It was wartime, and, as happens in wartime, supplies were rationed. Cowboys were allowed one shoot-out with three bullets each, detectives had to cope with a maximum of two red herrings and five suspects, and space rangers were downgraded to scientific graphing calculators. Elves and aliens had been drafted to the front, heaving bosoms had been placed in heaving bosom houses, and main characters were hidden in bomb shelters in hopes of better days. It was wartime and, as happens in wartime, the little people, the small presses and freelance writers, muddled through with their genre strictures and limited POV.

Times were hard, filled with constant air raids as inflation and superstores bombed through the night. Every day mothers received letters of rejection, watching as streams of wounded soldiers, some with the nibs of red ballpoint pens sticking painfully out of their shoulders, trudged down the streets into a Hiroshima sunset.

It was the worst of times and it only got worse when the Kissing Tax was passed.

“Necessary,” General Random coughed, wiping the blade of his quill before resheathing it. “Absolutely necessary, you understand. Most potent, secret weapon of them all, and whatnot. Had to be done. Couldn’t be helped.” He wiggled his eyebrows and adjusted his reading glasses. “Need to stock up for the big climax, you know. Can’t have every minor character involved in a romantic entanglement. Think of all that wasted amour out there. No, no. Only one kiss per story, thank you. And that goes double for the romances!”

The Kissing Tax:

One kiss per story, no matter how novel. All kisses, too – no matter how, where, with whom or what. No stealing kisses in dark rooms or on the cheek. And blowing kisses counted.

So there was great consternation when a kiss was misplaced one day, only to be picked up by a small child who, despite Romantic conventions, was not saintly, nor, as Modernists would have it, the demonic product of an abusive society, but only a good-natured but overly curious boy of seven.

He had found the kiss quite by accident, lying on a table next to a pile of notes, several deliberations and a pack of Rolaids. It had grown dusty from weeks of nonuse, one little rose petal waiting for someone to pick it up and find some use for it. Once or twice it had almost been snatched up by an eager young lover or an enormous sheep or a sagging middle hundred pages which needed oomph, but always the siren would ring and the ration be remembered, and the petal, the kiss, would sigh and wait and collect dust.

The boy first saw the kiss, supposing it to be a bit of licorice or even a lozenge; blew off the dust, and was surprised to find it nothing more than an ordinary-looking petal. “It must have fallen off from one of the flowers outside,” he said, carefully wrapping the kiss in a tissue and placing it in the front pocket of his overalls. “I’ll look and see.”

Therewith he hurried out the front door and down the steps one at a time – although he nearly let go of the railing in his haste to the moderate flower garden in the side yard. He remembered that he ought to close the door behind him and was on his way back up the steps to finish this commission, when he heard a dainty girl’s voice from the broad climbing tree that took up the majority of the front yard.

He turned around slowly, his eyebrows exceptionally high and his every nerve aquiver until he discerned the source of the cry. A little girl dressed in a simple frock laughed and jumped down from a particularly proliferous branch to land amidst a flutter of leaves. Her feet were bare and her elbows and knees a bit dusty and scraped. Her dirty blond hair was haphazardly caught up by a bedraggled bow cocked to one side. Her cheeks were likewise smattered with dust, but still glowed a healthy pink.

“Well,” she said, “I daresay you’ve come not a moment too soon!”

The boy was seriously confused by this and decided to finish closing the door.

“There’s a war on, you know,” the girl continued, leaning against the tree.

The boy nodded, not really understanding, but having those courtesies ingrained in his demeanor that are often accounted “gentlemanly” and “obsolete” by various factions.

“And I’m an enemy,” the girl said, thrusting a particularly begrimed thumb at her chest. Then, as if realizing that the boy’s nods were more emphatic to this declaration (he was, after all, only seven and not seventeen), she said, “But I’m not supposed to have told you. So forget what I just said.”

The boy understood this quite well, and proceeded to ignore her so completely as he made his way to where the flowers were planted around the side of the house that the girl was required to exert herself and follow him. She was soon rewarded by seeing the kiss as he took it out of his front pocket and began to look for a flower with similar petals.

“Ohhh…” she said as he walked down the slight incline to a larger bush. She immediately ran after him and tapped him on the shoulder. “I say,” she said, “you did remember to forget that I’m the enemy…right?” He didn’t answer. She sighed. “Good. Because…because…(here she was obliged to run around to face him since he was wandering over to the second bush)…I was thinking that you might want to give me that kiss there.”

