Luxury

When we woke up, everywhere we looked, parachutes. Pierced on church steeples, crumpled in meadows. Cast over roof gutters and laid bristling against treetops. They sagged from branches like the carcasses of ghosts.

My brother and I set about collecting them. Our area of focus was the stretch of land between where the yellow grass of our yard ended and where that green and lush hill began its upward slope nearby. Others collected elsewhere surely. We concerned ourselves with no task other than our own.

The silk was soft as anything you’d ever laid your hand on. Softer than you remember your mother’s cheek being. We didn’t know what to be poor was, but we knew how gritty our toes came to feel after a few weeks with no rain, and how painful the smell of warm bread torn open could be. We knew how to recognize things of value, and how important it was to claim them for yourself before someone else took them from you.

We clambered over fences, shimmied up trees, accessed rooves via a conveniently preexisting system of hay bale stacking. For the church we were forced to enlist the help of our lame pastor, who kept a peeling ladder in his shed.

My brother rolled an ankle sliding down from our neighbor’s chimney onto the grass. He surprised me though by soldiering on, despite his quickly ballooning foot. He looked driven by some external spirit, meaner than himself.

After we finished gathering, our aunts and sisters set to work deconstructing. It was satisfying to watch the threads be pulled out, like fish deboned. The smell of fabric filled the air – a clean smell, reminiscent of chewing on a sprig of mint.

The next step was to reassemble the material in new forms to create trousers, corsages, blouses, socks, rompers for the babies. A pair of moccasins were made for me, so that I may better sneak up behind my friends in the woods and pretend to kill them. The cloth rubbed smooth and sinful against the tops of my feet.

Luxury was the word the older people kept using.

This was the closest the soldiers ever came to us. They had slipped in and out during the night, leaving behind only their skin, like a shedding snake. If it hadn’t been for those few days in the beginning of June of that year, the war would have only ever existed to me as pops of color on the horizon at night and the occasional sizzle and boom in the distance that my brain understood to be gunfire. Wearing our new silks, it was impossible to believe that just a few fields over, lives were ending.