One – Awakening
My muscles burn from the force I use as I
methodically scrub the cracked pavement with my wood handled wire brush. I know
that I must remove all signs of blood before Caade gets home from work. My face
is hot and tears sting my cheek as I clean. My nose won’t stop dribbling so I
suck in a deep breath, mingling the horrible aroma of cleaning solvent, dust
turning to mud and human blood. My mom’s
long wavy hair falls forward as she kneels beside me scrubbing another pool of
blood. She is completely unaware that the tips of her hair are dragging along
the ground, getting matted with blood and muck as she forcefully thrusts her
brush back and forth. She mumbles beside me rehearsing the words she plans to
say to Caade. She hasn’t yet made it through Nettie’s last words without
choking up and stopping to wipe the tears from her eyes several times. Although
she speaks so quietly I can barely hear above the sound of metal scratching
pavement, I can tell that her voice sounds wrong, instead of sweet and tender,
husky and strangled, like a child after a powerful cry. I have never seen an
adult cry so hard that they become childlike. Not until today. I can’t imagine
how difficult it is to have to tell your best friend’s child that he will never
see his mother again.
One Hour Earlier
I reach my fingers and toes straight out as far as
possible in opposite directions taking a deep morning breath. The thick, acrid
air burns the inside of my nose even before opening my eyes. Thrust from my
pleasant dreams, I can feel the heaviness of the world around me the moment my
consciousness moves into reality. My
skin feels sticky and my hair is matted to my forehead. The warmth of the sun
seeping in through the open window is already beginning to feel too strong.
I stretch my legs well past the end of my mat. I don’t
know if it was made for sleeping, but my orange spongy mat has made a very
comfortable bed. My fourteen-year-old body does not fit quite as well as it did
when Mom first brought it home three years ago. I naturally pull my knees up
tight, so that my feet don’t hit the floor while I sleep. Curling up in a tight
ball leaves me a little sore in the mornings. Still, I can’t complain, Caade
and every other kid I know, sleeps with only pieces of cardboard between
themselves and the cold hard floor.
I am extremely lucky that my mom found this mat for me
in an alley behind a skyrise in Inner Newtopia. Of course, Mom wasn’t supposed
to be strolling around the city, much less taking anything from the Elites. Her
work visa only allows her to enter the district in which she works, Executive
District, where she is a night janitor. This is where all of the corporate
headquarters are located. I am not sure what they do in those skyrises, but it
must be important. Everything that Elites
do is important.
Every evening, Mom walks to the West Common Rail
Station and then rides an hour, halfway around the city, to the Common Gate.
This is the only opening in the giant wall that surrounds Inner Newtopia. Once
inside, she must walk nearly another hour along The Common Path to Executive
District; she’s not allowed to ride the Elite Rail to work, which would get her
there in under ten minutes.
In the daylight she could never risk diverging from The
Common Path, but when Mom leaves work a few hours before sunrise, when few
Elites have awoken, she slips through the residential districts cutting over a
half hour off her exhausting commute. How she snuck this brightly colored mat
through an off limits section of the city and then on to the Common Rail, I’ll
never know. My mom amazes me; there isn’t anything she wouldn’t do for me.
I rub my eyes and roll over to watch Mom making
breakfast. Her feet drag as she takes short, slow steps. She is obviously
exhausted. Of course she is. She has already walked several miles today, not to
mention the endless hours she spent cleaning toilets in the Elite’s skyrise
offices.
These toilets, automatic, water-filled machines, sound
like magic. I have never seen one, but maybe someday, if I get to go to University
I will be able to use one. In The Commons, rowhouses only have a toilet seat
that opens in the center to a deep, deep hole. There is a putrid river down
below; they say it flows out to the sea eventually. We have to be very careful
never to drop anything down the hole because if we do, it is gone forever!
Sometimes I feel jealous of my mom. I wish I could see
Inner Newtopia too. I have never seen a skyrise before, but she has told me
about them and all the beautiful things she has seen in the city. Mom says that
at night the buildings shimmer from embedded lights glittering like the starry
night sky.
Not that I have seen a real star since moving here.
Most of my friends don't even believe me that they exist. The sky above The
Commons is consistently a dull brown. It never changes. I imagine that we have
immobile mud soaked clouds that hover just above us, but I don’t really know
why our sky looks the way that it does. When I was a kid we lived near the
coast, the sky was blue and I could see a million stars at night.
Daddy was an Electrotech at Solair Hydroelectric
Corporation. Solair was a generous corporation.
On Daddy’s credits we could always afford enough food and we rented an
uncommonly large rowhouse with vinyl floors, crystal clear glass windows and a
division between the sleeping area and the daytime area. I even had my own
room. Well, it was called a pantry, but it was the perfect size to cuddle up
with my thermal blanket and sleep soundly at night, I loved my room.
