Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Two Flanking Maneuver

There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.

 — Sun Tzu, The Art of War (c. 512 BCE)

It took me three days to find another supermarket, since I’d been looking for the familiar ‘Klegelmeyer’s’ sign. Even the red and white ‘IGA’ sign hadn’t done me any good, and I finally figured out that I had to look more carefully at the front windows, which usually had smaller signs on them that referred to food, although there were other subtle clues as well. The second store was ‘Nathan’s Market & Deli,’ whatever that last word meant. Maybe it was an abbreviation for ‘delicious.’ I didn’t much care, once I’d found it.

Since I’d pretty much stuffed my first storehouse full, I decided to do a little recon, seeking out alternative routes into the village with a view towards using the same ‘forward cache’ strategy to cover as many likely entry points as I could. Now that I had the trick of finding them, ‘supermarkets’ seemed to be almost ubiquitous. In many areas, there was one near almost every intersection of roads as soon as I got well away from my huge tower, which I’d made my base of operations, since I figured that most foraging parties from the castle would be drawn, as I’d been, straight toward it.

I spent a lot of time exploring — it must have been several weeks, but I couldn’t bring myself to care what day it was, since every day was pretty much the same here in the village, find a supermarket, find a safe storehouse for the food on a main road into village, then move the food into position — and eventually found the mother lode of all supermarkets right in the middle of a huge expanse of blacktop near the outskirts of the village. It wasn’t marked with any clear indication that it was a supermarket, not even the little clues that I’d discovered in the central village, so finding it was pure luck. There were lots of flat-roofed buildings just like it all around this part of the village, but it just drew me toward it for some reason, maybe because the huge expanse of blacktop marked it out as being somehow special, since most of the flat-topped buildings had much more modest areas of blacktop near them, and sometimes none at all. It was locked up tight, of course, but the judicious use of a little napalm took care of that, shattering the heavy glass of the doors, and I simply kicked away the metal bar at the bottom of the former door that was all the barrier that was left behind.

Inside, it was like forager heaven; what seemed like endless rows of floor-to-almost-ceiling shelving stacked high with boxes and boxes of canned and bottled foodstuffs. Even with my new train of heavy-duty carts, it would take years to empty out this place, although I’d have to figure out some method of lowering the food safely from the higher shelves, since I couldn’t safely climb down the shelving with a box filled with cans, and if I simply tied them to one of my ropes, I’d have the problem of climbing down to release the rope, and then ascending the stacks of shelving again.

Then I had another thought; there were hundreds of these flat-roofed buildings all around the outskirts of the village, some of them had to contain food, but more than that, maybe some of them contained things that might help us beyond mere day-to-day survival.

The only trouble with this idea was that I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was beginning to think that what I’d been taught about the plants wasn’t really true. They supposedly weren’t intelligent, but they seemed to have been clever enough to kill almost every member of a team of humans armed with the best technology we knew of. They were supposedly ‘drawn’ to humans based on their need for certain nutrients that human bodies contained, yet I’d seen plants here in the village, where there were very clearly no people at all, except for me. There weren’t very many plants, but they were here, and they hadn’t seemed particularly anxious to get those ‘special’ nutrients from me. In fact, as far as I could tell, they’d totally ignored me. The facts were that — judging from what I could actually see — the hostile plants were clustered around the castle, not the city, so maybe it was the people in the castle they were after, not just people in general.

In fact, the whole picture looked a little whacky. Just outside the ring of hostile plants, there were what looked like endless fields of wheatgrass. Call me crazy, but wasn’t bread made from wheat? Why were we sending young men off to die in an attempt to forage in a distant village when there was enough wheat to supply a hundred castles sitting just beyond our front gates?

With that thought in mind, I left most of my carts where they were and walked out onto the blacktop. Choosing a direction at random, I set off to explore the warehouses, equipped only with my flamethrower, a small prybar that I’d found in one of the supermarkets, and the bottom half of my protective armor, which I was wearing. One direction seemed as good as any other, so I headed north, pulling only one of my carts.

Most of the buildings were more or less anonymous, having at most a small sign on the door, like ‘SmithCo’ or ‘Roberts & Leland,’ although a few had the same sort of thing painted near the top of one or more walls, so they didn’t seem worth the trouble of breaking through the doors to find out what was inside.

