“So yeah, I’ll tellya what happened. What paper did you say you were with again?”
He held out his right hand, his white sleeve neatly rolled above the wrist. “Ken Ransom,” he said. “The Long March.”
I shook. He had a firm grip. A grip like someone who hasn’t been starving for months. It crushed my fingers together. I could not decide if it hurt in a good way or a bad way. “Native. Of....” I gestured. The venerable oaks of Jackson Square cast dappled shade over my truck’s dented side panels. Peeling paint read, Nancy’s Cookies. Underneath was a picture of a couple chocolate chip cookies next to a glass of milk. I can’t remember the taste of milk.
“Native? That’s your name, or...”
“My name. Here, you wanna cookie? Not many left. But seeing as how you’re the first outsider who’s made it through in what, a year now.”
He nodded and jotted in a narrow notebook. With a pen. I stared at his hands. Smooth, unscarred, fingers straight, joints fluid, and the way his skin curved meant they held a thin layer of subcutaneous fat. My own hand hung in midair where he’d released it. Torn, cruddy nails. Skin stretched over knobby bones. Blue veins. A gnarly scar wrapped around the palm. Oven burns.
I cleared my throat. “The Long March, is that like, Alrazzera or something?”
He smiled more easily than any I’d seen since the before times. It made his blue eyes spark. God, he looked so... clean. Not covered with brick and concrete dust and stinking of garbage and sweat. “Al Jazeera. They are out of Qatar. But no, The Long March is a global socialist weekly paper. Online. We’re out of Chicago.” He reached for the cookie.
“Haymarket and all that.” Leave it to a socialist to visit a war zone on purpose.
He nibbled the cookie. “Good,” he mumbled. He hardly chewed before swallowing.
He could not possibly understand what had gone into that cookie. The lives lost getting those chocolate chips. His blues stared expectantly, so I dove in:
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