One day, when I was eight years old, I was swinging on
my tree swing when I saw some of Daddy’s friends carrying something up to our
house. I jumped up cheerfully to greet
them, but when I got close, I saw they were not carrying something, they were carrying someone. His friends brought him inside and
carried him into the sleeping area. He
didn’t look like my dad. He looked like
something broken.
“He’s been electrocuted!” Mom shouted when she saw his
melted flesh.
Daddy’s friend with a scruffy beard and work pants that
were torn at the knees mumbled, “I’m sorry, Lyvia,” as he reached over and
pulled her in for a comforting hug.
After that, Daddy was fired because he could no longer
perform the duties of an Electrotech. We couldn't afford our beautiful home,
besides as a former employee we were no longer eligible to live in Solair housing
anyway. Mom had to find work and being a
janitor at Sanitation Network was the only job she could find. We were
fortunate that she found a job so quickly. If she hadn’t we probably wouldn’t
have survived. Just a week after Daddy’s accident, we left Solair Coastlands
and moved to The Commons.
Poor Daddy, he never got better. The burns were so
severe. When they began festering, we knew we only had a short time left with
him, the infection was just too strong. It has been just mom and me for six
years now. Remembering Daddy is painful.
He was ripped from my life so quickly. I wish I could just lay here and
step back into my dream world, where Daddy was alive, I always had food in my
belly, and we were a happy little family, but I can’t. That’s not my life
anymore.
I sit up and shake my wrists and then roll my neck to break
myself out of this morning funk. I must force myself to get out of bed. I stand up, pick up my thin thermal blanket,
fold it and place it on the shelf. Then I lift my mat, roll it from bottom to
top into a tube shape and slide it between the wall and the shelf. The spot
where I sleep is also the spot where we set up our table for breakfast.
I trudge to the
window opposite of the one my mom is cooking at and remove my green shorts, purple
tank top, and underwear from our hanging clothes drying rack. I am glad that it
has been hot enough to dry my clothes thoroughly at night. I hate having to put
on slightly damp clothes in the morning.
I take my warm, crisp clothes, and head into the bathing
room. Placing my clothes on top of the tightly sealed toilet lid, I turn to
look into the amber tinted cracked mirror above the washbasin. My mousey brown
hair falls in matted curls over my slightly sunburnt shoulders. I wish I would
have remembered to braid my hair last night before bed. It would be much easier to deal with this
morning. My small comb tugs unhappily at my tangles, trying in vain to loosen
them.
The sounds of mom cooking breakfast in the window grill
makes my stomach growl and reminds me how long it has been since our late
afternoon dinner. We don’t have much, but mom has always made sure I have
something to eat. We have never been without food, even if we could only afford
a small portion of ProtoNutrien.
Every week mom sends me to buy a new power cell for the
grill and our rations of ProtoNutrien with her credits from work. There have
been a few times where our funds were so low that I had to work off the
remaining credits at the market. Luckily, Caade works there and has a little
pull with his superior. Unloading deliveries from the Common Rail was a hard
job! It took me several hours. Moving
the boxes out of the railcar wasn't the hardest part; trucking them two and a
half blocks was brutal. My back ached and my arms felt so weak afterward, but
we had a hot dinner that night. I was even able to surprise mom with an egg and
some wilted greens to add to our ProtoNutrien.
“Tess-love, you
sure are taking a long time in there,” Mom calls through the door, pulling me
out of my thoughts and back into our bathing room.
“Uh…what?” I respond stupidly. Have I really been just
staring at myself in the mirror for several minutes? Man, I feel so tired this
morning. I just can’t seem to break out
of this groggy fog. Frustrated, I give up tugging at my hair.
“Finish your bathing and come set up the table.”
“Sure thing Mom,” I clumsily answer. I fill the basin
with water from the hose, not too much though, because our rain barrel has to
last until the next rain. Otherwise we have to buy water from the market and it
is far too expensive to buy more than our drinking water. I dip my washcloth in
the slightly warm water, wash my freckled face, my armpits and the other
necessary areas, then I pull my green shorts over my straight, boy-like hips and
button them. They have lasted me well. This is the second summer that I have
worn them. I wonder if I will ever grow out of them.
“Hurry Tessa, ProtoNutrien is done and I am hungry!”
I quickly pull on my tank top and decide to finger comb
my matted hair into a bun. I’ll deal with that later. “Coming mom!” I yell as I rush out of the
bathing room and quickly grab the folding table, knock the legs into place,
flip it over and announce as if completing a race, “Done!”
“Chairs too, unless you want to stand to eat,” She
smiles.
Mom sets the table with a bowl of hot watery
ProtoNutrien porridge, our typical meal, a white flakey powder that consists of
a perfect balance of protein, carbohydrates, fat and essential vitamins. Its
flavor is so mild that it can be mixed with nearly anything. Ours is usually
very bland since it is most often mixed with only water. Mom turns with a
surprise in her open palm. She was able to afford an egg today. She hands me
one half of a hard-boiled egg. Oh, how I love eggs. I often long for smooth,
custardy eggs like we used to have in Solair Coastlands, but here it is a
delicacy that we can rarely afford.
