If you just need a short memory jog, this IS the story about the February town in the Detroit ruins, building a parade float that brother Joe, among others, has to ride on; also features Grandpa muttering about how we should have fought, etc.
Thank you!
That's the one that I thought it was, but then somehow I got it tangled up in my head with "Jump and I'll Catch You" on Drabblecast, thinking that the story with the parade float was also the one about "Our New Friends", so when I looked at the Drabblecast story and saw the phrase "Our New Friends" then I thought I must've been misremembering this story, but it turns out I got them tangled up in my my memory.
So much confuse! OK, I'm straightened out now, thanks!
ETA: I removed the strikethroughs on my original comment, since it was about this story.
Ha, whereas I almost skipped that Drabblecast story, just looking at the title and seeing it as "When It Ends, He Catches Her," and thinking, "nah, Pseudopod's version was perfect, so I'll just keep that narration in my head."
It's tough keeping track of stories sometimes, especially these days when we have such a bounty of them.
Anyway, to comment on THIS story:
I rather liked the immediacy of the story, focusing tightly on what was happening without going much into why, and letting awareness dawn as events transpired. Most kids probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about their own backstories, after all. And that avoidance of retrospection clearly fit the 11-year-old viewpoint character's childish nature.
I do agree that the celebration of their own conquest is horrible. Just the tribute is required, with the pageantry having been developed by the people to dress up the sacrifice and make themselves feel better about it all. But that means they've ending up taking partial ownership of it, and being somewhat complicit with it.
I really, really like the brother's being troubled over whether his coming back means he was rejected or means he was chosen.
Another thing that strikes me is that although the viewpoint character is pretty unsympathetic to Grandpa, I still feel pretty keenly for him. Everyone else is so focused on getting through the day, which may well be the best way for them to cope, but he's the only one who's even trying to keep the memory alive of what it was like to resist. So he had the desperate struggle of resisting the invaders then, and now he's just desperately struggling to keep that memory alive for future generations, despite nobody wanting to listen.
However, I wish we hadn't heard about the Colonel and his crazy inventions and their eventual emancipation. It didn't feel earned, and it seemed to weaken the impact of the story.