Catastrophe Jones

They came for us in the night.

Two days in, and we were low on resources, terrified, running blind. We didn’t know where the children went, where they were headed, what we would find. We had all left, going on what we assumed was the most likely path they’d gone, but we had seem no trace of them, no fallen seed, no scrap of cloth or sandal, no blood or footprint in the dust.

Nothing at all.

We bunked down in the dirt, under the starless dome of grey, huddled to one another to stay warm, some of us more wretched than others.

We woke, torn from one another’s hands, fire at our wrists, our throat.  We could not breathe to scream. We could not clench our fists to pull the shackles from our flesh. All we could smell was smoke and fire. All we could taste was ash.

We saw them come up from the ground, from the chasms in the earth that mirrored that one scar in the sky from whence our creature fell. The creature we saw mocked in these forms. Where its wings shone, these had gouged wounds in their shoulders, as though they had torn their own wings free. Where it had music in its voice, these had the discordant screams of every heart ever broken.

We could hear our own selves, wailing for our lost children, mocked within the throats of the things that pulled us away from one another, so we could not even find solace in being together.

They surrounded us, panting, snarling, teeth bared; one of them pinned Ilen, while another fell upon Riesa.  Ilen began to scream, and the beasts seemed to grow in size, to become enormous, to feed and feast upon the sound of horror.

They painted the rocks with Ilen, and the dust became mud where we panicked, more and more of us falling to the giants, the monstrous, raging things that came for us in the dark, tore into us to find the secret heart of our fears, and lay it bare, beating and bleeding. Ilen fell, and another, and another, and another. We broke and bled and begged; we cursed the Captain, cursed our children, cursed ourselves.

Riesa, as she lay against the stonegrass, could think of only one thing. She reached up a hand and touched the monstrous face of the beast that was drinking away her life through its clawed, burning hands. She did not curse, she did not scream, she did not plead.

She sang.

If the Captain had been worried before, at the beginnings of Ilen’s questioning of his rule, he was now unnerved. Enim’s disappearance caused an outright panic. The children, gone off to scavenge as they had for months now, were no more or less in danger than they had been any other morning, but we who now considered ourselves their parents wailed and screamed for them, as though Enim being missing was an omen of their destruction.

We went to him, ranting and raving, and no amount of his words would quiet the terror we felt, within the very bones of us, each and every one of us made raw by the leaving, as though the separation from them was a loss we could not bear without screaming, tearing at our clothes.

He tried to reason with us, tried to calm us, tried to cajole and soothe and gently shelter us from our own fears. The Captain tried his best, but we were misery made flesh, and we set out to go find them, find the children, bring them back. Now.

We left Songfall, left the camp, left the Captain and the creature behind. Only Luroteo stayed; he would not leave the creature, nor the Captain.

We stumbled out into the night, starving for our children, hungry for knowing where they were, and if they were safe.

We left the home we created behind, and set forth into the ash and dust and rock, up over the hill, and lost sight of the pool, Luroteo standing vigil, and the garden of growing things.

We did not sing.

No one kept track of the days after the world ended. They had started to, but then one day bled into the next somewhat easily. No one really kept track of the days after we managed to collect, and stick together. No one even really kept track of the days after Songfall was cleared, but once we began to live, to dare to thrive, we began to mark time again.

In this way, we saw the children grow, like weeds, and yet still so small.  We saw our garden grow, and our birds get fat with eggs and then some of our eggs became birds, and on and on the cycle went.  Days and nights grew hotter, rather than colder, as if the earth were not merely ash, but ash atop a smoldering coal, slowly coming back to life from the wind’s breath.

In those days, tempers occasionally ran high; wanting to survive at times kept many fights in check, but now that we had more under our control, we seemed to find reasons to argue, where before it wouldn’t have mattered.  Things grew even more tense as, along with the slow flourishing of our lives under the Captain’s rule, couples formed within our grouping — families. There was no template for who grouped with whom; no one cared about what made a family, only that there was enough food and shelter for those involved. When several of the women grew round, all of us sang and celebrated; more children meant more mouths to feed, but it was a sign that we were not yet defeated.

We felt on the rise, even after all that had happened to us. We felt whole.

We felt strong.

It was only when the first one was born we realized we still did not understand all there was to know about this new world, this place in which we’d found ourselves.  The child came into the world as most children do, messily and screaming. A little girl, pink and shaking and squalling, was named Enim, and laid to its mother’s breast. We breathed a collective sigh of joy and relief.

The next morning, many of us awoke to the sound of shrill, awful screams, the sort that had filled the air when the world collapsed, when the sky was smoke and fire and the ground was ash and blood.

The children were gone to do their morning’s work, but Enim was gone, as well.