Inspiration #9

My grandmother remembers when they still had deliveries by people, right to where you lived, and it was provided by a nationwide system.  Every person agreed to pay what they could once a year in exchange for big projects and services like that, which they could never make work on their own.  Incredible.

Inspired by first line of "Lieserl" by Karen Joy Fowler: "Einstein received the first letter in the afternoon post."

Inspiration #3

Mutants aren't nearly as interesting or as much fun as movies have led people to believe.  Amil dropped a coin he could ill afford to give away into a beggar's cup because the beggar had a dog.  He wasn't proud of himself, but while he could brush off pain to humans, pain to animals was intolerable.  The beggar's too-thick tongue didn't allow him to speak, so he had apparently trained his dog to tap a paw on a scrap of cardboard upon which was scrawled, "THANK YOU" in thin, crooked hand.

The mutant beggar made Amil think back to mutant superheroes; while tragic and misunderstood they were still heroes with powers, each more dramatic or frightening than the last.  Real mutants had twisted DNA, either before or after birth, that didn't cause them to be super-human; they became less desirable as human.  Mutants' DNA twisted and turned from humanity, and humanity, abhorred, turned from them.

Inspired by "The Healer" by Aimee Bender.  "There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice."

Pageant Question: Before you, there were Baby Boomers and Generation X. How do you think history will remember your generation?

The first lesson to learn is that humans never learn their lessons.

The world we knew and loved, cherished and abused, lived in and died in, was destroyed, beginning long before we noticed we were destroying it.  Humans mentioned "the tipping point" over and over for decades, but hadn't realized we passed that point before the words were ever mentioned in conjunction with humanity's destruction.

But I digress.  In the moment I'd like to describe, I was in a food line, hoping to get to the front before they slammed the gates shut.  My mother told me that back in the day, she heard about food lines like this in Russia, where they waited hours and hours for a lousy loaf of bread.  She had wondered how it had come to this in the United States.  I hoped to get that bread.

On this day, I was alone as my mother had died about ten years ago.  God, ten years?  Time slips, though the days are the same.  I had no other living relatives, as far as I knew.  Cholera took my mother.  She laughed as she died; laughing that cholera, a disease she associated with slums in India, would kill her.  "Love in the age of cholera," she said.  "I love you," she said.  That was all.

I had been in this line for three hours when, at least thirty people ahead of me, they slammed down the gates.  It had been brewing for a long time, but this was the start of the worst riot in memory.  Even without television or internet to spread the news, the news spread, and the whole country rioted.  Hell, maybe even the whole world--what was left of it.

365

Tyra had left their group ages ago, so long that they had just about stopped wondering what had happened to her.  The relief of her being gone had been enough for them to discuss for days, but days to weeks to however long it had been meant the stories about her had run their courses.  Once in a while, Jen might snipe at Baxter, or, perhaps, Ross would put on a superior air, and the others would call a "Tyra" to diffuse the situation.  Nobody wanted to be a Tyra.  Though she had been tiring, annoying, and even dangerous, they still felt a sense of guilt when they found her body lodged under a cement pipe outside a crumbling, half-completed construction.

310

I dream of disaster.

Every night I have dreamed of disaster, global, catastrophic, unavoidable.  Invariably, the military is deployed, but even from my puny vantage point on the ground, I can see that it will be futile.  The people escaping with belongings stuffed into cars is also futile.  Destruction will be complete.

I wake to my alarm's soft chimes, increasing in volume if I ignore the call to the waking world.  It is hard to wake, and I struggle to the surface, still tired.

300

Chara and Boyd basked in the glory of northern summer as they hiked the nearly hidden paths of the Great North Woods.  They had been traveling together for nearly ten years, though the first two were simply as friends in a Gathering.  That particular Gathering had many problems, and Chara in particular had been feeling increasingly troubled.

Gatherings were meant to keep people safe, and there were many that shifted and morphed and quite often disappeared.  There were some that had been around for so many years that they had come up with rules and titles within their Gatherings and often became exclusive, self-important, and sometimes downright dangerous.  Chara was sensing that from the Rhee Gathering, of which she had been a member for a decade before Boyd joined.

Boyd was in his own, very small Gathering, but it was not affording the kind of protection or quality that he needed, so he left for the much larger Rhee.  Chara and Boyd found each other there and formed a quick bond sensed by the leader of the Rhee who was, unfortunately, Chara's betrothed.

Now, Chara and Boyd travelled alone.  Dangerous, but undeniably their best decision yet.