The Current - The Rivers School

Kate Bullion // Smoke and Smiles
The little girl sat in her room, puzzled by what she had just seen. She stared out at the spiraling
snowflakes streaming from the sky. Yet her eyes were not focused on the crystals. She had
long forgotten that her original intention upon arriving home had been to check how much
snow her modest little town would be receiving. Alone after school; she had flipped on the
black box sitting on her kitchen counter, praying that the magic screen would inform her that
conditions would make school unsafe the next day. A meteorologist popped out of the black,
in the midst of prattling on about an expected thirteen inches of accumulation. The slight,
nimble figure commenced to twirl around the kitchen table, her laughter sparkling around
the room like the ice outside. The sprite grabbed the phone off its receiver as she whizzed
by, and, stopping mid-spin, she began punching in her mother’s number. But a new image
on the screen interrupted her thin thumb in its descent. She looked upon a photo of two tan,
tough-looking boots at the base of an odd-looking black pole. At the top of the pole rested
a thick inverted bowl. The little girl giggled, reflecting that if she had been told to make a
sculpture it would have turned out much better than this one. However, as she focused more
of her attention on the screen, she realized that the black portion of the arrangement was no
ordinary pole. It was a gun. A big gun. And the oddly-shaped bowl was not something out
of which she would ever find herself eating cereal. It was a helmet. The scenario made little
sense to the young mind, and soon a reporter’s voice floated through her confusion, only adding
to the chaos of the girl’s thoughts. She caught the phrases, “three new deaths this week”
and “withdrawal of troops” along with words she didn’t understand, like “suicide bomber” and
“al qaeda.” The screen proceeded to show images of fiery explosions, heavy trucks zooming
across a desert, crying men and women. The child was horrified. She threw down the phone,
which she had been clutching tightly to her breast, and snatched up the remote. Yet as she
scrambled to send the terrors before her back into darkness, the images shifted again. There
was a low, grey-brown building on the outskirts of a sprawling town. Filing into it were children,
children about her age. The girl’s fears shrank and were replaced by a hesitant curiosity.
She watched in rapture as the newscast took her through an off-white door into a simple
classroom. In the space, the children, and what appeared to be a schoolteacher, were smiling
unabashedly at two men dressed in thick vests and heavy helmets. But despite the busyness
of the scene, the young girl’s eyes were drawn to the men’s footwear. They wore boots. The
same boots as those that had been used in the strange sculpture at the beginning of the
broadcast. These two tall figures were handing out pencils and notebooks to the children in
the report, and the little outside observer was amazed by how elated the students seemed.
They were only receiving school supplies after all, just pens and paper. She watched, befuddled,
as the report ended with a shot of a boy’s dark beaming face. He reminded her of one
of her classmates at school, a boy with whom she had talked not even a half an hour ago on
the bus ride home. Abruptly, a blaring commercial burst onto the screen, and the miniature
body quickly switched off the box. She distractedly mounted the stairs, contemplating in her
adolescent thoughts all that she had just witnessed. A story beginning with death and fire
had ended with smiling faces. Faces so small, so similar to her own. What did those men in the
boots understand that she didn’t
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