Stripes and Solids

Stripes and Solids


It's not as though it requires repeating, but all children are born with stripes and most of them manage to hold onto them throughout their childhood.  Nobody pays much attention as they walk, run, and skip, arm in arm down the street, giggling, like kids do.  It's seems so natural. 

It's not until adolescence, as the stripes begin to fade and they look more like than unlike their parents that the troubles begin.  No longer are kids attracted to the wholesome stripes of their brethren, but begin to become enamored of the sinister solid skin of a single hue and a monotone consistency.  It would be fine if all children faded to solid at the same rate, and at the same time, but no, it couldn't be that simple.  Some change earlier than others, and due to their similarity to most of the cool elders, they begin to tease and taunt the kids who lag behind.  They can be brutal.  Some stripeys never make it to adulthood, either dying at their own hands or the hands of others.

As the children age into later adolescence, it's easy to spot the lines of anxiety creep across their parent's faces only to later be displaced by the confused anxious marks across the child's own striped face.  In earlier times, the striped children would have been whisked off to one of the homes for striped people.  If they were lucky enough to fade to solid before too long, they could rejoin normal society, if not, well, they had to stay put.

It wasn't until somebody discovered the genetic basis of persistent stripes that striped people could live outside some type of asylum.  The discovery that the mitochondria caused the stripes was not well received.  Another affliction apparently inherited from one's mother was testily denied for decades.  Women would just not accept the science or the blame. 

It was finally proven when they developed a rat-model of stripiness.  Once they'd done that, it was a simple matter to remove the mitochondria and see what happened.  Almost immediately the stripes faded, but just as the scientist began to celebrate their discovery, the rats died.  The poor little things just rolled over on their backs, heaved a last sigh and exploded.  There was something about removing the mitochondria that caused the rats to combust.

In order to query if the same thing happened to people, anonymous striped people donated cells to the Mitochondrial Extraction Peace Project or MEPP for short. The cells were cloned and allowed to grow.  Unfortunately, an overly zealous scientist thought they could save funds by doing a mass extraction from several hundred cells.  The subsequent explosion practically leveled the entire MEPP lab.  And aside from maiming several of the scientists, it contaminated two of them.  They regained their stripes.  It was the first known transmission of stripiness.  That was not good.

Apparently some of the mitochondrial DNA escaped through the ventilation system and contaminated the nursery too.  It was a disaster.  Not only were the babies striped, but the stripes were intensified.  Several developed a plaid-look with overlapping stripes. That was the end of mitochondrial extractions and the beginning of forced striped colonies.  If you didn't fade to solid by eighteen years of age, federal laws allowed you to be colonized.  Not that anyone managed to hang out at home until they were eighteen. Kids had their birth certificates forged and were sent off at the age of ten and sometimes less.  For some reason, solid people were afraid striped people would become terrorists and explode on them.  How silly, as though anyone would self-extract their mitochondria just to blow up on people.  It wasn't as though mitochondrial extraction could be done at the curbside. Could it?

For several reasons, the colonies didn't last very long.  One, some people faded to solid after eighteen years of age and sued to be released from the other stripeys, and two, children of striped people didn't necessarily stay striped like their parents.  The Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional to lock them in colonies just because their parents were striped.  Later on, they decided it was unconstitutional to lock minority-striped people up just because the majority was afraid of them; after all, striped people hadn't committed any crimes warranting exclusionary colonization.  Still, nobody wanted a potential explosive in their neighborhood; hence, striped ghettos became a matter of course.  Stripeys would self-segregate just to have some peace of mind and hang out with people who weren't scared to death of them.

Besides, everybody knows striped people only like to hang out with other striped people, anyway.  Mixing stripes and solids is somehow unfashionable and unseemly.  Everybody knows that.  At least all normal people know that.  There were and always will be the abnormal.

Segregation continued happily on for many years and then some avant-garde striped people began to tire of ghetto life and left to live amongst solids, at least, in those progressive cities where they were allowed.