She clapped her hands together awkwardly, tilted her head to the side and swayed, attempting to look demure. The boy screwed up his face.

“All right then,” the girl said, spreading her feet and planting her fists on her hips. “Give me the petal. You can’t be so stupid that you want to put it back on a flower, are you?”

The boy bit his lip at this and looked around. There were tears coming to his eyes and his nose had begun to run a little, but he quickly wiped the latter with his sleeve and managed to screw up his face enough to keep any tears from falling. His courage flagged for a moment, but then he looked defiantly at the girl and marched past her to the next bush.

“Because you aren’t going to find a flower that fits that description, you know. Kisses only come from roses and you’ve got apple blossoms and rhododendrons and dandelions – but the roses have been rationed. Do you understand! There’s a war on and you’re messing everything up and you should give it to m….”

But the little boy never heard what else she might have said because just then a zeppelin with an escort of two very noisy propeller planes flew overhead, dodging and dancing in the air because they were saving their bullets and all their Curse Word Ration had been used up (and even fighter pilots and pseudo-Germans sound pretty silly calling out things like “meany” and “gunky” and “der böze Wolfe!” to one another no matter how dashing they may look with their white scarves flittering in the propeller’s choppy breeze).

As it was, the boy managed to slip around to the far side of the garden, noticing as he trotted that the girl’s prediction appeared to be correct. There were no flowers that even remotely resembled the petal in his hand. He was just about to turn back to the house when another woman, willowy from her loose white dress to her unbound hair, stood up from between two lilies and said, “Here’s rue for you,” and began singing a strange tune that seemed more poem that song.

The boy blinked several times and then jumped as a voice behind him said, “The readiness was all.”

“What?” he asked, staring straight ahead and holding the petal in both hands.

“To kiss or not to kiss, if only I’d asked that question,” the voice said again – a gentle baritone. Then it sighed. “I loved Ophelia! But I never gave her aught. There’s a war on, you know.”

The boy’s eyes bulged and he bolted for the neighbor’s. But before he could even reach the street a humongous frog leapt in his path. Now, frogs he could deal with. Leave girls and lovers and even zeppelins behind and give him a good slimy amphibian any day. As luck would have it, though, this particular amphibian talked.

“Give it,” the frog croaked.

The boy fell backwards.

“Kiss me!” the frog tried again. The boy scrambled back to his feet, not bothering to dust off his bottom or hands.

“Give it!” the frog boomed, waddling closer. “Must be human. There’s a war on. No more wart juice left. Must be human. Kiss me!”

The boy stifled a scream and leapt to the left, skidding to a stop on the sidewalk corner like his mother had always taught him. He waited while two cowboys drew their pencils and sketched each other in the hot noonday sun. From across the street, a buxom lass ran out from a modest saloon selling soda water (hangovers had been banned from the beginning) and nearly knocked the boy down.

“Quick, quick!” she said, tugging up one frilly sleeve. She was obviously not one of the usual fiercely independent or cotton-brained women who normally inhabited such can-can garb. “They must kiss and make up or else they’ll Dorian Gray each other to death. And we’ve used up all our bullets and Billy Bo Bob kissed me on page thirty-two because our author’s never had a date. Quick! Quick! The petal!”

And with that she nearly wrenched the fragile thing out of the boy’s now-grimy fingers. But he was smaller and more agile than anyone in such a preposterous conglomeration of petticoats and high heels, and he sped beneath the staple-gun crossfire, past two detectives and one shadow, through a red shirt that was materializing from a levitating hubcap lightbeam, and hopped a fence to tumble his way down to a secluded brook.

Or, at least, it seemed secluded.

A very glum businessman was sitting there, using his briefcase as a cushion. His tie hung loose around his throat and his hair showed signs of nervous fingers running through it. His blazer was folded neatly beside him, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to show the gold Rolex on his tanned wrist. He began speaking even before the boy had finished tumbling.

“You know, I used to be in your position.”

The boy didn’t respond, which is not surprising considering he had landed face downward in the dirt.

The man continued. “ ‘Course, this was before the war. Back when we didn’t have to use contractions to save page space, when obsolete words were par for the course, when we had the leisure to put in as many characters as we wanted. Before any sort of tax.”

The boy had managed to right himself and was busily cleaning his face in the stream.

“Not quite before agents, but then, what is?”

“Do you want my kiss too?” the boy asked suddenly, the words somewhat obscured by the water running down his face from his damp hair.

The man laughed. “Of course. You don’t think I’d be waiting here if I didn’t.”

