Daniel says, "I currently work out of my house writing catalogue copy for a major book distributor (you can peruse my 30-word masterpieces on Amazon.com). I am 34 years old, and in that time have labored as a writer, editor, temp, construction worker, teacher, tutor, security guard, freelance journalist, and paid volunteer for salaries that should scandalize any college-educated person. To quote Dylan: "20 years of schoolin' and they put me on the day shift." I've also earned a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Jewish-Christian Studies. My fiction leans towards the socio-political. "Lamentation" is inspired by the year I spent in Camden, NJ, working to establish a social justice center in that city. "Three Army Helicopters" is my reluctant acknowledgment that I live in an empire.
My fiction has also been published recently in The Blue Moon Review, The Fairfield Review, and The Timber Creek Review.
My personal philosophy: eat the rich, don't take wooden nickels, buy union, love your neighbor and your enemy, live free or die. For the rest, consult Lenny Bruce.
......by Daniel R. Vollaro
Three army helicopters ride up the Delaware Valley in triangular formation headed north, their rotors beating like drums on the river. I have stopped peddling long enough to watch them pass. The crickets have ceased their early-Autumn singing.
In another country, I might be running for the tree-line by now, but here, I just straddle my bike on the toe path and watch three army helicopters creep up the river. In the land of seamless digital connections we die in hospital beds following a long illness; we slip in the bathtub; we are crushed in our cars and extracted with heavy machinery while the stereo continues to pump out the soundtrack of our lives, but we are safe from our own army, and for this I am not grateful enough.
Thwap! Thwap! Thwap! The blades clop steady and martial like horse hooves. I stand transfixed, handlebars gripped in one hand, water bottle in the other, with half my life already run out behind me—my life lived along cropped grass boundaries and fine gravel bicycle paths. My life lived in the cozy intestines of an empire.
They are close now. I can see strange appendages dangling - antennae or missiles - I cannot tell. This machinery is as foreign to me as a combine or an icebox. I try to imagine who sits at the throttle -the kids from my high school who never went to college or teenagers who eagerly walked through the front door of a street-corner recruiting station in Newark or Camden as if they were portals to another world. They will see Germany and Japan and Korea and Egypt and Bosnia from the back of a jeep or the deck of a warship. I will arrive at the airport alone and wait with strangers to claim my bags.
The three army helicopters are overhead now, and the din rattles house windows all along the bike path. Here in the valley where Abbie Hoffman lived and died and Pete Seeger sang songs to save the river, where ex-hippies and refugees from the suburban east have always clustered in gay circles to open shops, to live and die for art and antiques and aesthetic salvation, my neighbors have all paused to stare up at the sky. We listen for the sound of the frontier lands, a transmission from the borders of the empire. It is a mostly alien sound.
The Short Stories of Daniel R. Vollaro