Abukoff House Books

Freedom was a thing we read about in the papers. And after the last of the papers had been published and then read and then used to wrap fish in or insulate a drafty shack, freedom gradually became a concept. A catchphrase. An insult even. It became a word the kids used as slang that, over time, had less and less to do with something that people once fought and died for. But if you went out after dark, away from the small cluster of boxes that people had come to live in- away from the collections of shipping container homes and pre-fab sheds and wooden shacks, and ventured out beyond the lit fences and mounted sentries, you’d find small rogue settlements of FREEDOM.

Freedom was a thing we read about in the papers. And after the last of the papers had been published and then read and then used to wrap fish in or insulate a drafty shack, freedom gradually became a concept. A catchphrase. An insult even. It became a word the kids used as slang that, over time, had less and less to do with something that people once fought and died for. But if you went out after dark, away from the small cluster of boxes that people had come to live in- away from the collections of shipping container homes and pre-fab sheds and wooden shacks, and ventured out beyond the lit fences and mounted sentries, you’d find small rogue settlements of FREEDOM. 

They were lone tents, lit by campfires, or sometimes fire pits. And you’d find one or two people there, huddled around the fire, late into the deepest black of night. Fire danced in their old eyes. Not the reflection of the fire in front of them, but the fire of something from long ago when they wrote and read those newspapers. When the newsprint ink was something to be proud of. Like the simple ink stains of a vast tribe of people voting in their first free election. That ink meant something, like the fire in their eyes. Like the sparks their fires made on the horizon, it was a distant memory. A distant promise that, while it never came close to us, it also never left. Something planted stubbornly between the tree of liberty and the river of truth.