“Oh, Mommy, Mommy, you bought an egg. Thank you, thank
you, thank you!” Nothing like a childhood favorite to make you act like a kid
again.
As I take my first luxurious bite of my egg, mom asks,
“What do you have planned today?”
On days that I am not in school, I like to stay out of
the house after breakfast so Mom can pull out my mat and sleep in peace. “Hang
out with Caade, like always.” I say with my mouth full. “He’s working at the
market until ten, then we’ll probably find some other kids to play with. No
real plan.”
“Tessa, you know I love Caade…” Mom begins hesitantly,
“…as if he was my own child…but…you, you both, need to understand how dangerous
his actions have been lately. People have started to whisper that Caade may be
a rebel. If those whispers get to the Patrolmen, he’s in big trouble. You two
need to stay safe, to lay low for a while. I don’t want you…”
I cut her off mid-sentence. I can’t let her believe
that my best friend is up to no good. “Mom, Caade is as much of a rebel as you
are!” I say with slightly too much
sass. I can tell I am walking a thin
line here but I can’t help myself from continuing. “You sneak across Inner
Newtopia every night! He got caught trying to climb over the wall and go into
The Wilds. They said he was going to sneak into Inner Newtopia, but he wasn’t,
he just wanted to explore the forest.”
A Patrolman chased Caade up the wall and pulled him
down, beat him, gave him a black eye and bruised ribs, before dragging him by
his long sun bleached hair back into The Commons. He was lucky he didn’t get in
more trouble. He could have been
arrested for this. He could have been sent to Reprogram.
“Besides, he needs me today,” I continue. “I could hear
his mom and dad fighting until late in the night last night. He’ll need someone
to talk to.”
Mom locks onto my eyes for longer than feels
comfortable. Her face is pained but her eyes seem like they are almost smiling.
Confused and afraid, I worry I have made her angry. Am I in trouble? Did I
cross the line? Please don't be mad at me! Please don’t ask me to stay home
today!
“Just be careful Tess-love. I worry about you. Having
people suspect you are a rebel is dangerous, very dangerous. Caade made a very
bad decision. The Patrolmen could have arrested him on the spot for trespassing
onto private property. Every bit of land between the wall and Inner Newtopia is
owned by Wilderness Conservation, and they are very protective of their land.
We are not allowed to enter The Wilds, ever!” Mom glances toward the wall that
separates our unit from Caade’s and unexpectedly changes the subject, “Do you
know what they fought about?”
I shake my head. I try hard not to listen when Nettie
and Randt fight. It can get pretty ugly
when he is drunk. I laid awake last
night plugging my ears and worrying about Caade.
Mom sighs heavily, “Tessa, can you clean up the
breakfast table and make the mat up for me while I go get ready for bed?” She
quickly gets up, grabs her nightgown off the hanging drying rack and disappears
into the bathing room. She must be really worried about Nettie; she has barely
eaten a thing.
I greedily shove her half of the egg into my mouth, and
say before swallowing, “You know Mom, for someone who was so hungry for
breakfast, you sure didn’t eat much. Are you feeling okay?” I swallow quickly
and then begin to gobble down her nearly full bowl of porridge.
A scream from outside stops me mid slurp and I run to
the window. Just then I see Nettie turn the street corner, I hear her scream “Lyvia,
help!” at the top of her lungs. Mom instantly slams open the bathing room door
to see what is wrong. She rushes out the front door to see Nettie running up
our walkway. Three Patrolmen with batons in hand turn the corner and quickly
overtake her. Together they tackle her right in front of our doorway.
As Nettie falls, she hits her head on a cement step and
begins bleeding profusely down the side of her face. Her cheeks quickly begin
swelling where they’ve hit her. The world around me fades into blackness and
all I see is the look of fear and pain on her nearly unrecognizable wet crimson
face.
I don’t remember when I walked outside or fell to the
ground, but I am on the front stoop and so is my mother. She is kneeling beside
me crying and reaching out for her friend, while keeping a safe distance so the
Patrolmen don’t turn their attack onto her for interfering.
Suddenly, Mom realizes that I have seen every bit of
this right along with her. With a gasp, she wraps her arms around my head
pulling me in close, trying to keep me from seeing the brutality unfolding
steps outside of our home. I give in to her embrace but pull her hand away from
my eyes and turn toward the woman crumpled in a pool of blood with giant ogres
attacking her. The Patrolmen are rough, way too rough for a petite and
undernourished woman, especially an innocent one!
She has to be
innocent!
As they pull her broken, beaten body up off the
pavement to arrest her and carry her away, she looks back at my mom with tears
streaking down her bloody face and mumbles, “Take care of him…Tell him I love
him…I love him.” Her head rolls down, she slumps forward and gives into her
captors.
No comments:
Post a Comment