself president. The crowds. The speeches. The whole world recognizing him, saying this is it, this is the turn.
And then. Nothing. Maduro stayed. More sanctions. Hospitals got worse. People kept leaving. People kept dying.
I left.
I press record. Te quiero, Mamá. Vamos a ver.
I love you. We’ll see.
I send it before I can say anything else.
Narrator: Night. Studio apartment. Rancho Cucamonga.
Small. Clean. A bed, a desk, a hot plate. The pharmacy degree on the wall, next to a calendar from a Venezuelan bakery in Panorama City.
She’s in bed. Phone in her hand. The only light in the room.
Valentina: I open WhatsApp. The family group chat. Familia Caracas.
Seventeen members. I scroll through the icons. People I grew up with. People I left behind. My mother. Brother. Tía Rosa. Cousin Diego. Cousin Maria.
The photos are old. Everyone frozen in time. My mother’s icon is from 2016. She’s wearing lipstick. Smiling. She doesn’t look like that anymore. I scroll back through the chat.
It used to be different. Memes. Birthday messages. Photos of food. My brother posting terrible jokes. Diego sharing fútbol highlights.
Now it’s logistics.
Does anyone have power? The water’s been out for three days. Mamá found rice at the bodega on Avenida Sur. Expensive, but it’s there. Has anyone heard from Abuela? She’s not answering.
When the news broke that the Americans grabbed Maduro, the chat exploded. Forty-seven messages in an hour. I watched them scroll past.
Diego: SERA QUE POR FIN??? Maria: Dios mío, I can’t believe it. My brother: Don’t get your hopes up. Tía Rosa: Praying. Just praying.
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t.
Everyone was so happy.
I know what this is. I’m not stupid. The Americans aren’t doing this because they care about Venezuela. They’re not doing it for my mother. They’re doing it because there’s oil in the ground and someone’s getting paid.
I know there are contracts being signed right now, in rooms I’ll never see, by people who couldn’t find Caracas on a map.
I know.
But my mother is sixty-three. She walked six hours last year to find bread. Six hours. And if the ships come and the shelves fill up and she can get her medication, I don’t care why they did it.
Is that wrong? Probably. But I’m tired. Tired of being right about how broken everything is. I just want her to eat.
Act II. The Blood in the Fruit. Scene 2.
Narrator: Later that night. Valentina’s laptop, open to a PDF. Testimony from the Ciénaga massacre. Translated from Spanish.
Valentina: I’m in this history class. Need the credits. Latin America, H108, Colonial Period to Present. Preparing a response paper. Two pages, double-spaced. Due Thursday.
I’m reading testimony from a survivor. A woman. Age nineteen in 1928. Describing what she saw.
Narrator: Ciénaga. Colombia. December 6, 1928. The banana zone.
I can smell it. Salt. Rot. Gunpowder. I can feel the heat. I can see their faces. People everywhere. Thousands of them. Workers. Families. Children sitting on their fathers’ shoulders. Women holding babies. Old men in white shirts, sweating through the cotton.
They’ve been on strike for weeks. Twenty-five thousand banana workers. They work for United Fruit, except they don’t. Not officially. The company uses subcontractors, so they don’t have to call anyone an employee. No contracts. No protections. No rights.
They get paid in scrip. Company money. Only good at the company store, where the prices are whatever the company says they are.
They’re asking for direct contracts. Cash wages. Toilets at work. The company said no.
The US government sent a message to Colombia: Protect American property or we send Marines. Colombia didn’t want American boots on their soil. So they sent their own army instead.
The soldiers arrive in the plaza. They form a line. Rifles ready.
Valentina: I see a woman near the front. Young. About my age. Holding a little girl, maybe three years old. The girl is playing with a piece of ribbon. Red. She keeps winding it around her fingers.
I want to yell at them to run.
A general steps forward. Cortés Vargas. He reads from a piece of paper. His voice carries across the plaza. He says, “You have five minutes to disperse.”
Nobody moves. Where would they go? They’ve been camped here for days. This is where they wait during the negotiations.
