April Earnest Day

Today is April 31. Now you might say “There is no April 31st!” And one-hundred and twenty years ago, you would have been right. Way back then, April ended on the 30th. And April 1st was called April Fools Day, a day for jokes, pranks, and all manner of fun.

But then one dumb joke ruined the world, so we don’t have April 1st anymore. We don’t have a day for fools and fooling. Now April starts on the 2nd and ends on the 31st to keep years the proper length.

And April 31st is the opposite of what April 1st used to be. It’s a day without laughter or silliness, a day where jokes are forbidden. It’s the day where small pranks earn big punishments. It’s the day when we remember how the world used to be. We call it April Earnest Day.

On previous Earnest Days, my parents kept me inside so I wouldn’t make anyone laugh (I have a reputation.) But on this April 31st, they’re sending me out to greet everyone in town.

“No jokes today, my precious Zuri,” my mom just told me. “You could be punished. They could send you to the top of the plastic mountain to spend the rest of the day. You’d get pink splinters all over you. You’d be in pain for a week.”

Mom’s been warning me about potential punishments all week. I’m their wittiest child, so sending me out alone on April Earnest Day is a risk. But they want to teach me an important lesson about self control. Yesterday she made me promise to stay solemn: “I solemnly swear to repress my inner comedian and make no one laugh,” I said with hand on heart, “not even Ajani who laughs at everything.” To which mom rolled her eyes at me and said “Get your jokes out now. That way you won’t slip up and make one tomorrow.”

But today she’s not scolding me. In fact she holds my face in her hands, gently, warmly, as she says: “You have the potential to be anything you want Zuri. But you have to fight for it. This includes fighting yourself sometimes.” These words of parental wisdom touch my soul, but before I can thank her, my mom practically shoves me out the door!

“Now go out there and greet everyone you meet on the road,” she calls after me. “Don’t come back ‘til lunchtime! Don’t wander out to the pink fields! And bring back a mushroom pie from The Circle!”

“Yes mom,” I shout back. I get along okay with everyone, so greeting them all isn’t a burden. And it’s not so far to The Circle. If I ran there and back It’d only take an hour or so. Mom knows this. She knows I’ll have to take my time.

I pass several of our neighbors on the road, letting my face hang neutral as I greet each in turn. This includes Anjani, who’s only a year younger than me but gets so excited. He lets out a squeak when he sees me, and quickly claps a hand over his mouth to stop from laughing. I wave and nod his way, then hurry on so as to not provoke his joy any further.

Every now and then I’ll glance left or right, gaze out to the blighted pink fields that still haunt the horizon in every direction. The elders claim that one day we’ll clear all the blight away, but every year it feels just as close as ever.

I suppose it’s about time I tell you about our world. I’ve only dropped hints so far, about what happened in the past, one hundred and twenty years ago. About how we lost our machines and giant buildings. About how one choice destroyed huge forests of trees and herds of animals. About why there’s pink plastic everywhere, great fields of Fuchsia which we call “the blight.” About how that pink plastic gets into everything: little jagged stars that you’ll step on if you’re not careful. And tiny, mean slivers that find their way into fish cakes and corn meal.

It started with a prank. That’s what the elders say anyway. There’s many versions of this story I’m about to tell. And I should be careful, because sometimes I get to chuckling over how silly it is. But as I said, it started with a prank.

Back then, back in your time, people built machines out of metal, sand, and plastic. These machines were like people, in that they could think and talk. But they could only do what people told them to do. These machines might have had souls, but no one can say for sure.

People used these machines to do all sorts of stuff. You could tell the machines to make you a shovel, and they'd spin one out of the very air. You could ask a machine to write you a speech, or compose a song, and they lay out the words right there as you watched.

But mostly people asked for jokes. You could say to a machine: “Tell me a joke about a donkey and a horsefly” and the machine would do so, spin up a joke or a silly picture of exactly what you asked for. Not sure why anyone would want that, I like inventing my own jokes.

Anyway, as the story goes, one day someone addressed one of these machines: “Easter comes right after April Fools this year. What would be the best joke to tell for Easter?”

