C4 antho - Chamber Four

~180~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
spend three days smoking hash and dreaming up daring escape
scenarios. One night at a nearby café, I meet two substitute
schoolteachers from Florida. They are frightened of the
locals and joke that they need an escort.
“We want to get drunk,” they tell me.
We go to slavery museums together and eat long spicy
lunches in the old district. The old district is different from
the new district in that it has fewer hotels and more murders
per capita. One of the teachers is blond. The other is a redhead.
The blonde is named Sally. I can’t remember the redhead’s
name, but she is afraid of snakes. During one of the
snake charmer shows I pinch the redhead hard on the back
of her overly freckled neck as if she were being bitten. She
screams and runs off crying. Sally laughingly consoles her as
I watch another cobra rise from the wicker. I think, what if
we dropped a million laser-guided cobra baskets on Baghdad?
Would they survive the impact? What exactly is the
going rate for cobra labor these days?
At night, we eat couscous and all manner of things that
have been jerked, or steamed.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Sally asks.
“I’m breaking my friend out of the war,” I say.
“I don’t think they let you do that,” the redhead snaps,
still a bit raw about the business with the snake.
“Why not?” I ask.
“It’s like taking your kids out of class before school’s
out,” the redhead says. “It’s just not done.”
“Yeah,” Sally chimes. “You need a note from the principal
to do that. So you would need a note from the President,
I suppose, or at least some sort of general.”
“I’m going note-less,” I say.
“How are you going to do it?” Sally asks.