Eventually, I found a building that said, ‘Hemmings Hardware Supply,’ which seemed a likely prospect, but the front door didn’t open, despite using a rock to pound off the front door handle, and then my prybar to wreck the mysterious innards of what must have been a pretty good lock, until I remembered a road sign that I’d seen lying on the ground several blocks away, where the roads were buckled up and it was difficult to maneuver even my sturdy new carts. It had looked heavy, since it still had a cylinder of some sort of rock attached to the bottom of the steel pipe the sign was mounted on, so I trotted down the road with my cart to where it was, levered it up onto the cart, and walked back backwards, towing the cart and the sign pole using both hands on the handle of my cart, because it was awfully heavy.

It was effective, though. I simply left it on the cart and took a run at the door, pushing the cart and the end of the pipe with the rock on it into the door. The first run bent the door. The second tore the locking mechanism from the frame, leaving the door open, and hadn’t affected my cart at all, so I was very pleased. Brute force beats brains almost every time.

I was even more pleased once I got inside, although it took quite a few days to make sense of what I’d found. I had several different sizes of pry bars, heavy hammers, some metal wedges, and a set of ropes and some things the ropes were woven through in a particular order that would — according to the picture on the package — let me raise and lower heavy objects easily, in short, a foraging kit designed for the obstacles I’d encountered thus far.

Walking back to my super-supermarket with my new load of tools, I was feeling pretty smug about the day’s accomplishments, already envisioning being able to lower the heavy bundles of boxes they had stored on the higher shelves without having to cut open the straps and plastic wrap and lower one box at a time, so I wasn’t really looking exactly where I was going when I realized that right in front of me was a medium-sized burrower, about as tall as I was, but greener, a lot bigger around, and with more creeping vines around it than I wanted to count just then, since I was frozen, trying not to move an eyelash, much less a finger. Not so long ago, I’d seen larger versions of this thing eat Lieutenant Forge, my squad leader, plus seven of my fellow Horticulturalists, so I wasn’t exactly optimistic about my chances of making it back in time for my triumphant salvage operation on the world’s largest cache of food.

‘Oh, crap!’ I thought. ‘Harrison’s Bloody Ass! At least I’ll die quickly.’ I’d cleverly left the upper part of my protective suit and my helmet back at the tower, and didn’t even have my flamethrower on me, since I’d left it back at the super-supermarket so as to make more room for goodies. In short, I didn’t have very many options left.

The burrower didn’t have eyes, so I couldn’t exactly know whether it was looking at me or not, although it was clear that it was aware of every movement, because every time I shifted position, even slightly, it would turn a bit, or the vines beneath it would move, rustling with a dry breathy sound like the wind through the wheat grass we’d walked through at the beginning of my adventure.

At last, the burrower reared up on its vines, fully displaying its gaping maw, filled with multiple rows of teeth, the exact same sort of teeth that I’d seen grinding up Lieutenant Forge, and he’d been wearing full armor at the time.

I did the only thing I could think of. I had a bottle of that pungent cheese in my wagon that I’d brought along in case I was delayed and got to feeling peckish, so I quickly picked it up and threw the whole bottle into the thing’s ‘mouth,’ thinking that it might distract the creature long enough that I could get away.

No such luck. My big chunk of cheese disappeared into its gullet as quickly as an extra ration of sugar might vanish into the mouth of a hungry child. It opened its mouth again, obviously wanting more.

At this point, I improvised, since I didn’t want to offer it my arm, so I said clearly, as if speaking to a child, “I’ve got lots more, but you’ll have to follow me. I’ll give you more cheese if you do.” I felt stupid, of course, talking to a mobile plant, but they say that drowning men will clutch at straws.

The beast said not a word, of course, but it seemed slightly more attentive and a tiny bit less menacing, so I took a chance and set off back toward the big super-supermarket, where I’d seen a larger row of the same sort of metal and glass cabinets I’d found cheese in at all the smaller markets. “Come on!” I said, feigning a bravado I didn’t really feel. “Don’t dawdle. I haven’t got all day!” and walked off as if I took green monsters for walks every day.

