Michael Soll - Scorched

I thought about the world that once was. Was it just one big Newbury? One Nanash? One Hive? Was it an amalgamation of all three? I dream of going above, but I do not wish to go back to what once was. I do not wish to see the cruelty that existed before my time. Bryan shakes another’s hand and I wonder, did the Sun congratulate itself when it scorched the surface and every lingering civilization?

There was a time when people had greater weapons than swords and spikes, but what’s the point of such ways to kill people when you have no need to kill? Would Newburyians have swords if Nanash did not exist? If Kaolin and I made a new Hive, would we build our own swords?

I continued to push through the crowd and my thoughts when I finally reached Kaolin and James. She embraced me and squeezed tightly as James watched with a deep resentment in his eyes.

“The big hero,” he said indifferently as his eyes spoke differently.

“No. You’re the hero,” I replied. “You saved Kaolin from the massacre.”

“That’s right. I would’ve rescued you too, but you looked a lot like a NaNa.”

“Well, looks can be deceiving. Or so I’m told.”

“Yes, they can be.” He smiled and patted me on the back. “Let’s celebrate!”

He took me by the hand, firm and powerful and pulled me over to a lady who stood before a variety of alcoholic beverages.

“What can I get you?”

“A bottle of wine!”

The two of them shared a laugh and we all began drinking… from a glass of course. From the bottle would be uncivilized.

Everything became hazy as the world became blurry. James became funnier and the music became better.

I grasped Kaolin and kissed her. I didn’t care that James was watching or all of Newbury. I was impervious to their thoughts.

She laid her head against mine. “We need to leave,” she said. “I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want the eyes on me, I don’t want the chains around my throat.”

“What do you want?” I asked, ready to give her anything.

“Unfiltered air. Unfiltered ideas. I want to leave.”

I nodded. “I’ll take you wherever you want. Whether the surface or the center of the Earth. As long as you’re beside me.”

“I want the surface. Tomorrow. Before they figure a way to separate us again.”

I smiled. “Done.”

How many times had my thoughts been sparked in another’s mind before I ever considered them? How many conversations had been spoken and uttered above the ground years before they were extinguished, resurfaced beneath the surface within me? Is there such a truth as new or fresh or novel in a world with incalculable moments with innumerable members with brains and voices of their own? Have my yearnings been yearned by many before? Will my desires be desired by my descendents deep in the future?

I am Spec. There will never be another me. There will be similar iterations, but there will not and cannot be another Spec. There is only one Kaolin and only one Valasca. The one Cotta died with Cotta…

But was there truly only one Cotta? Was he only one? Was he a singular voice and presence? I remember the young Cotta, before he ever chipped into the dirt with his ax. I remember the Cotta, covered in filth, tunneling through to the Old Hive. I remember the Cotta dripping with water, cleansed of the soil and past. The Cotta entranced by Newbury and the one reborn in Nanash. He was a copy of himself, skewed and changed by the world. He moved like the river that almost brought my death.

I am Spec. Tomorrow I will be as well, but tomorrow I will be different. Yesterday I was different, but I was Spec. Before I left the hive, I was a Spec who dreamt of the surface and nothing else. And now, I dream of Kaolin. I am different, and just like the river, I slowly alter the world around me. If it weren’t for me, Cotta would be alive. Would Joey be alive? Would Newbury be alive? How can I, nothing more than a grain of dirt have such an impact on a world made of infinite grains?

It was night and I was back in the Mayor’s house, in Joey’s unaltered room, sleeping in the bed beside a memory that would not vanish. Kaolin was back in her home, being repressed and suppressed, but it would be for the last time. I thought about destiny, a concept introduced to me on my journey, the idea that events which have happened could only happen. That there is one future and it has already been decided. The idea that Cotta and Joey needed to die because they were to die. Destiny was an invisible man writing my story, and I could do nothing but observe it. All of my thoughts were his thoughts and I was forced to live them. He introduced the solar flare to our planet and forced me out of the hive and willed the knife into Cotta. He controlled the all that was. But I refused to believe it. I refused to believe any of it, even if it was his will making me refuse. I believed I had control over my own choices and decided my own fate. And since I believed it, it was fact.

I arose from the bed and sunk downstairs where the Mayor sat again, like he had so many times before. He picked at the tip of an ancient knife, once used in a battle on the surface long ago. He held it firmly in his hand as my shadow cast across him.

“The Hero of Newbury!”

I watched him from afar. I didn’t say a word because I did not know what to say. I had no words to say.

“Take a seat.”

I stood for a moment, watching him glare into my eyes. He pointed at me with the knife and repeated, “Take a seat.”

So I sat, across from the man with the weapon.

“You know what my father said to me the day that he died? Of course you don’t, how could you? Let me rephrase that. Would you like to hear what my father told me?”

He picked at his nails with the tip of the knife, scratching the underbelly, freeing his fingers from grime.

“Yes.”

“He said to me, in his raspy voice, because he was manly, you see. And manly men have raspy voices. I couldn’t look up to the man if he squeaked like a mouse. You don’t know what a mouse is, do you? You don’t know a lot of things. My father would love you — you embody everything he told me the morning he died. He said, ‘Son,’ in that raspy voice of his, remember? ‘Son, live every day as if it were your first.’ Not last, not like that saying you hear everybody say. No, he said ‘Son, live every day as if it were your first.’ I always wondered, ‘how do I do that?’ But then, how could I live every day as if it were my last? How do I know what my last day would be like? If it were like my father’s, I would be living every day immobile in bed, sick and beleaguered. But now, I’m supposed to live it as if it were my first. See the world with eyes wide open, full of hope and mystery. But how does one infuse mystery in a story read time and time again?”

He moved the edge of the knife from beneath the nails to his tip, shaving small slivers off as he spoke.

“How do I see anew that with which has already been seen? But you do. You do, Spec. Because you’re a child. You were born alone and only grew when my son saved you. We gave you eyes and ears and showed you what life should be and you lived, by God you lived! And now look at you. Time has passed and yet, every day is still your first. And here I am, glued to my chair with a glass in my hand, like the day before and the day before and before that. Living my last day on repeat. Have you heard that ignorance is bliss?”

“I heard it before, spoken by a gleeful child who repeated the words but had no sense of its meaning.”

“Well, it’s true. No child is born unhappy. Oh, they cry. They cry a lot, but they don’t know sadness. They just know need and want, and for a child, they are one in the same. But the child is ignorant. Because the child has no fear because it knows no fear. It does not understand the concept of death. It does not understand the concept of losing something it needs. No, that’s taught. That’s taught by the people who control whether that child gets what it needs or doesn’t. Fear is infused by civilization. So to live every day as your first is to live without the fear that is learned thereafter.”