Perhaps the start of something:

One by one the coat hangers began to disappear from the hall closet. In former American wars the shortages had been very much a part of the national consciousness. Not so in this war. The dissenters were not asked to sacrifice much; he supposed they’d learned that from Vietnam. Don’t ask don’t tell. In the first Gulf War CNN had shown him fireworks from hotel lobbies, now the fix was fully in and the covered coffins of the national heroes were disappeared much like the limbs of the ten thousand maimed, arriving silently to hangers of a different kind.


Gas prices fluctuated, but that market had been rendered sufficiently opaqe by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the red herring of Alaska’s Anwar, and all the new oil in Africa. Would they call the African oil “blood oil” like they did with human cost diamonds? He doubted it. Besides, it was all blood oil after all wasn’t it.


The woman to his left, in her late eighties was shrunken into her diminutive white pillbox hat, and nearly lost in her white fur overcoat. She was not there, as he was, to pick up her dry cleaning. She had a bundle of hangers with her in an oversized plastic bag and she passed them earnestly to the clerk, emphasizing that she was making a deposit and not a withdrawal. As she left the storefront several women came from the back presses to watch her drive away – some knowledge passed between them and they were distracted until she at last merged her vehicle into traffic.


In this neighborhood, in the center of a central city, in the southern north or the northern south, many blacks and whites still maintained a cordial service-dialectic. The city had been shuffled in the civil rights era like a deck of cards. A de segregation hand had been dealt, but even still, in the baseball stadium at the urban core of the city, mostly black players played for a mostly white audience, who were sold beer by mostly older black men that was made locally by mostly older white men.


Perhaps one of the press girls had a mother or an aunt who had worked for the elderly woman’s people. This was a mixed neighborhood of both modest means and mansions. The truly wealthy family’s of the bygone master-servant had moved suburban, or off the map entirely. The very wealthy had mastered invisibility in the gated communities of the previous century. Such servants as there were in these new worlds, were often Japanese nannies or Latina maids. Why brook the race card when you could hire model minorities for less? The people left in the land of black and white were tied together by economic pragmatism and some lingering sentiments of concern.


“There’s a shortage,” explained the clerk, pointing to a sign that requested hanger returns if possible. “Do they use them to make boats and bombs?” he wondered, imagining the giant furnaces of the second world war turning cast iron banisters into prows and projectiles. It seemed unlikely that hangers would help, but if you took enough to cause a shortage, maybe?

Perhaps the political left took the missing hangers. What if the ten million women who had just marched on Washington in protest of backsliding women’s rights had each taken one with them, thinking that “never again” might come sooner then they thought?