And off we went; modern man and ancient nightmare. For some reason, I remembered my mother telling me a story,

‘But while he was seeking with thimbles and care,
A Bandersnatch swiftly drew nigh
And grabbed at the Banker, who shrieked in despair,
For he knew it was useless to fly.’

That pretty much summed it up for me. My mid-size ‘burrower’ was a baby bandersnatch.

By the time we got back to the flat-top supermarket, the bandersnatch was getting restless, and it didn’t like going inside the building at all, but it cheered right up when I opened the glass-front cabinets at the back of the market and tossed it a few bottles of cheese. There was other stuff in there, but it just looked moldy, with a sort of fuzzy black and green color that didn’t look appetizing at all. The bandersnatch didn’t think so either. Say what you will, it had good taste. I just hoped that it wasn’t saving me for a snack later.

Over the next few days, the bandersnatch became my constant companion, an uncomfortable relationship — for me at least — since I wasn’t exactly sure how the bandersnatch would feel if I ever came up short in the cheese department. Luckily, every supermarket I’d found so far had a cabinet with at least some bottles of cheese, so it was simply a matter of remembering to keep a good supply on hand when we went out foraging. My beast seemed happy with one bottle in the morning and one in the late afternoon, so I always kept at least four on hand in the cart I took with me when I went out searching, which also carried my new breaking in and salvage kit. I decided to haul around the top half of my suit as well, and the helmet, just in case. My brush with death had spooked me a little, but not enough to persuade me to return to the ‘Burn it first! Then try missiles!’ philosophy of the Horticulturists, since I was beginning to be fairly certain that they’d brought at least some of their misfortunes on themselves. I didn’t actually wear the top half, of course. Despite the slight chill, wearing the whole outfit was stifling, and I felt lots better with it off. It chafed as well, and drove me crazy with itching the few times I’d tried it on after the first few days I’d spent without wearing it all the time. I reckon they’d had trouble finding one that fit properly, since I was on the small side for a Horticulturist, and had been putting on a little weight since I began eating regularly here in the village, despite my current schedule of fairly strenuous physical activity.

I still tried to get back to my tower regularly to sleep, because the warmth it held for quite a while after sunset was comforting, and because it allowed me to keep a general eye on the areas around the village. I’d also found a flat-top building with sections devoted to clothing and blankets by then, and finally added the bottom of my suit to all the stuff I hauled around, rather than wearing it, because it was a major inconvenience hooking myself up to the urination device, and I had to take it off to crap in any case.

It had been a little over a month since I arrived, although I found it difficult to pin down the days, since one day seemed a lot like another without the weekly rhythm of mandatory Chapel services to punctuate the week, when we studied the Word of Harry and heard general announcements from the Leadership of The Castle. In that month, perhaps a little more, my life had undergone a drastic change, from what had seemed like a justifiable terror in an extremely hostile world to a relatively peaceful existence in which at least some of my former nightmares had turned out to be — if not completely innocuous — much more manageable than they had appeared to be before.

My bandersnatch, for example, appeared to have a proprietary interest in my safety, which had surprised me when it had chased off another bandersnatch which had evidently approached too closely. If it had been a dog, one might have expected furious snarling, growls, and barking, but of course their agitated interaction was initiated, performed, and finished in eerie silence, except for the dry rustling of the leafy vines which formed their peculiar ‘legs,’ and the grinding of their prominently displayed teeth.

There had still been dogs in the castle when I was young, so the bandersnatch’s behavior was strangely familiar, but it was also unsettling. It was obvious to me by now that my bandersnatch possessed some level of intelligence — at least enough cleverness to recognize its ‘meal ticket’ — but it also had feelings of some sort, although I didn’t know whether those feelings were of affection, or jealousy, or something so completely alien that I wouldn’t recognize it.

“Hey! Gumball! Let’s go!” I talked to my bandersnatch a lot, since there was no one else around to talk to, and I didn’t want to be one of those crazy people who talk to themselves. In the castle, that was a quick way to ‘volunteer’ for a foraging team. Surprisingly enough, though, he paid attention when I talked to him, which gave me the illusion, at least, that he was part of a somewhat one-sided ‘conversation.’

