Fiction and Drama

The approach to the farmhouse is not meant for walking, and Bibi feels that she is barely making any progress. The haze blankets her surroundings, giving her approach a dreamlike quality as images come into focus like memories and dissolve like dreams. Slashes of moss-green lawn, the sharp, blue inhalation of what is perhaps a swimming pool. Bibi wonders why swimming pool floors are always painted blue and if this has anything to do with the sky and the ocean. She wonders what it would be like to swim in the ocean and look up at a blue sky.

We had a color-coded system for managing the hierarchy of suffering: green was for welfare snafus, lead paint violations, legal procedural errors, fertilizer-related illness, corporate malfeasance and minor environmental damage; yellow was for assault in jail, wrongful conviction, citywide poisoning, retaliatory solitary confinement, grievous and preventable workplace injuries, strikebreaking at the national scale, anti-labor espionage of any kind; red was for police murders, police or military torture, counter-radical operations involving violence or murder, war crimes (many of these last categories pertaining to refugees who had lost their homes or family members to American military campaigns).