Five minutes. The soldiers raise their rifles. The woman with the little girl. Looking around now. Confused. The girl, still playing with the ribbon.
Then. The guns. Loud. Sharp. The sound hits your chest before it reaches your ears. The screaming. And then. Silence. And then screaming again.
Trains. Waiting at the edge of town. They load the bodies onto the trains. Hundreds of them. Nobody counts.
The trains go to the coast. The bodies, into the sea.
The official report will say forty-seven dead. Survivors will say hundreds. Some three thousand. Nobody knows.
The company reopened the plantations within a week. The strike, broken. The workers who survived went back to the fields. Company scrip. No toilets. Nothing changed.
The government called it restoring order.
Narrator: Years later, Gabriel García Márquez will write about this. One Hundred Years of Solitude. A chapter. The massacre. Thousands dead.
Then the town forgets. Everyone forgets.
The rain comes and washes the blood away, and the streets look like they always looked, and life goes on, and nobody remembers.
Valentina closes her laptop. Opens WhatsApp. Plays her mother’s message again.
Act III. Butler. Márquez. The Question.
Narrator: Chaffey College. The courtyard. Concrete table. January sun, cool air. The hum of the freeway.
Elena: Valentina’s already there. Bag of Takis and a Monster Energy. I sit down. Pull out my tupperware. Rice and beans. I tell her she’s eating a breakfast of champions.
Valentina: You know your mom’s food makes my Takis taste like depression.
Elena: (I push her the Tupperware.) You want some? She made too much. It’s better than that red dust.
Valentina: The red dust has caffeine. I need to be awake for my shift.
Elena: Suit yourself. Hey, did you read the Butler speech? For Thursday?
Valentina: I skimmed it.
Elena: You skimmed it? Val, it’s the whole thing. “I helped make Mexico safe for oil.” “Honduras for the fruit companies.”
Valentina: Yeah. I saw it.
Elena: And then Ciénaga. The strike. They killed them because they wanted toilets. And the US threatened to invade, so the Colombian army did the dirty work.
Valentina: History repeats itself. I know.
Elena: And now Maduro. They’re saying it’s for “democracy.” It’s not. It’s the Racket. The oil. The contracts. It’s a setup. You should be furious.
Valentina: I am furious!
Elena: You don’t look furious. You look like you’re doing homework.
Valentina: Because I am doing homework. I have an Anatomy quiz in ten minutes.
Elena: How can you care about Anatomy when they’re invading your home?
Valentina: Elena, stop. If I fail Anatomy, I don’t get the degree. If I don’t get the degree, I don’t get the raise. If I don’t get the raise, I can’t send money home.
You think I don’t know it’s a racket? I know exactly what it is. I know they’re stealing the oil. I know they don’t care about us. But my mother called me yesterday. And for the first time in three years, she wasn’t crying about the blackout. She was talking about bread.
You get to write a paper about the “racket.” You get an ‘A.’ You go home to your parents’ house. I don’t have that luxury. I don’t care if the bread is stolen. I just need her to eat.
Narrator: (Silence. The campus noise fades away. The air feels heavy. Elena pulls her Tupperware back slightly. Neither woman moves.)
Elena’s grandfather never talked about Guatemala. She used to think that meant it didn’t matter. Old news. History. Now she thinks he carried it the whole time. Like weight you don’t name because naming it doesn’t make it lighter.
Valentina looks at her phone, but doesn’t unlock it. The message is still there. Her mother’s voice, full of hope. Valentina will play it again later, alone, like she’s checking that hope is still real.
They sit at the concrete table. The campus noise moves around them. The freeway hum doesn’t stop. Elena slides the Tupperware a few inches farther away from Valentina. Valentina folds the Takis bag down flat, presses the crease with her thumb. Red dust on her fingers.
Neither of them speaks.
Then Valentina stands. “I have to go.”
Elena nods. “Yeah.”
Valentina walks toward the lab. Elena stays seated, watching her go, like she’s watching a door close slowly.