It may have been my imagination, but ‘Gumball’ — I’d named him after a device I’d seen in one of the supermarkets, which had multicolored round balls of something inside a big glass globe with a sign on it that read, ‘Jumbo Gumball’ and then a smaller sign under it that said, ‘$2.00’ — was getting smarter. Lately, all I had to say was ‘Cheese, Gumball,’ and he’d rustle over to the cart and cleverly pick up the satchel that I was using to carry cheese bottles in, since they tended to be fragile. He’d carefully carry the satchel over to wherever I was at the time, so I’d make a great show of looking for the exact bottle I wanted to give him, and then toss it high up in the air so he could rear up and catch it on the fly. He seemed to enjoy the game and, frankly, so did I.

I was over on the eastern side of the village, and I’d been feeling a little out of sorts since early that morning. I was a long way from my tower, still looking for the elusive answers to questions I still didn’t know enough to ask. I’d found a lake inside a field of tall grass, although there were blacktop walkways, mostly cracked and broken, that wandered around through the grass and then circled the lake completely, which was equipped with a low wall and rusty iron benches, as if they’d had sentries on duty, ready to repel whatever it was that the lake had been home to.

I felt a little leery, walking next to it, but didn’t see anything to worry about, although the lake itself was very murky, and might have concealed almost anything.

Suddenly, an enormous sort of vine with long brownish-green leaves heaved itself out of the water, flopping from side to side as it wormed its way toward me and Gumball.

“Watch out, Gumball!” I shouted as I quickly turned to grab my flamethrower, but Gumball was already gnashing at the nearest leaves to good effect and, as if by magic, was soon joined by half a dozen of his fellows, who all seemed to delight in gobbling down huge chunks of leaves and stem.

By the time I got my flamethrower ready to fire, the tentacle vine had withdrawn into the cloudy water and Gumball and his former fellows were immediately aware of each other in a hostile manner. Not for the first time, I thought of dogs, except that rustling leaves were a poor substitute for growling.

“Play nice, guys!” I cried out. “Gumball! Cheese!”

Gumball shook himself, making a particularly angry-sounding rustle, then slithered off to fetch the satchel, suspiciously, I think.

His dark suspicions were confirmed when I tossed him a bottle, followed immediately by a bottle each for my rescuers, and then another bottle of cheese for Gumball, to demonstrate that he still had pride of place. “Gumball, honey,” I said soothingly, “these guys helped us a lot, so they really deserve a little treat, don’t they? And besides, it might be handy to have a few pals around if we ever get into trouble again, wouldn’t it?”

He grumbled, well, his rustling seemed like grumbling, but tolerated the other bandersnatches when they brought up the rear of our procession, since I had to find another supermarket. I’d brought what I’d imagined was at least a week’s supply of bottles for Gumball, and a few for me, but with seven maws to feed, they wouldn’t last that long.

It didn’t take long to find a supermarket, either, since I’d developed an ability to spot a likely candidate from several intersections away, so was able to walk directly to one, as likely as not, once I stood in the middle of a road and looked from one end to the other.

Sure enough, there seemed to be a supermarket about three roads down, so we all trotted off to stock up on cheese.

This one had been looted, unlike every supermarket I’d discovered so far. The shelves were stripped of everything edible, but for some reason they’d completely ignored the glass-front cabinets that usually contained the cheese bottles.

‘The more fools, they!’ I thought to myself. “Look here, Gumball! There’s forty or fifty bottles of cheese in here, for you and your little pals!” I refilled my satchel, and then found a few boxes that I could carefully stack my new cache of cheese in, so we could travel on without fear of running short.

Gumball didn’t deign to comment, of course, but he seemed quite mollified as we headed out the door and further east.

We hadn’t been walking long before I started noticing things, houses that had clearly been broken into with savage disregard for any future use to which they might have been put, and plants… everything green had been burnt to black, and a large group of craters told me that they’d even burned a dandelion!

I felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for Lieutenant Forge. He was definitely of the ‘burn it if it moves’ school of thought, but even he had limits. He would have been angry, I think, at the wanton destruction inside the village, although I no longer believed that it would burn down completely if part of it caught fire. Every one of these pillaged houses might have been put to better use, though, and the wanton destruction of plant life was pure folly, especially inside the confines of a city in which the plants, by and large, didn’t go out of their way to hurt anyone, and otherwise did whatever it was that plants did, grow, I presume, and some of the seemingly dangerous plants were quite useful, like the dandelions, without which the Horticulturists wouldn’t have any napalm with which to burn things. Who were these guys anyway, a troupe of traveling idiots? Napalm didn’t grow on trees! I had a good notion to give them all a good talking to!