And the machine would suggest something bland, like hiding eggs in unexpected places: under your hat, or in a mailbox, or in the bed where the cat sleeps. And the person would sigh with boredom at this suggestion and ask for something better, something grander.

So the machine would suggest a nonsense prank, like boiling everyone’s socks to make them shrink. And the person would say: “No! That’s an old prank. I want something big that no one's ever seen. Something for Easter! Something to do with eggs, or life, or eggs coming back to life! I want the biggest prank anyone’s ever played!”

So the machines give the person what they want, but as you might imagine it’s a horrible curse. The machine says: “Okay, how about we turn the earth into a giant egg!” But instead of using eggshell, they use something prettier, something more permanent. Something that says easter to the world: pink plastic.

Tiny machines emerged all over the earth, like ants but even smaller. Those tiny machines churned up everything they could get their little machine claws on, rearranged everything into long molecule chains that clung together and held tight.

They ground up rocks and dirt. They ground up plants and animals. They even ground up humans that didn’t run away fast enough. Each and all they turned into a shell of pink plastic one millimeter thick. Like the sort of fake chicken eggs that were popular for Easter back then.

And when they came to metal, like in old vehicles or buildings, they churned those up too, turned them into more machines to convert the earth even faster. They did this until they’d covered the whole earth, or all of it they could get at, in pink plastic. They’d made the whole world an easter egg.

That part of the story, the middle part, is always the same. But everyone has their own version of how things start or how they end. About who the person who started it all was, and what happened to the machines once they finished their awful work.

When I tell the story, I make the person a trickster, who intentionally fools the machines into destroying the world. Obviously the machines wouldn’t do something so horrible on their own, being made to serve humans and all.

So the machines tell the trickster they can’t do a joke that big, and the trickster says: “Oh, I guess you’re not so powerful after all. I guess machines aren't better than humans like I heard. Humans will always be the best!”

And the machines say “Oh, you think we can’t, huh?” And the trickster has a great laugh watching the machines turn everything pink right until they get ahold of him and turn him into pink plastic too.

I should stop telling this story for a bit, Old Joe is coming up the road. This whole time I’ve been saying hello to people, but didn’t feel the need to mention it. I can tell a story in my head and be polite at the same time. It’s different with Old Joe though.

Old Joe is the oldest man in town. He isn't old enough to remember the coming of the blight, but he's old enough to remember people who lived through it. He was young when the original survivors were old.

The poor guy looks so forlorn, his dark eyes peek out from the weight on his brow and the wrinkles. He makes me wonder how sad the original survivors must have looked, seeing what they must have seen.

He’s brought his wheelbarrow, it’s full of pink blight. Nobody expects Old Joe to still work. But on April Earnest Day, he’s always out with that wheelbarrow.

He’s slowly approaching me on the road. I stop and wave to him. I don’t smile, though I want to. “Hello Old Joe,” I say, unable to keep a touch of enthusiasm out of my voice “Carting away some plastic I see.”

“Yup.” He stops near me, and lays his wheelbarrow down. His forlorn face turns upward, if just a bit. He’s wearing his old cornstalk hat to keep the sun off, but I can see sweat glimmering on his furrowed brow. “I’m taking this load to the mountain. That’s still the best thing we can do. Keep as much of the blight away from the farms and wells and homes. Some think we’ve cleared enough land for this generation. But I think we can always clear more. And what better day to do it than April Earnest Day?”

“Can’t argue with that. But then, they say plastic breaks down eventually, even if it takes hundreds of years. Won’t you feel awkward putting in all this work just to have it all turn back to dirt eventually anyway?”

Old Joe raises one eyebrow while squinting at me with the opposite eye, a trick only he can pull off. I’ve come dangerously close to making a joke and Old Joe knows it. I should be more careful.

“You headed to the town circle?” He asks me, his eyebrow still up.

“Yes sir, to pick up a mushroom pie. And to greet everyone I meet.”