“What do you want it for?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Any number of reasons. To kiss my wife, to kiss my kids, to kiss my boss’s a…nyway. Lots of reasons. But there’s a war on, you know.”

“War with who?”

“With whom.”

“Who’s ‘Whom’?”

The man rubbed his eyes and said to himself, “I’d forgotten the National Ignorance Act passed last week.” Then turning to the boy he said, “We’re at war with the world.”

The boy’s eyes grew very large and round and his mouth followed suit as he said, “Wow. The world is a very big thing to be at war with.”

“Mmm. I suppose, though, that we’ve always been warring with the world. They do something, we contradict it. But this time, they do something, we uphold it. They pass the Minimal Affection Act; we pass the Kissing Tax.

“We’re at war with the world, not against it. The ones we’re fighting are little boys like you who will one day become what we are. We’re fighting for your minds. We’re fighting for the right to brainwash you. We’re fighting to keep you in darkness. We’re fighting to make you think what the world has decided to think, and not what is actual, what is true.”

The boy’s face screwed up and he pushed himself against a tree. He half expected to hear ventilated breathing any minute, but when the ordinary man continued looking over the shallow brook he ventured, “Then you’re a bad guy?”

The man pushed out his lower lip and picked up a stone. “I’m not wearing a black cape, am I?” The boy shook his head, slumping down to the grass in relief, then jumped to his feet when the man said, “But yes, I’m the bad guy. Does that surprise you? Yes, I suppose it does. But don’t you see, I’m the fella that keeps you drooling at a glowing screen, I’m the guy that tells you don’t read, don’t think, don’t question, I’m the guy that bans books, good books, classic books, books your grandpa read. We’ve already got my generation drowning in its own mundanity. We’re after yours. Feed you palaver and paraphrase and keep you from the source.

“Lots of pop fiction around. They’re the main artillery. But philosophy? Theology? No, never mind. Ever hear of non-fiction? Scary stuff. Might teach you something. But keep the youngsters’ minds on nothing and they got nothing in their minds. Make them see through ‘til they see nothing. Make ‘em keep an open mind so they never fill it.

“So, you see, the Kissing Tax. The petal. The roses. Hide ‘em, keep ‘em away, don’t give ‘em to anyone. Grab, don’t give. Take, don’t ask. Teach the kids aloneness. Isolate. Call it “Independence” and “Freedom.” Then lock ‘em in themselves. Make ‘em think they’re thinking. An’ maybe they’ll beat their brains out. Maybe they’ll write about it. Believe they can change the world. But their stuff’ll just stay in the slush pile. No real problem. Quagmire. Slush.”

His eyes had grown wild, his hands were kneading one another, one foot was tapping the damp earth. He laughed and looked at the boy who held the precious rose petal close to his chest.

“So, yeah, I want your kiss. I’ve used up all mine. I’ve lived my life in a psychedelic bubble. Kissed my luck, kissed my drugs, kissed my money. Never kissed my wife. Never kissed my kids. Bigshot then. I ordered the bombs to flourish. I ordered porn in the sandbox. I ordered music and noise so you can’t hear yourself. An’ now I’m sitting by this brook talking to my enemy and begging for a kiss.”

He laughed and threw the stone into the water, swinging his arm and ripping the seam.

“Contact. Isn’t that what the arts are supposed to be? Across space and time. Helen is still as beautiful, Anna still as dead. Touch the human soul – say, ‘I know you for you are I.” A comfort, like the saints. But mayonnaise and ketchup come in little plastic wraps so you don’t have to acknowledge the fellow next to you. Why shouldn’t words be the same?

“Necessary. Couldn’t be helped. Can’t have every minor character involved in a romantic entanglement. No contact. Isolate. Independence.

“But the Word came down from Heaven and became Flesh….”

The man’s eyes did not water. Like kisses, he had used up all his tears on other things: the stock market and the Beatles. But they hadn’t outlawed remorse yet.

The boy stood, wobbling a little on the uneven ground, and then, very slowly, he made his way up to the man in the business suit sitting on the briefcase, and opened his hand to reveal the petal. With the insight, or perhaps the fortune, often inherent to those like children, the boy let the silken kiss drift away on the wind.

Then, wrapping his pudgy arms around the man’s neck, he kissed him on the cheek and walked home; so he never saw the first glistening tear in twenty years that wove its way down the man’s tanned face, nor how the petal broke into a thousand thousand pieces, flitting over the war-torn earth.

The End

(c) 2002
By Emily C. A. Snyder
All Rights Reserved
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