***
I emerged from the school in a thunderstorm,
surrounded by strangers banging pots and tins
and wearing crinkly aluminum clothing.
Of course the lightning struck them.
Of course I learned later,
in the first revolution,
this was a punishment
and the punished believed
if they accepted death with open arms
that God–or whoever the punishers claimed owned them–
would go easy on them.
I didn’t die though,
in the fusillade of lightning bolts.
I had blood in my veins
and flowers behind my ears
and my wrinkled fingers built a puppet of petals and red cells
to die in my stead.
The thunderstorm vanished oddly quickly after the lightning.
So I stood in a puddle surrounded by aluminum graves
on a stone mesa
exposed to a shimmery sun,
with shiny copper domes poking up
in unnatural knolls
around me.
I picked the second closest one–
not wanting to deal with
wherever these aluminum wearers came from–
and walked toward it.
That’s how I found
my first hero.
Jordyn Saelor 