No One Told

NO ONE TOLD THEM
NO ONE TOLD THEM about the insects. Or the birds. Or the mice. Or any of the other larger animals.
No one had said a word about the winters (or the summers, for that matter). Or the sky. The water table. Or the instability of the land–-the landscape--the geology. The seismic activity. The potential for flooding. The fire risk. Or the winds. Nothing about the winds.
Or the problems with the infrastructure. The weaknesses in the foundation of the home. The roof, the walls, the siding. Or the fact that the electricity was always going out; the bad plumbing; the leaky faucets. The water heater. The furnace.
No one had warned them about the food either, or the water and the air, or the lack of rain and the lack of food (because of the bad soil) and the long lines, the difficulty breathing; and the stress and the medications. Oh, the medications! So many of them. Or the insect bites (so many of them too). And how long the pain would linger, even after the insects had been killed and removed from their bodies–-from their arms and their legs and between their legs, and the back of the neck. Even after the ointment had been applied.
And the size of it all: just how big and how out of control everything had become.
They weren’t told about the lies either–-and not just the lies they had come to expect; or the lies they were still surprised to hear (like the ones about the Colorado River, or the Columbia River, or the Sea of Cortez), but also the lies they themselves would be telling--the lies they would be telling to the ones they loved the most.
Or the neighbors. No one had told them about the neighbors. No one had bothered to tell them about the neighbors. The fighting, the screaming and the yelling and the hitting; or the horrible things that went on in the basement on Sundays; and sometimes even the horrible, cruel things that went on right there in the backyard for everyone to see. The incident with the pliers and the Phillips-head screwdriver. And at night: the footsteps along the side of the house.
Or what would be happening soon to their own families: the visits to the emergency room. The follow-up visits. The mortuary. The cemetery.
No one had said anything about the rest of the town, either: the curfew, the sidewalk tax, the trampolines, and the floodlights at the slaughterhouse. And the schools. (How could they have not told them about the schools?) And the bumping sounds and the hoses, and the continuous, round-the-clock firing up of the trucks. And the section of town where the slaves were kept and fed and then beaten--and then, later on, let loose. Or the paper mill and all the costly delays; the toxic waste plant, the noise from the sound factory. And the on-going construction: all of it; the jack-hammers, especially. But also the saws; the chain-saws and jig-saws and the buzz-saws that whirred and whined until you thought you were going crazy.
They didn’t know about the bubbles, either.
Or the thing with their own bodies.
Or about the people who went down to the post office every day to do nothing but buy stamps for their goddamn stamp collections. The money exchanged. And the work: the work gained and the work lost. The paper work too. And what it was all supposed to mean; and what that meaning was supposed to mean. To what purpose it was all for.
No. No one had told them about any of this: what it was going to be like. No one had said a word. Not a single word; not a single soul.
And they didn’t ask. They didn’t think to ask. They didn’t know beforehand how it was going to be. And now it was too late. It was too late to ask. They had to figure it out on their own.
And they weren’t doing a very good job of it.