A minute later, Elena gets up and heads for the parking lot. She passes the vending machines by the student center without meaning to.
Bright glass. Rows of salt and sugar. The banana.
Forty-seven cents.
She stops. Stares at it. Her hand hovers near the button like it has its own memory.
She turns and keeps walking.
At home. Her father’s folder. Still in the safe.
Music byArtist: rakeySong: Limelight


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Act I. Tick Tock
[SFX: The noise of New York City]
[Narrator] New York City in December. Manhattan. No snow yet, but the cold sits like it’s waiting for something.
A kid walks home from work. Twenty-four years old. Jacket zipped to the throat. Same route he always takes. Down from Midtown, cutting through the side streets. Too many tourists on the main streets.
He wants to move through the world without it touching him.
It’s 6:12 PM. The sun is already gone. The crosswalk timer across the street blinks 12, then 11, then 10. Tick. Tick.
Cars honk. Little beeps, long beeps, the ones that hold down the horn. Trash trucks. Ambulances with sirens blaring. Delivery drivers on bicycles. All stuck.
The kid walks by the way he walks by everything. Eyes forward. Keep moving.
Cops on almost every corner. Keeping the peace. On the buildings, American flags, lit from below, snapping in the wind that cuts between the towers. Red and white and blue against the black.
And the steam.
It comes up through the grates, the vents. Somewhere underneath. The water in the gutter catches it, and the whole street looks like it’s breathing. Like the city has lungs.
A waist-high stack painted orange and white hisses near the curb. Warm air in cold air.
He asked someone once. Why does it do that? Why is there always steam? Like the water is smoking.
The subway, they said. The pipes. The heat below. The cold above. The whole city is a machine, and the steam makes it run.
[Daniel] I love it. The city breathes. Exhales. Makes it feel alive. Like something’s happening under the surface, even when nothing’s happening at all.
I put my headphones on.
The noise is still there. I can see it. Mouths moving. Cabs lurching. Cops talking into their radios. But I can’t hear it. I’m inside my own head now.
The tourists look up. They stop in the middle of the sidewalk to take pictures. Big coats. Shopping bags. Walking three across, like the city belongs to them.
The New Yorkers move like water around rocks. They don’t stop. Just flow toward wherever they’re going.
I’m one of them now. Four years in. The headphones that say don’t talk to me, don’t see me, I’m not here.
[Narrator] The lights from a bodega spill onto the sidewalk. Red and gold. A pizza place on the corner, line out the door. A woman arguing into her phone in a language he doesn’t recognize.
He turns onto his block. Streetlights tinge yellow-orange. A guy smokes on his stoop, looking at nothing. Somewhere above, music loud enough that the bass comes through the walls.
Home.
He steps inside.
[Daniel] There he is. My little brother. Sitting on the couch. Looking at me like he’s got something to say.
[Narrator] Daniel stands in the doorway. Doesn’t move. His brother looks up. People call him “K.” Nineteen years old. Named after his great-grandfather. Same face Daniel’s known his whole life, but something’s different now. The way he sits. The way he holds himself. K speaks first.
[K] “I tried to call you. A few times.”
[Narrator] Daniel pulls off his jacket. Tosses it on the chair. He moves to the kitchen, opens the fridge.
[Daniel] He’s right. I never pick up.
“You hungry? I’ve got leftover Thai. The good place.” K says he’s not hungry.
[Narrator] Daniel grabs two beers. Pops the caps. Sets one on the coffee table in front of his brother and sits down across from him. K has been waiting for him to sit down.
[K] “I joined the Navy.”
[Narrator] Silence. Daniel’s beer stops halfway to his mouth.
[Daniel] “What?”
[K] “The Navy. I leave in two days.”
[Daniel] I don’t say anything. I’m trying to hear it again. Navy. Two days.
“When did you decide this?”
[K] “A while ago.”
[Daniel] “And you didn’t tell me?”
[Narrator] The brother looks at him. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t apologize.
[K] “I’m telling you now.”
[Daniel] “That’s a waste.”
