a race of children

Six years ago we ran.

The coasts were emptied. We ran into the jungle, into thick trees and restless nights. We ran into the mountains, into dusty caves and darkness in the daytime. We ran until we hit hard stone, and then we stopped to breathe.

Our land grew thick and dark. The grasses were rising. This was a new quiet.

High on the edges of cliffs, we laughed at the irony. We sat, legs hanging into the space, the thousand foot drop an old threat, and watched strangers walk across the sand. Far below, specks in the white. From up here, in the tight silence, we could see everything.

We strained to hear their voices, the voices of men, voices we could not remember. We built a story for each with imaginations grown wild. But we wondered why they had come. We watched for ten days until one morning the shore was blank again, their long, swift boats swallowed into the sun, their voices into memory.

We ran down, tearing through knotted briars and thickets, stumbling across mossy rocks, skidding down muddy slopes, and burst into the wide open beach. Fear hit hard. And then, a terrible heaviness inside our gut; one by one we dropped to the ground. We shriveled up inside our skin, pressed ourselves into the hot sand, sucked in air past a rough spot in our throats, staring straight back at that sun. Don’t blink. A stinging in the corners of our eyes. We cannot last this way. We begin to realize that we would be forgotten. The winds would shift at night, and by morning our traces would be completely smudged out.

This is a rare silence. Comforting only in its deadly permanence.

We keep waking. A moment in darkness, a moment in light. We keep staring. Everywhere we look, the sun stamps our vision.

Evelyn dies and we do not mourn.

            She has taken the blue with her, taken the wind, taken the rivers. The black spines of trees are stiff. The water does not run. It sits so still, cradling dark reflections.  If I had not seen her fall, I would have known by this stillness. Everything is slowing, slowing to a stop, and soon it will not be able to pick itself up again.

Leo and Drake lift her and carry her into the cave, the sun jumping and sliding off her limbs. The smaller ones hurry beneath her, palms up, as if to catch her if she suddenly crumbled. Their palms are filthy, cuts encrusted with mud. Their faces are blackened from endless nights in the dirt. They disappear into the dark of the cave, and burst out again, eyes wildly clear. They find a childlike thrill in death. They will never be old enough to understand.

    Evelyn is buried with the others, slowly surrendering themselves to earth’s roots. My family, too young to die. All their graves unmarked.

We are a race of children.

Condemned to childhood, desperately afraid of growing up. Some of us remember how this began, most were not born.

    The sickness hit our livestock. It sprang on the coast, so we blamed the islanders. Sent men with fire, burnt their lands. But it was not the fires that killed them. Something else had caused the massacre.



    Simon glances at me, and out at the Northern Shore. I know where he’s staring. There’s a place where the water curls in slimy waves over the pebbles, where the yellow sand is speckled with ashes, and abandoned fires are constantly being relit.

 

6 years ago, the sickness hit our livestock.

It sprang on the coasts, at the ports, so we blamed the islanders,

sent men with fire and burned their land.

But it was not the fires that had killed them.

Something else had caused the massacre.

The wind has crept back into the mountains. The spines of trees are stiff. The lakes are still, cradling dark reflections. Everything is slowing, slowing to a stop, and soon it will not be able to pick itself up again.