Letters from the Void

Longlisted in Pigeon Review’s 2022 Flash Fiction Competition

The Airgonaut/November 2022

To the innocent early seventies,

You didn’t know cell phones. Or 24/7 newsfeed. Or Internet. You had this hazy, slow-moving, swirly feel. You kept us in a cloud of sitcoms, endless games of hide-n-seek. Sure, you shared some things, like the Beatles breaking up, or the invasion of Cambodia, the gas and hostage crises. Of course life was bad, like always, like now, but I was very young and I just didn’t know how, well, how horrific things could get.

Alan and I folded newspapers on the den floor watching the Six Million Dollar Man. We filled our bags and jumped on banana bikes, flinging the news onto neighbors’ lawns. We freely roamed the streets of the neighborhood, without care or concern, without telling our parents. We didn’t know about the kid in Des Moines who went out to deliver his papers and never came home, or those four children in Michigan found dead in a ditch.

You taught me that ignorance is bliss.