[Narrator] It comes out before Daniel can stop it. K’s jaw tightens.
[Daniel] “You’re smart. You could do anything. You’re going to swab decks and take orders from guys who peaked in high school?”
[Narrator] K doesn’t look away. But something closes behind his eyes.
[K] “Great-Grandpa Kenneth was Navy.”
[Daniel] “That was different. That was a real war.”
[Narrator] The words hang there. K picks up his beer. Sets it back down.
[K] “I needed to do something.”
[Daniel] “You were doing something. You had a job.”
[K] “I was delivering packages.”
[Narrator] K stops. Looks down at his hands. Then back up.
[K] “I wanted to matter.”
[Daniel] He says it like it’s simple. Like that explains everything.
And I just told him it was a waste. Told him his war wouldn’t be real enough.
[Narrator] K stands up.
[K] “I should go. Early flight.”
[Daniel] “K—”
[K] “It’s fine.”
[Narrator] It’s not fine. Daniel can hear it. But K is already at the door.
[Daniel] “Be safe. Okay?”
[Narrator] K nods once. Doesn’t look back.
[Daniel] The door closes. I sit there with two full bottles and the thing I said still in the room.
He wanted to matter. So he signed a contract. Raised his right hand. And now he belongs to something I don’t understand.
Act II. Duration
[SFX: Train wheels on tracks, rhythmic, then slowing. Station announcement muffled.]
[Narrator] The train pulls into the station. New Jersey suburbs. Christmas Eve.
Daniel is on the platform. Cold air. Gray sky. Not cold enough to bite. Just there.
He didn’t want to come. His mother called three times. The third time, she didn’t ask. She just said what time dinner was. So. Here he is. The house is twenty minutes from the station. His father picks him up. They don’t talk much. The radio fills the space. Sports. Weather. Traffic.
[Daniel] Dad asks how my place is. He asks if work is good. We talk about sports. That’s the whole ride.
[Narrator] The house is already full when they arrive. Cars in the driveway. Lights on in every window. A wreath on the door. Same wreath since Daniel was a kid.
Inside, the house is warm. The smell of food. Voices overlap. Christmas music competing with a movie playing in the other room.
His grandmother finds him first. “There he is. Look at you. So skinny. Are you eating?”
[Daniel] “I’m eating.”
[Narrator] She doesn’t believe him. She never believes him. She tells him she made a brisket and pulls him toward the kitchen.
His mother finds him before he gets there. Hugs him like she’s checking if he’s real.
[Daniel] She says I look tired. She asks about work. She asks if I’m seeing anyone.
And there it is. I say no.
She tells me about a girl. Rachel’s daughter. In law school. Very pretty. She could introduce us.
“Mom.”
She’s just saying.
I need air. Quiet. To be anywhere but in the middle of this.
[Narrator] He escapes. The back room. Used to be his grandfather’s study. Now it’s just a room with old books and a chair nobody sits in.
Except tonight.
Kenneth is there. In his late nineties. A circle of cousins around him, laughing at something he just said. He’s holding a glass of wine like a prop. He won’t drink it. Just likes having something in his hand.
[Daniel] Great-Grandpa Kenneth. Everyone’s favorite person. Always has been.
He’s the one who remembered every birthday. Sent five dollars in a card until I was ten, then switched to twenties because, in his words, “inflation is a thief and you deserve to keep up.”
He’s sharper than anyone expects. Mixes up some names. Thinks my cousin Mike is still in college, even though Mike is thirty-two and sells insurance. But he knows what year it is. Knows who’s President. Has opinions about both.
[Narrator] The cousins drift away when someone announces food. Kenneth stays in his chair. Daniel sits down across from him.
[Daniel] “Do you think the Jets will make the playoffs next year?”
[Narrator] Kenneth laughs. A real laugh. Starts in his chest.
[Kenneth] “I’ve been waiting on the Jets since nineteen-seventy. I thought we were going to repeat.”
[Narrator] He looks out the window. His fingers tap the arm of the chair. Something shifts behind his eyes.
