By Lauren
This is another short story I recently entered in a writing competition.
There was no point looking at the sky, Xander knew that. There was nothing to see, only endless beigey-orange clouds. In some of the older records – the copies of the few original records that survived the Fallout – there are mentions of it being blue… blue? How could the sky be blue? Blue was the colour of rare gems, of eyes, the occasional shell… not the sky. These records also said the clouds used to be white. Sometimes he wondered if the old records were all make believe, because the idea of white clouds was just ridiculous.
Regardless, he still looked at the sky. Every evening, when the beigey-orange sky went to pinkey-orange, he’d looked up at the sky. Occasionally, there’d be a glimpse of darkness. It was always small, a barely visible trace, but that glimpse of darkness was depthless, a tiny spot of what must be the sky beyond the clouds, with more hints and mysteries and angles than the oldest of the old records.
The Old Records also said the night sky used to have these little spots of light, Xander had written a paper on them in second school. They were called Tars and apparently, they filled the darkness. The record he’d read said that “they lit it up in tiny splashes of pure light, not to destroy the shadows of the night sky, but to complement them” but another record had described them as “A dark, thick flammable liquid”. Xander had never seen a Tar, nor had anyone he knew, they were little more than a myth… so was most of the Old World though.
No-one knew what happened to the Old World, or the Old People, but everyone assumed they must’ve been primitive because the Fallout had been their fault… and they’d thought the earth was round, no-one in their right mind thought that anymore.
Xander often found his thoughts wandering to the Old People, and today was no different as he leant against the fence and watched the donkeys pull a plough around the field. The Old People and Fila, he decided, were where his thoughts were at most.
Fila was Xander’s neighbour, the pretty girl he could now see laughing as she fed her chickens with her brother, Aden. Fila always seemed to be laughing, laughing or drawing some massive, complicated machine she’d read about in one of the Old Records. There was this one called a tractor which Fila had claimed helped you do farm work in almost half the time.
When she was done with the chickens, Fila turned and saw Xander, giving him the opportunity to give her a smile and a small wave, Fila waved back and came bouncing over, climbing the fence next to him.
“Hia!” she said, “Watcha doin’?” – Fila was the only person he knew that refused to pronounce her words properly, “This way’s more fun!” she’d say whenever someone brought it up.
“Ploughing,” Xander said, gesturing to the donkeys.
“Wouldn’t it be better if we could recreate one of the Old People machines? I read about one the other day that didn’t need donkeys to pull it at all!” she said.
“It would be better, if only you could come up with a way to make it possible,” said Xander.
Fila sighed, “Sometimes I wish I could speak to one of the Old People, I would learn so much! Some of their machines would make the world so much more interesting!”
“I’m not really interested in the world,” admitted Xander, “I’m more interested in what’s beyond.”
“What do you mean?” asked Fila
“I mean what’s up there,” he said, pointing to the beige-coloured clouds, “Beyond the clouds.”
“The Old People had a machine for going up there too, it was called a Rocket, but I don’t know if it’d be very interesting, the Sun and Moon and Tars are mostly gone now, you’d probably just find more clouds.”
Xander shook his head, “I think they’re all still there,” he said, “I think they’re not fading, just behind the clouds.”
“Why do you think that?”
“How often do you look at the sky?”
“Not often, it’s sorta boring.”
“Come back here tonight and I’ll show you why I think that.”
...
That night, Xander sat shivering on the fence where Fila had been that morning, waiting for her. Cold was good, he decided, normally it meant the clouds were thinner and more of the darkness was visible. He looked up at the sky, it was towards the end of the pinkey-beige stage and was getting more and more dark beige. While he was looking up, Fila arrived and got up on the fence next to him.
“I brought a blanket,” she said, “I didn’t know how long we’d be here and I thought it would be cold.”
Xander looked at her, in the darker light her eyes seemed to shine brighter, and for a second he thought he might understand what it was like to experience a Tar.
“Look up,” he said, pointing, “Look for the patches of darkness, when you see them, it doesn’t look like they’re being faded out by the clouds, it looks like the clouds are covering them, it looks like there could be a whole other sky up there.”
Xander and Fila sat there, the blanket wrapped around them, sitting close together for warmth, and searched the beige sky for the depthless darkness beyond.
“There!” she said, pointing, “There, I see it! Is that it?”
Xander looked and sure enough, there was a little patch of darkness
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, “Like staring into some never-ending cave of mysteries.”
“I think most people would be scared of it,” said Fila, “People are generally scared of what they don’t understand.”
“The Old People weren’t,” said Xander.
“No, they weren’t,” she agreed.
Suddenly, almost too quickly to comprehend, a tiny streak of beautiful light streaked across the darkness.
“Did you see that?” asked Fila, “Did you see that Xander, or did I imagine it?”
“I saw it,” he said, breathless. It had been so small, so beautiful.
“Now that… that was beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful,” said Xander, without thinking.
Fila blushed, “Thank you,” she said, then turned and kissed him. And it was just as beautiful, just as unexpected as that tiny flash of light.
“Scintilla!” said Fila, suddenly
“What?” asked Xander
“Scintilla. I just remembered, I was looking through one of those old records, one with all the words.”
“A Dictator?” he asked, dictators were records used to find the meaning of words.
“Yeah, a Dictator. Anyway, I found this word, Scintilla.”
“What does it mean?”
Fila pulled out a small record… a copy of a pocket dictator
“Scintilla,” she read, “A tiny, brilliant flash or spark; a small thing; a barely-visible trace.”
Scintilla, what a beautiful, perfect word. Maybe the flash they’d seen had been a Tar.
Comentários