| OCR Text |
Show I have long thought a room should be painted-pink with white trim, the colors a six-year- old might choose. If my parents could have afforded it, I would have asked for a white canopy bed. I become stridently religious and fear nothing less than nuclear war, an event that will surely leave me dead or alone on the ravaged planet or so poisoned with radiation that I would be confined to a cement-block room for the rest of my life. In my diary I write: Life is hard right now. I have no friends. I miss my old ones. I probably can't get contact lens and I feel very low at times. I enjoy talking to God and should do it more. I think there may be a nuclear war which we will deserve because the world is falling apart. At school we do not run air drills or practice finding shelter because we know that nothing will survive nuclear winter. I watch War Games, Top Gun, and Red Dawn, movies that terrify me and teach me to seek comfort in weapons and artillery, in a military that flies the fastest, shoots the farthest, and is not afraid to use its arsenal. And I work on the house, the cars, the yard with my father. Crescent wrench, he says from beneath the car. His hand shoots out, palm up, waiting for the tool like a surgeon awaits a scalpel. She looks into the red tool box and consider the various sizes, all of them silver and cold, grease covering the wheel where you adjust the bite. Large seems best, always can be made smaller. She has forgotten he is working in a small space. She has forgotten he used the small one before. The wrench is hurled across the floor of the garage, knocking the saw table and spinning in circles. Not that one. I need light, no, a hand. Hold this bolt. 182 |