[Kenneth] “You know what waiting really is? I learned it in the Pacific.”
[Narrator] Daniel didn’t expect this. But you don’t interrupt Kenneth.
[Kenneth] “Picket duty. Small ship. Radar watch. You sit out there and wait. Okinawa, 1945. We were the first thing the kamikazes would see. That was the job. Spot them. Report them. Hope they didn’t get through.”
“We were at sea when Roosevelt died. April. Someone came through the ship saying the President was dead.”
[Daniel] “What did you think?”
[Kenneth] “We didn’t believe it. He’d been President my whole life. Since I was a kid. Didn’t know there could be another one.”
“You know what they told us when we signed up? ‘Duration Plus Six.’ That was the contract. You serve for the duration of the war, plus six months. No end date. Just... until it’s over. However long that takes.”
[Daniel] “What if you wanted a different deal?”
[Kenneth] “Only deal there was. You signed, or you didn’t. I signed. I wanted to matter.”
[Narrator] He looks at Daniel. Eyes clear. Present.
[Kenneth] “I heard your brother signed up.”
[Daniel] “He just started boot camp.”
[Kenneth] “I know. Your mother told me. Navy. Like me.”
[Narrator] He nods. Proud. But something else crosses his face.
[Kenneth] “I enjoyed serving. Proud of it. Still am.”
[Narrator] He pauses. Looks at Daniel like he’s deciding whether to finish the thought.
[Kenneth] “But the men who send them. The men who decide where they go. What we did was right, but it isn’t always right. Those men should be bound too.”
[Daniel] “What do you mean?”
[Kenneth] “Limits. A clock on them. Something that says you can’t keep sending boys forever just because you feel like it.”
[Narrator] Someone calls from the other room. Dessert. Kenneth waves his hand. He’ll be there in a minute.
Daniel waits for more. But Kenneth is looking out the window now. Somewhere else. Sixty years back. Small ship. Radar. Waiting.
[Daniel] I sit there another minute. Then I get up. “Thanks, Grandpa. You want me to bring you some food?”
I walk back into the noise. The laughter. The questions. But I’m not there. I’m somewhere else.
The men who send them. They should be bound, too.
[Narrator] Daniel leaves the next morning. Early train. The city, waiting. But something is different.
He wants to move through the world without it touching him.
Act III. The Debate. Scene 1.
[SFX: Espresso machine. Cups on saucers. Quiet conversation.]
[Narrator] January. The city has its rhythm back. The holidays are over. The tourists have thinned out.
Daniel is at a café in the West Village with his friend Margot. She loves the coffee here. Says it’s the only place in the city that does it right.
They’ve known each other since college. Margot works at a think tank now. Policy stuff. She reads everything. The kind of person who sends you articles at midnight with “thoughts?” in the subject line.
[Daniel] Margot is my smartest friend. She’d tell you that herself. Not in a bad way. She just knows what she knows, and she knows a lot. When I want to argue about something, I call Margot. When I want to feel dumb, I call Margot.
[Narrator] They’re on their second espresso. Margot is reading something on her phone. Frowning at it. Then she looks up.
[Margot] “You following this term limits thing? You should. Someone’s going to float it again. Repeal the 22nd. Let him run again. Or let whoever comes next run forever.”
[Daniel] “Why would we do that?”
[Margot] “Why wouldn’t we.”
[Narrator] She takes a sip. She’s enjoying this.
[Margot] “The 22nd isn’t a founding document. It’s from 1951. A reaction to Roosevelt. Republicans shoved it through because they were mad at FDR. Now they’re the ones floating ways to get around it.”
[Daniel] “So we just erase it?”
[Margot] “If the people want someone, why should dead people get a veto? The men who wrote the rule are gone. Every generation should get to decide for itself.”
[Daniel] “So term limits are antidemocratic.”
[Narrator] She leans in a little.
[Margot] “If sixty million people want someone to be president, and you tell them no because of a rule written by guys who’ve been dead for seventy years, who’s the tyrant?”
[Daniel] “What if they’re wrong.”
