"He will continue scratching against the silence,"

I wrote in a short story I submitted on Sep. 23.

https://medium.com/@ramsey-hanhan/the-piano-teacher-b61e753cee2e

Thank you for sharing this perspective of growing up amidst America's perpetual war. I came to America around 1990 so the images you describe are contemporaneous, except I experienced them as an immigrant from Palestine. "Where is that?" was the most common question I got. "Flat," as you say.