Just then, however, I heard a squawk from my helmet, which was still in my cart with the other stuff, and then a voice, although I couldn’t make out the words. Suddenly, I realized the precarious position we were in; if any of those fire-happy clowns — now positively identified as Horticulturists — happened to see my green entourage, they’d probably burn me right along with Gumball and his pals on general principles.

Quickly, I turned my cart around, called Gumball, and then hightailed it back the way I’d come, at first followed by my seven friends, but Gumball and a few others managed to pull ahead, racing ahead of me back toward familiar territory, where I was intimately familiar with almost every street and building.

Too late! I heard a tinny shout through the headset in my helmet, and then the familiar sound of a rocket launcher some ways behind us. “Gumball! Scatter! Hide!” I screamed, and ran down a side road as quickly as I could, which was pretty fast by now, but not faster than a missile, despite their slow start.

With a flash of light, and then a wave of heat, followed immediately by a very loud explosion back at the intersection I’d just left, I was knocked off my feet and came up hopping mad. I grabbed my helmet and put it on, then keyed the talk circuit and screamed at the gang of clowns, “What in Harrison’s Holy Hell do you morons think you’re doing?! You could have killed me!”

There was at least a minute of garbled chatter before one of the sorry sons of bitches managed to focus long enough to say, “Who is this?”

“This is Lieutenant Forge, of The Castle Horticulturists, and who the Hell are you, young ladies?” One advantage of being a daydreamer is that I recognized an opportunity when it’d been handed to me. As lowly ‘Seven,’ sad remnant of a foraging party, I’d have no clout at all and would likely be impressed into service with the dopes, then sentenced to lashes at least for ‘dereliction of duty’ when we got back, because I was ‘out of uniform,’ and finally sent out through the local gate alone, if I made it back at all. I knew for a fact that Forge and all the rest of our expedition were ‘missing in action’ at most, since only I survived, and I hadn’t told anyone. The helmet radios were short range only, since any foragers who got into serious trouble were on their own. If they couldn’t extricate themselves, they were dead, as witness the great majority of our party.

After a few minutes more of stupid chatter while everyone tried to talk at once — proof positive that there was no officer in charge — what seemed like the same voice came back, sounding surer of himself by now, “I’m Six, of The Citadel Horticulturalists. What are you doing in The City, and what were those rolling plants? Where are you? Come out and show yourself!”

That I wasn’t about to do, since I wasn’t wearing my suit, as protocol required, and the stenciled number Seven would instantly betray me as someone he could push around, so I resorted to military intelligence, “Consider yourself on report, Six, and the lot of you stand down and gather in the middle of the street so I can take a look at you. Quite frankly, I don’t feel confident that I can rely upon your uncertain level of discipline to keep you from hysterically firing off another missile at me in your general confusion.” Two could play at that game, and I had missiles too. Careful to conceal two of the HE variety behind my back, one preloaded in my bazooka, I peered back around the corner. They were there, and gathered into a loose sort of squad, as I’d ordered, but held their weapons at the ready, at least three rocket launchers. “I said, Stand down! ladies. I’m not saying it again.”

Another peek told me that they had no intention of doing that, so I fired off one of my missiles over the houses to where they were, and then jumped out and fired the other straight at them, fairly confident of success in eliminating at least the nuisance that I saw, although I couldn’t be sure that there weren’t more of them lurking somewhere in hiding. I didn’t stop to see the result, but ran back down the road to my cart, grabbed the handle, and beat feet down the parallel road and back toward my familiar section of the village. On the way I keyed the transmitter again and said quite calmly, “I told you to stand down. Any comment?”

After a few moments, there’d still been no reply, so I risked going back to the road several intersections closer to the city and carefully looked back. I saw no one still standing, not that that meant much. Even dolts can take a hint when it’s been presented in words of one syllable or less.

I thought about going back to check for survivors, but then decided against it. The risks were too great when compared to the potential rewards. At best, I’d be able to salvage any missiles they had left, but I already had quite a few to spare. At worst, they’d be prepared to ambush me, which would of course be fatal.