[Margot] “Then they’re wrong. You don’t get to protect people from themselves.”
[Narrator] She sets her cup down.
[Margot] “I’m not saying I want it. I’m saying the argument against it is weaker than people think. The 22nd is a leash. And the hand holding it has been dead for decades.”
[Narrator] Daniel’s cup is empty. He doesn’t order another.
[Daniel] I think about Kenneth. The chair by the window. The men who send them should be bound too.
Margot doesn’t know about K. Doesn’t know about Kenneth. She’s arguing in the abstract. I’m somewhere else. But I don’t say that. I don’t have the words.
[Narrator] They step outside. The cold hits them. Margot heads uptown. Daniel walks home.
The city hums. Steam from the grates. American flags wave in the sunlight. He puts his headphones on. But today they don’t work the way they’re supposed to.
Kenneth’s voice is there. The men who send them should be bound too.
And now Margot’s voice. The dead have no rights over the living.
They don’t agree.
Act III. The Debate. Scene 2.
[SFX: Neighborhood bar. Quiet. A Knicks game on low. Someone shooting pool in the back.]
[Narrator] A week later. Daniel is at a bar near his apartment. Not his usual place. Just somewhere close. Didn’t want to cook.
It’s a Tuesday. Almost empty. A couple in a booth by the window. A guy at the end of the bar, watching the game. Daniel sits in the middle. Orders a burger and a beer.
The bartender is older. Sixties, maybe. Gray hair, kept short. Moves slow, but not tired. The kind of guy who doesn’t need to talk, but will if you want him to.
[Daniel] I’ve been carrying it around for a week and haven’t said it out loud to anyone. And then I say to the bartender, “My brother just shipped out. Navy.”
[Narrator] The bartender looks up. Nods once. Keeps wiping the glass.
[Bartender] “Where to?”
[Daniel] “He can’t say.”
[Narrator] The bartender nods again. Like he knows that feeling.
[Daniel] I don’t know why I ask him. Maybe because he’s right here.
“What do you think about term limits. For presidents.”
[Narrator] He doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t act like it’s weird. People talk to him about all kinds of things. He sets the glass down. Thinks about it.
[Bartender] “You know why we have them?”
[Daniel] “Roosevelt served four terms. People got nervous.”
[Bartender] “That’s the history. Maybe not the reason.”
[Narrator] He shrugs, like the rest is simple.
[Bartender] “We don’t do kings.”
[Narrator] He says it plain. Like Daniel should already know.
[Bartender] “That’s the whole point. Some guy sits in the chair until he dies, and then his kid sits in it. We said no. We said the people get to choose.”
He leans in a little.
“But the people choosing the same guy forever, waiting for him to die, that’s just a king with more steps.”
[Daniel] “But if the people want him…”
[Bartender] “People thought they wanted kings for thousands of years. Might have worked for Europe. But it’s not America.”
[Narrator] He pours a beer for the guy at the end of the bar. Comes back.
[Bartender] “There’s no guy so important the whole thing falls apart without him.”
[Daniel] I think about what Margot said. The dead have no rights over the living.
[Bartender] “The guys who wrote the Constitution, they’d seen what happens. A guy gets power, he wants more. Stays long enough, he thinks he deserves it. Stays longer, he thinks he’s the only one who can do it.”
He taps the bar with two fingers.
“After that, you’re not voting him out. You’re waiting for him to let go. And men like that don’t let go.”
[Daniel] “So the limit protects us from ourselves?”
[Bartender] “It reminds the guy in the chair it doesn’t belong to him. He’s just sitting in it for a while. He gets up and someone else sits down. That’s the deal.”
[Narrator] The burger comes. Daniel eats. The bartender moves down the bar, checks on the other guy, comes back.
[Bartender] “Your question. You’re chewing on something.”
[Daniel] “I keep thinking about it. My brother. He signed. He’s bound.”
[Narrator] The bartender nods.
[Bartender] “Then the guys who send him shouldn’t be able to do anything they want.”
[Narrator] He lets that sit.