We thought the stripes had faded for our family until my older brother came home from college on Christmas and decided to come out of the dark as a striped person.  He said it was something he discovered in college.  It was awful.  Christmas is bad enough with all the ugly clothes, stupid repetitious singing and stupid presents, but to bring up being striped during Christmas was like choosing the Pope out of a lineup of saintly beings and just slapping the dog-pee out of him.

I didn't know what to say.  The turkey got stuck in my throat and I had to gulp down my soda.  I couldn't believe it.  Nobody joked about such things, not even the cable comedy channel.  My mom was in the middle of a dainty silent sip of her wine while trying to surreptitiously moisturize the turkey.  When he said it, she just sprayed the entire table with wine and turkey juice.  I wasn't sure which was more mortifying, what she'd just done or what my brother had just said.  Mom was speechless as she dabbled up the wine stains and tried to wipe the turkey juice off our faces with a spit-cloth.  Mom being silent was a real rarity around our house.  As dry as my mouth was, I don't know where she got any spit.

Since no one had said anything, eaten anything, or bothered to blink, my brother was taking a deep breath and preparing to repeat him-self when Grandma silenced him with a glare that could evaporate jello.  Nobody messed with Grandma.  She was evil, and crazy.  She had skulls and crossed-bones notched in her cane, and the cane was made of metal.  We thought they represented all the missing, rude, out-of-turn speakers Grandma had encountered during her many alien years surveying the planet.

Since my stomach was in knots and Mom had sprayed all the food anyway, I asked to be excused.  I tried to catch my brother's eye to follow me out, but he seemed determined to sit there and weather the storm like he had something to prove.  I wasn't sure anyone had any storm in them.  My dad looked like he'd been stabbed.  My mother was looking off to the side as though she'd done something wrong like fart in church, and Grandma, well; she kept chewing like she had real teeth.  It was scary.  I made my escape.  I looked over at my brother and tried to capture an image of what he looked like, since I might never see him again.  There were some awfully sharp utensils on that table.  People had disappeared from our family before, or so I'd been told.  My Dad always said he made us and he could make another one that looked just like us.  He could be scary sometimes.  I always thought he had a crappy sense of humor, but Mom always laughed.

Some of my friends had relatives who were striped, though they only whispered the details to a few choice friends.  It was not something you talked about and still expected to be invited to all the right parties.  Nobody had any friends who were striped and we didn't know any who lived in our town.  Rumor had it they always left and went to the big city and lived in striped ghettos.  The stress and expense of bronzing the stripes to solid skin was exhausting.  The only striped people we'd seen were on television, since they tended to be actors and involved in the arts and fashion where all the freaks were.

I wondered out loud if my brother was making it all up.  There were those people, the wannabees; who tattooed themselves with stripes, and we were told, there were people who tattooed themselves solid so they could pass for normal.  I couldn't imagine doing any of it, but there it was anyway.  There were also apparently federal agents who were genetically altered so they could infiltrate striped ghettos, just in case they were planning terrorist acts.  The agents were never heard from again, though. At least, that was the rumor.  We were told the government didn't do that anymore, but why would they expect anyone to believe that?

Our city was one of the few cities that voted to order the city department of health to monitor the water for levels of sposgine.  Sposgine was a chemical they used to put in our water to make kid's teeth a few shades whiter.  If used during the later years, after your permanent teeth came in, it was okay for most kids.  Unfortunately, it had the ability to expose stripeys earlier than would naturally have occurred.  It may have even created some stripeys, but nobody would touch that.  It took years and a couple civil rights marches to have it removed from the water.  We became a "Don't drink, don't tell" town.  It was the only way to stop the exodus of striped children.  Our town was shrinking and becoming dominated by a bunch of wrinkled old solids.  Even back then, it was fairly clear we needed stripeys.  We just figured we didn't need to see them.

