“Do you want to know why war is so good for business?” he asked her in his plastic voice. He was big and bright, a walking advertisement. She was small and wealthy, a reluctant apex predator. He was her father and though he was older he was much less wrinkled than she. A lot fewer things bothered him.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because war reveals what people really want the most. Damn war boys destroy everything except what they love. We swoop in afterward, look at what’s left, and stick a fat price tag on it.”
He hadn’t answered her original question and it made her itch. She couldn’t tell if he was purposefully dancing around his answer or if dancing was all he knew how to do. As a money man, all he did all day was dance around like a clown in the ashes. Sometimes the audience threw coins; sometimes they just smiled back.
“But would you really say you love war, daddy? Do you think it’s a good thing?” she asked him again.
All she wanted was a scope into his thick plastic head. Half her blood came from him, after all. It was natural that she wanted to know how plastic she could expect to become.
He gave her his clown smile. His teeth looked like dimes. “I sure as hell love war, Sugar,” he said. “You love it too. We’re rich and happy because those damn war boys won’t stop pumping each other full of lead.”
He touched her little white hand on the table. For as long as she could remember, he’d never had a real job title. He was simply a seller, a money man. She used to go with him when he picked over fresh battle scenes along the warm coast below. Together they’d walk through the dark red mud and gun litter as they stuck neon-colored price tags on churches and trees and animals, all the special things that hadn’t been blown up. She’d been undisturbed by the war when she was little, desensitized by those neon tags with big numbers. Fresh deaths had embodied no loss. For her, they often represented new toys or a new pair of shoes, if the selling was good and the people were scared enough to buy.
Regardless, her mother had made her stop going with him years ago, when she started getting tall. Both parents agreed that seeing those gruesome places was turning her hair too dark. Her mother had always been so proud of having a blonde daughter. The preservation of that corn silk hair was always of greatest concern.
Now her father’s cold-fish palms on hers made her twitch. His hands were embarrassingly without callouses. Like baby hands, they just blindly grabbed at pretty things.
“Thank you,” she told him. She left there thinking that children should never have to thank parents for answering questions.

When her mother gave a similar answer in the next room, her stomach coiled tight like a cold snake. “War is beautiful, Sugar,” her mother said, “Have you seen how gold it’s made our city?"
Her mother was a stagnant woman. She always lounged on her old couch the same way. The couch was antique, with slippery pink upholstery and legs with carved animal feet. Upon that couch, with her plentiful fat motionless and her small legs cast uselessly to the side, she looked like a brash and poorly-preserved monument from a time of great decadence. Most days, she painted her eyes with pinks and purples and wore earrings with dangling coins.
“So you love war, mother?”
“Oh yes, Sugar, it hasn’t done anything but good for us. War is the best sort of hygiene. Just look at this sparkling city of ours.”

That evening, she left her parent’s big house and got on the bullet-proof train that went north. She often went to the coast, the cold one. There was a boy there with dark hair and eyes. She’d let him touch her ribs and chest with his mouth and hands a few times. She thought about him when her parents wouldn’t let her look out the windows.
Because he made her feel full of chemicals, she hadn’t asked him yet if he loved war. She was afraid of what he would say. She wasn’t ready to have another set of plastic hands on her skin. She was cold enough as it was.
Like the windows in her house, the train windows were tinted dark to hide how red the mud outside was. On the train she felt safe but unsettled, like her throat was barbed. The breath kept snagging. It was like the death outside was seeping in the vents and straight through her closed teeth.
This was the culmination of breathing war her whole life, this new discomfort. Now she was always picturing her lungs, mottled red and black and full of metal dust. She knew they were thin-skinned organs, not reinforced. She’d seen opened-up men with exposed lungs on the ground of fresh battlegrounds. She’d seen those pink tissue paper sacks, thin enough to wrinkle and tear from wind.
When she pictured her parents’ lungs they were different. They were healthy and pink and dumb, filtered somehow. It made her want to cry.

When the train stopped on the cold coast, she went through the green and gray to where he was. There was no gold here on the cold coast, and no neon tags. He lived here where the mud was the darkest red and he had stopped bothering to clean off any stains from his clothes. The mud was always up under his fingernails. She thought it was brave, how he let the war make him unclean.
“I’m leaving tomorrow, you know,” he told her. “I hope you weren’t expecting to stay here.”
“No, no,” she said, “I just wanted to come and talk to you tonight.”
“We won’t get to talk anymore after I leave, you know,” he said. There was red mud smeared on his jaw and brow. “They don’t want the war boys talking to anyone.”
She looked at the wet ground. “I know how it works; you don’t need to warn me. I’ve been watching it happen the whole time.”
He took her inside and lit a fire and touched her for a while. His hands were filthy but warm on her. She liked it even though the mud left stains on her thighs.
“Where are they training you?” she asked, looking up at him. “Seattle? Vancouver?”
“I don’t know. You can’t visit me, you know.”
“I know, I know.”
Her spine was thin under his fingers like a long, expensive necklace. He frowned down at her. “I don’t think you really know anything. You’ve watched it all from up high. Everything looks small to you.”
She sat up. “But I’ve walked through it. I’ve seen everything you’ve seen.”
He stood up. “But have you touched it lately? The mud is darker now, you know, and—“
“I know I know I saw from the train.”
“—and now it’s tainting the trees. The wood is turning red now too. And some of the leaves, even.”
“I know I know I’ve seen it too.”
He picked up a coffee mug from the floor and threw it at her. He needed to close her mouth. “But you’ll never have to touch it again,” he shouted, “I have to touch it all the time. It’s on everything I have. I eat it. It stays on me. See my skin? Your skin is never going to be red like this. I could take you outside and bathe you in it and you’d stay white.”
Boldly, she stood and touched her pink tongue to the mud on his forehead. She moved her mouth onto his and breathed into him. He coughed.
“At least your city isn’t covered in gold,” she told him.
Then she split open her ribcage and showed him her filthy lungs. They dripped black and red sludge all down her white thighs. And yet, upon each ruined lung was a clean neon price tag with a very big number.
He laid her down on the floor and used her lungs to wash his face and hands. When he left to fight the war that night, he was as clean and white as she.