[Bartender] “If my kid’s going to war, the man who sends him should know he won’t be there forever. The longer you sit in that chair, the more you think it’s yours. There’s gotta be a limit.”
[Daniel] I stop chewing. That’s it. That’s what great-grandpa Kenneth said. Almost the exact words.
[Bartender] “A king doesn’t think about that. A king thinks he’ll be there to see how it ends. A president with a limit knows he won’t. That changes how you decide. Something good for the country is one thing. Something good for him is another.”
[Narrator] Daniel finishes his burger. Finishes his beer. Pays the tab. Leaves a good tip.
Two voices in his head all week. Kenneth. Margot. Now a third.
There’s no guy so important the whole thing falls apart without him.
He walks home. Headphones off. The city. The machine. Noise surrounds him.
Act IV. The Limit
[SFX: Silence. A refrigerator hum. A radiator clicking.]
[Narrator] May. 3 AM. Daniel’s apartment. Dark. Phone buzzes. Unknown number.
[Daniel] “Hello?”
[K] “Hey.”
[Daniel] “K? You okay? Where are you?”
[K] “I’m good. Can’t say.”
[Daniel] “Is it cold? They feeding you?”
[K] “Yeah. Food’s fine. Look, I can’t be on long. There’s a line. But I need a favor. Tell Mom I’m good. Doing the job.”
[Daniel] I picture it. A line of guys at sea waiting for two minutes with a phone. Two minutes of home. And he’s using his to check on Mom.
“I will.”
[Narrator] Silence on the line. Daniel hears voices in the background. Someone waiting for the phone.
[K] “Hey, I gotta go. There’s a line.”
[Daniel] “Wait. K. I was wrong. What you’re doing matters. I didn’t get it then. I do now. We’re all proud of you.”
[Narrator] He stops. That’s not what he meant to say.
[Daniel] “I’m proud of you.”
[Narrator] Quiet. Just the static of wherever K is. When K speaks again, his voice is different. Younger, almost.
[K] “Hey, I’ll be home in a few months. We can go to that Thai place.”
[Daniel] That’s all he says. It’s enough.
“It’ll be my treat. Be safe, K.”
[K] “You too.”
[SFX: The line clicks. Silence.]
[Narrator] Daniel sits on the edge of the bed. Phone dark in his hand. His brother, somewhere he can’t name. For a duration he doesn’t control.
[Daniel] K signed the contract. Gave them his time. His body. Maybe his life. Duration Plus Six. That’s what Kenneth signed in 1943. You serve until they say you’re done.
K trusts the people spending his life know the value of it. America sends her sons and daughters to serve. The nation owes them something back.
If K is bound, can’t say no, can’t leave, can’t tell me where he is, then the men who sent him should be bound too. A clock. A limit. You don’t get to do this forever.
But in my head, Margot’s voice is there too. The dead have no rights over the living. If the people want someone, who are the dead to say no?
[Narrator] He walks to the window.
[Daniel] Two ideas. Both American. Both true.
The dead have no rights over the living. We owe allegiance to no king.
What happens when they collide? The 22nd says the people will have no king, even if we want one. But the dead can’t enforce anything. The only thing holding the line is the living agreeing to keep it.
K is inside the machine. Bound by iron. He serves the American people, not a king. His oath is to the Constitution, not a personality. If we unbind the men who send him, what was the point? What did Kenneth sit on that ship for? What is K doing right now, in the cold?
The men at the top have to be bound too. Power is a loan. You are not a king. We don’t do kings. You sit in the chair, then you get up. That’s the deal.
[Narrator] Daniel steps outside. Same route. The tourists. The cops. He reaches for his headphones.
Leaves them in his pocket.
[Daniel] I wanted to move through the world without it touching me.
But my brother is somewhere cold. Someone sent him there. And that someone is either bound by a clock, or they’re not.
[Narrator] He looks at the crowd. The living. The ones who decide.
The dead have no rights over them. And they owe allegiance to no king. Both true. The question is which one wins.
May God bless the United States of America.



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