54.

   I lay back in the grass letting the gravity of Claudia’s words sink in. I marveled at this angry, wounded beauty. She looked into my eyes and smiled a weary smile. I wanted her to tell me more but I dared not ask. We lay next to each other watching the towering thunderclouds that marched along the horizon.
   Claudia ran her fingers through the blades of grass. “Life is full of tragedy, Oliver. I’m sure you have faced it yourself. But how is it that men thousands of miles away in another country could feel we were just pawns in their sadistic games? Your president and all his men and the CEO’s of your country’s ravenous corporations were responsible for thousands of people being tortured to death. And for what? To prove the to the Russians that they would not allow a socialist country to exist in their own back yard?”
   I had nothing to say to her. I looked down at the grass in shame. When I looked up, I was confronted with a startling sight. A socialite heifer the size of an elephant had waddled over the top of the hill and spotted us. “You who! Wooo Who!!”, she squealed. “I see a couple of party poopers!” As she strutted towards us, rolls of fat jiggled and quivered everywhere on her body. She was an extraordinary sight bent over at the hips in an impossible posture. Her enormous breasts that almost touched the ground looked like fore legs. Her arms waved from her shoulders like pointed sticks. A handbag hung off one of them. She stroked the thick makeup troweled over her face and pursed her huge, lipstick smeared lips. She wagged a head almost as large as the rest of her that was crowned with a ridiculous beret.