An Honest Man [Tool/Vasco]

Tía Abuela Xuxa would talk about the men that stood for their country.

She was the sort to wear long black dresses, down past her ankles, and pairs of knitted shawls over her shoulders, no matter the heat. We liked to joke that tía abuela was a witch when we were children, that one stern look from her would leave us cursed for the rest of our days. She didn’t say much around us, and less still when the tías gathered on the porch to gossip. I would come up the walk and catch her staring out at the horizon, staring right through me, as though she was looking for something better.

She’d been just a girl during the dark days, no more than six or seven when the first games came to pass. But she would tell me that she knew enough that it didn’t have to be this way. When she was older, and her mind’s sharp edges had been worn down, she’d go on about the men and women who’d put everything on the line for freedom. We used to know what it meant to be free, and not to sit back and do nothing!

More often than not it’d be at a dinner, her tucked along the far edge of the table. They’d let her rage, this bubbling ferocity that would fly out along with the flecks of spit from her lips, until at last she would remember herself and go quiet, so that she could excuse herself from the room.

We buried her next to her sister Uxue, with a little flame etched into her tombstone.

I keep replaying the young man’s struggle against the peacekeepers in my head. The moment when all of us watched him pulled from the stage, as though there was nothing that could be done. That all of this was normal, and that each year we’d struggle through until another set of children could be dragged to the trains all over again. That our freedom, or what we called freedom, was dependent on a sacrifice. One our family had paid with in blood. And still we’d done no more than keep our heads down, do as best as we could. Praying that they’d leave us alone.

I feel as though Xuxa’s shadow follows me through the justice building. Through the peacekeepers ambling the halls, over my shoulder. A reminder that I cannot continue to live for eleven alone – this is bigger than just us.

“Tool?” I give a knock at the door, and pressed on into the little waiting room, flushed with light. I’m still in my leather jacket and button up shirt, and pair of fancy deep blue jeans. A mayor’s outfit, or the closest approximation I could ever come up with. “I’m Vasco Izar. I wanted to… give you my support, in anything you might need. And see how you were.”