She said that she was going home, and she didn't lie. She said that she was going back to Jamaica for a fresh load, and that's the truth. She'd never shirk her duties, but every so often, when the summer sun shining through the clouds reminds her of a bygone time, she has to make a detour to the West Coast and a place where strangers buried her heart and soul. There, she mourns a life ended far too soon, a mind that Britney broke and twisted, a woman who was used as a tool to foster and strengthen hatred.

Shimmy fell in love a long time ago, before the souls of the cities fled to New York, before Britney sang her siren song through the airwaves, before Todd Carter was anything more than a young grunt in boot camp. Those were the days when she was young and strong and drawn to a fierce, vivacious woman with jet black hair and porcelain skin. She could never say the words, even though she knew that her colleague could theoretically return her affection; her fear kept her from passing the other woman's doorstep, the cross repelled her, burned her, left its scar on her soul. She kept her silence until it all started to fall apart around them. The rest of them scattered for safety, friends taking friends to the four corners of the Earth until there were only three of them left. Only then did Shimmy try to pull her beloved from the abyss, but by then it was too late. Then three became two when the most successful of them took her life by destroying the jewel of her New York past.

Shimmy still remembers the last try, flying to the perfect city shimmering on the California coast, a place that time could not change except for the flags in the windows and the crosses around necks. She bore the news of their friend's death, and met nothing but laughter and scorn- but worse was the fundamentalist doctrine about God and sin, Heaven and Hell and where all of them were bound. "She was a monster," she said to Shimmy's face, "She was a pervert, a rapist, she deserved to die, the world's a better place without her and her kind."

And Shimmy's response still burns in her memory like a mistake, even all these years later. "Her kind is our kind. She was no more or less a monster than you or I. If that's the only reason she would go to Hell, then we'll both see her again."

"I embrace the Lord and his messenger the President. I've turned away from that lifestyle. You still haven't broken free, and as long as you revel in your sick pleasures, you'll never be saved. Get out of my house, you filthy nigger dyke!" She couldn't even bring herself to shove Shimmy out the door with her own two hands; she used a bromstick to prod her, beat her, chase her out like she was vermin. Shimmy knew that this was it, but she had no idea how final this separation would be until that July day when Britney made her demands and her slaves jumped to obey. She'd made it to San Francisco by then, falling into the company of friends and allies who remembered the glory days, and the breath had gone from her lungs when that heartbreaking beauty came on the screen with her deadened eyes. Shimmy and the others watched, transfixed, as she spoke her name, called herself a filthy half-monkey born when her black father raped her white mother, described in detail crimes she had never committed, confessed to being hopelessly perverted and unsalvageble, and promised to cleanse America in her own small way so that others' children could grow up in a better world. That was when she pulled the trigger. Hundreds, thousands, of people had gathered in the park to see her confess, and not one of them made a move to help her as the blood poured down her face, not one of them tried to comfort her in her last few moments of life.

Shimmy cried her eyes out then, and the tears return full force now. "I failed you. I let you down. I loved you and I never told you I did, even as you hated me. I could have done more, I know I could, but God! We were so innocent! Who knew what was happening? Ah, but at least you remain innocent, naïve as the day you were born, but I- I have seen too much now. I know exactly what they did to you. I know you never meant to call me what you did, or to lie about what your father did to your mother, or to hurt yourself the way you did. Your death wasn't a suicide. Britney murdered you like she held the gun and pulled the trigger. You never knew what she used you to do.

"I feel dead inside, and I have for nine years. My heart's empty. I know there's nothing there, because I've spent so much time searching myself for some sign that something would turn out right for one of us. I only feel truly alive again when I go back in time to your smile and your pride. You never loved me, but then at least you didn't hate yourself. You knew that you were created a lesbian, whether it was by God's hand or your parents' genes, and it didn't make you a good person or a bad person, it just made you a person who liked women the way most women like men. It was part of who you were; it's part of who I am. None of the girls are around anymore, they're all gone to other countries, so there's no one left to talk to, and it hurts even worse because I can't share it with anyone who remembers you as you were. The people who care now, they only remember you the way you were on the last day, and I can't deal with that. It's already bad enough that I remember.

"I miss you. I think that was I was trying to say in all this. I miss you and I loved you." Shimmy falls silent then, painfully aware that no one is there to answer her. She came bearing roses, and she lays them now on the grave: red, gold, and green, the colors of her dreams, the colors that she still connects with love. Once, she would have prayed, but she finds it hard to believe in God now, not if Pete Richardson is His messenger of choice and His word is hatred. While America clings all the more fiercely to God, she has turned away from the Deity, become skeptical and cynical, embittered and angry. She is not the blithe spirit whose laughter and perpetual motion earned her the nickname she now uses.

But now is not the time to lose herself in reverie. Her connecting flight to Kingston awaits, and after that the smuggler's propeller plane to New York, back and forth in a cycle that won't end until either she or Britney is dead. Little things lead to big things, or so she hopes, and maybe someday she can avenge her beloved.