I took off the helmet and threw it back in the cart, then called out as loudly as I could, “Gumball! Guys! Where are you?!”

After an anxious wait, Gumball came out from wherever he’d been lurking, and then two more of the hangers-on, then three, and finally I had my seven bandersnatches back again, which I considered a fair trade for two of my stash of missiles. ‘Harrison rewards the quick and the clever,’ I thought, an aphorism often dwelled upon in Chapel, ‘and punishes the slow and stupid with chastisements of hellfire!’ I gave them not a further thought, other than as a cautionary tale.

I hadn’t gone but about halfway back towards the center of the village when I realized that I’d been wounded in the explosion after all, because the crotch of my Levi’s was damp with blood. There wasn’t much, so I knew whatever it was hadn’t hit an artery, but it concerned me enough that I stepped up the pace, wanting to get back to my tower, where I’d left my first aid kit — one of my first acquisitions from Aisle 6 at Klegelmeyer’s, but one I hadn’t needed, or so I’d believed. In all my time spent foraging, I’d never so much as broke a fingernail, much less experienced a wound. ‘Oh, well, live and learn,’ I thought.

The trip back was uneventful, but I never did feel safe enough — knowing that foraging crews from other fortresses frequented my village — to drop my Levi’s and look. Being ‘caught with your pants down’ was another aphorism often featured in the sermons, and not with any hint of understanding, but rather harsh judgement and contempt, which was meant to teach us that iron discipline overrode even necessary bodily functions.

It was full dark, without even a moon to navigate by, by the time we reached the tower, but I was familiar with every obstacle in my neighborhood, so we went straight up the stairs, taking them two at a time in my case, and my bandersnatches doing whatever they did with their vines, but keeping up with no difficulty. We exited the staircase on the thirty-seventh floor, where Gumball and his pals felt most comfortable. They quite liked being inside now, at least in this particular building, because they could sun themselves to their heart’s content — if they actually had hearts — basking in the sunlight through the windows, and then simply moving to the other side of the building as the day wore on. I’d set out large tubs of water for them, once I’d realized that even slightly droopy leaves meant that they were getting dehydrated, so they had everything they needed, except for cheese, of course, which I doled out as rations, and the odd lake monster.

First things first, of course, so I drew fresh water from the firehose near the stairwell. It was fed from a large rain collection system and cistern on the roof, so I had what amounted to an endless supply of water close at hand, although I’d felt foolish when I discovered this, about two weeks after I’d moved in. I’d made countless trips to haul water from a stream about three roads over toward the west, because I liked having a supply on hand, but how was I to know? None of the other plumbing worked — I’d looked in the bathrooms and what was identified as a ‘Break Room’ on this very floor to be sure — so I’d never tried the fire hoses until I’d thought about using them to make lifting straps for the food and other items I stored in the tower, reasoning that with straps and a long length of rope, I could haul things up quicker than I could climb the stairs. One lives and learns, as my mother told me once. one lives and learns.

In any case, I had my wound to look to, now that I’d watered my bandersnatches and had a full bucket of water handy for washing up. It wasn’t at all painful, just uncomfortable, and the sticky blood on my new Levi’s was annoying as well.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to discover that I’d been infected by the plants. I’d had plenty of exposure, what with lying unconscious after the dandelion and its pseudosharks had exploded, leaving me covered with plant parts and dirt, or even during our struggle with the lake monster. The suits were pretty good, as long as there was a buddy nearby to flame you if a plant managed to attach itself, but they weren’t perfect, and of course I hadn’t been wearing mine at all lately. Back in the castle, you were supposed to get washed with flame, and then disinfected with powerful poisons, before you took off your suit, but I hadn’t had that luxury. My condition wasn’t at all unknown, but babies who’d contracted it in the womb were discarded at birth, thrown over the walls for the plants to take care of, and their mothers with them.

In the meantime, I had to make another trip downstairs, so I could walk over to Klegelmeyer’s and visit Aisle 5, Feminine Hygiene — which I’d hitherto ignored — because I seemed to be menstruating, the perfect ending to a perfectly wretched day.

Gumball wanted to go, of course, although all of them were a little lethargic after dark, but a few bottles of cheese took care of that, so off we trotted, happy campers all. What the heck, misery loves company.

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved