"I remember green..."
by Anthony Roberts
Note: This excerpt is from the Pushcart Prize-nominated Pigtown by Anthony Roberts, published by Red Dashboard Publishing.
I remember green. The color I painted my face as a child, the desire to emulate commandos and soldiers while my friends pretended they were sports’ heroes. The various hues in the woods, (they weren’t really woods, just a small patch of trees and brush in the area near the railroad tracks), where I would go to hide. I would cover myself with the leaves. I would hide, while the teenagers made out and the stoners would huff glue and spray-paint in the center of a copse of vegetation. I had no idea what druids were then, some ancient ancestral memory followed my bones from Antrim, but that’s what they were - Priests and Priestesses of self-destruction. The world that would cost brain cells was far more preferable to the one that we lived in. Chemical euphoria as the 11:46 Chessie Red Line shook the trees, moving boxcars and flatcars on to wherever; while we remained in the neighborhood. The caboose at the end of the train was green; it provided the illusion of escape.
Anthony Roberts is a veteran of Baltimore and Afghanistan. He currently lives in New Jersey in a home with beautiful views and interlocking fields of fire.
Listen to our Savage Wonder episode with him here.
He is the author of the Pushcart Prize-nominated Pigtown and The Clearing Barrel.
You can follow him here.
Learn more about the Veterans Repertory Theater here.