Sent: Monday, August 28, 2000

Title: Driving
Author: Susan Frankovich
E-mail: susanf@ticnet.com

Classification: poem/vignette, Scully's POV,
post-colonization (yup, you read that correctly)
Rating: PG (some disturbing images)

Archive: Gossamer, Xemplary, Spooky's...Anywhere
else, please ask first.
Disclaimer: These characters belong to each
other, not me.

Author's notes at the end.
****************************************************************

Driving
by Susan Frankovich
~~~~~~~

I saw the first body at daybreak.

A young boy with blonde hair
wearing blue jeans and a baseball cap
lying by the side of the road
with his dog curled up beside him.

I wanted to cover him up
to bury him
to do something,

but you said no,
we had to keep driving.

So I closed my eyes
and said a quick prayer for him
as the tires of our car
left a trail of orange dust behind us.

We had only driven a few miles
when I saw the next one.

This time it was a woman
clutching a book in her left hand.
The pages fluttered in the red wind
as her gold wedding band hung
on what was left of her finger.

She was probably in her early fifties
and had brown hair like my mother.

I had to turn away.

You took my hand and squeezed it,
then told me we had to keep driving.

I said a prayer for her too,
closing my eyes as tightly
as I could to keep from crying
too much,

but my tears kept coming

and so did the bodies.

Little girls clinging to their mothers,
husbands holding their wives,
fathers lying on top of their children
on the hot yellow ground.

I asked you if you could
make it all go away,
if you could take me to a place
where the sky was still blue

and you said, "I'll try"
and kept on driving.

~end~

*This is my first attempt at writing
something about this subject matter. I
know there are already a lot of wonderful
post-colonization authors out there, but
it is my hope that this poem took an approach
that was a little different. Thank you so
much for reading.:) susanf@ticnet.com

~All my poems and stories can be found at:
https://members.tripod.com/sfrankovich/index.html