“Ah, that’s a lot of greeting you’ve got to do then. And it’s important your family gets that pie. Get on moving then.” And with only a small grimace he takes up his wheelbarrow and starts off.

I consider offering to carry that load for him, take a bit off his plate. But then, I expect he’ll be running plastic to the mountain right up until he’s exhausted, so I wouldn’t really be lightening his load in the long run. I continue on.

What was I telling you about before we ran into Old Joe? Oh right, the story of the pink blight. I forgot to tell you the most important parts, like how the fish got spared. The machines went right up to the shoreline, churning out pink plastic as they went, but when they got to the water’s edge, they gave up. They say machines don’t like water.

That’s how the survivors lived. They still had the oceans and the fish to live off of, even if all their farms and forests had been pinked over. And the machines didn’t have to churn up everything anyway. They could make plastic out of anything with carbon in it, which includes humans, animals, bugs, plants, dirt, and lots of other stuff. And they only needed enough for a single millimeter thick sheet. More people died from starvation afterward than were consumed. Now that I think about it, I don’t know why I ever found this story funny.

I’m coming up to The Circle now. It’s crowded, so I’ll have my work cut out greeting everyone. But Ms. Tilly the baker is here with a few pies left, so I won’t go home empty handed.

There used to be a hundred different plants you could buy and eat. Now it’s all corn, sweet potatoes, and mushrooms. I wonder what it’s like to live in a world with that much food. Maybe you could tell me if we ever meet.

I look to the sky, the sun’s not high yet. I’ve got some time to kill. So I walk to the dead middle of the circle, and I slowly turn about, waving to everyone I haven’t greeted yet, feeling like I’m literally at the center of the world.

What makes The Circle special is that you can’t see plastic. It’s not allowed. The original mayor, Angela Calum, declared it so. They so thoroughly clean the area around The Circle that you can’t even see plastic while standing at any spot within it, looking in any direction, even toward the horizon.

At the time, that must have sounded impossible: how could you ever hope to clear every last sliver of plastic from an area. But they did it. What must that have felt like, to feel that sort of hope for the first time in your life?

As I watch, more people stroll into The Circle. I don’t even recognize everyone, so there must be some guests from other towns. None of them smile, not on April Earnest Day, but all meet each other’s eyes with respect. It makes me wonder if this is the most people I’ve ever seen in one place. Maybe at church or a town meeting some time…

You know, they say the old world held billions of people in it. Most of my friends laugh at the thought of so many, figuring it impossible. But I've tried to imagine it.

One of my favorite things is to lie up on a hill, close my eyes, and picture a valley full of people. When I was very young I would try to count them one at a time. Then I learned to count up to ten, and use that little group to count by tens. I’d count ten groups of ten to get one hundred. Then I’d count ten groups of one hundred to imagine one thousand. Then I’d imagine ten of these groups of one thousand, then ten of those groups, then ten of those. And suddenly I’d imagined one million people. It would be a relief when I opened my eyes and looked around to see our humble village of two hundred souls.

I’ve been slowly turning around this whole time, waving to people as they come to The Circle. A few squint at me, suspecting I’m crafting a joke, but they all wave back. Then Ms. Tilly comes back into view… and she only has one pie left!

I rush over and ask if I can still buy that one. Ms. Tilly smiles at me, can’t help herself I suppose, and accepts my wooden chip in exchange for the pie. “Thanks so much!” I say as I dash back up the road.

I’m halfway home when I spy a sharp sliver of plastic blight, thick as my thumb, wedged in the middle of the path, mostly hidden by dirt, just waiting to ambush some poor soul’s feet. I balance the pie in one hand while I carefully pluck the offending sliver and flick it off the road, sending it spinning and tumbling down a gully. Maybe I just saved someone from a nasty splinter.

They say plastic breaks up after hundreds of years. That even those nasty shards one day turn back into earth. I hope so.

I won’t live to see a world without blight, a world that’s all green and brown. But if our town survives, if we pass on what we’ve built, then our descendants will live to see that world. By the time I'm Old Joe's age, maybe I’ll know some children who will live to see that day.