SUSAN THORNTON

How to Become a Refugee 

Let’s pretend that the governor of Massachusetts declares war on the governor of New York. First you get barbed wire fencing and checkpoints along the border then you get sporadic gun fights and some small skirmishes. Air strikes start. Your brother-in-law works at the GE plant in Albany. That plant is targeted and hit. Your sister calls. He’s been killed and she’s frightened. Can she and the kids come stay with you? You say: Of course. They can stay in the Man Cave downstairs. You only use it for watching football on TV. Airstrikes continue and Albany falls to the invading army from Massachusetts. Your daughter is in college at Oneonta. She calls and says: Dad, you remember my roommate Emily from Boston? She saw on Facebook that her dad, who was in the resistance in Boston, was executed and her mom just got here with her little sister and I’m scared because the troops are getting closer, and can I come home and bring them? You say: OK. Maybe you can transfer to Binghamton University. Your roommate’s mom and her little sister can stay in the camper in the driveway. The oncoming troops get to Oneonta and you hear some pretty scary reports of torture and rape in that city and you’re happy your daughter is safe. Then, really bad news. There’s an air strike at the Lockheed Martin facility in Owego and your best friend is killed. The same day your daughter comes home hysterical. She was at the Starbucks on Upper Front Street when an airstrike hit SUNY Broome. You say: We had better get to the neutral state of Pennsylvania. You get everyone in the camper and the two cars and you make a caravan to Great Bend, Pennsylvania. At the border, you are directed to the refugee camp which has been thrown up in a hurry behind the fireworks store across from the Mobil station. You join 20,000 people already there. You think you can relax. There’s no air strikes. Your family (now a group of nine) is assigned a flimsy tent for two people with no wooden floor. One toilet serves 218 people. Three hundred ten queue for the single shower. You wait three hours in line for breakfast and get watery oatmeal and bread so hard you can’t break it. You hand over your driver’s license. It’s a two-year wait for an appointment to ask for permanent residence. A new law says you can’t look for work. Too many local people unemployed. Meanwhile, your wife’s asthma is acting up. In her hurry to leave, she dropped her inhaler and stepped on it. There is a medical clinic, built in a tent, staffed with exhausted doctors. You get there at 5 AM and join the line of fifty. But your wife can’t breathe now. 

Susan Thornton lives in Binghamton, New York. Her memoir, On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner, was published in 2000 by Carroll & Graf, New York. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2016. Poems have appeared in SoFloPoJo, Paintbrush Quarterly and Rat’s Ass Review. She lives and works in Binghamton, New York, where for her sins she has worked as an instructor of middle school French.