The health department commissioner wanted to make us an "opt out" town because he felt it was more important for the kids to have white teeth than anything else, and besides, he felt we needed to know how many striped people we had.  He appeared pretty persuasive and might have won out except one day while he was giving a speech at the elementary school, somebody gave him a glass of sposgine and he promptly became striped.  Nobody knew he had been drinking bottled sposgine-free water.  Our stripey-loving Mayor fired the commissioner, and then the commissioner's wife divorced him for this really ugly, wealthy, solid, construction worker.  Now people are watching their children, waiting to see if they stay striped or turn to solids.  The commissioner of health had to leave town since nobody liked him anyway and now no one trusted him.  Rumor has it he lives in a striped people ghetto somewhere outside the city.

The CCC came to our town and wanted to hold tent revivals where they would give people sposgine water as a test of faith.  Luckily we were little kids at the time and our parents didn't believe in large gatherings of whacky people, at least, that's what they said.  The revival was a bust, anyway.  Nobody went.  Nobody wanted to have their faith tested.  The press didn't even go over there.  They filmed the empty tent from across the street and behind a clear plastic police barricade with officers smeared with waterproof gel, and wearing goggles, masks and helmets.  The CCC minister was known for throwing sposgine water at people and nobody wanted to risk being splashed and out-striped on the air.

I knew all of this because my parents collected all the articles and I had found them in some books around the house.  I decided to do a project on it in high school. 

As I sat in my room waiting for Armageddon downstairs, I began to think back if there were any clues about my brother.  I couldn't think of any.  He seemed a perfect solid, quarterback of the football team, sprinter for the track team, forward guard for the basketball team, and of course, class president and chief editor of the school newspaper.  He didn't hang around with any weird people and since we didn't know any striped people, none of those either.  He did have a tendency to stand up for little guys, but I just thought that was cool. 

Now he was a stripey.  How weird?  As I thought about it, maybe I was a stripey too.  Somehow that sounded right, so I ran to look in the bathroom mirror to see if I looked any different.  As I stood there staring at myself, rolling my eyes up and down in my head, sticking out my tongue, checking my gums and teeth, it suddenly dawned to me.  My brother wasn't striped.  I sat across from him and he was as solid as I am.  What was I thinking?  Why was I freaking out?  Why was anybody freaking out?  I stood there staring at myself, and then I thought I heard laughter coming through the bathroom ventilator.  Maybe I didn't.  Maybe it was a muffled scream and they were actually killing him for pulling such a sick joke.  I stood there for a minute or two not knowing what to do.  Next, I jumped from one leg to the other.  I do that sometimes when I'm nervous.  Then, I bolted out of bathroom and leapt down the stairs, taking them three at a time.  What was I doing, going to his aid?  Grandma could take me out.  Just as I rounded the corner, fully prepared to see blood and mayhem, I stopped cold.  I was too out of breath to scream.  I couldn't believe it.  They were all giggling and laughing, pointing at one another, and just hysterical.  And they were all striped, every single one of them.  And I can tell stripes from freckles, I'd seen it on TV.

They all stopped when they saw me and then it seemed like their stripes were fading, right before my eyes.  I'd never seen that before and I blinked really hard and stared.  Then I had to sit down on the floor.  I thought I was going to pass out.  I did pass out. 

When I awoke they were all sitting around me, and my mom was fanning me with one of the wine-stained napkins.  They all still had those smiles on their faces.  Maybe they had too much to drink?  Maybe I imagined what I saw?  I didn't know if I was relieved or calmly getting ready to pass out again.  I sat up and looked around.  The room was no longer spinning so I stood up.  That was a mistake.  I had to sit down again.  The smiles were now gone and looks of concern went from face to solid face.  Then the smiles came back again.  Then they started laughing.  Nobody said a word.  Had they all just lost their minds?  I knew Grandma juggled a few eggs and was short of a dozen, but I thought everyone else was sane.  Maybe it was something in the food or could it be they smoked something while I was upstairs?  What was I doing on the floor and why did I have spit on my face?


To be continued...