Quiet

In the sharp waning light of an early autumn day, a boy stood staring out over long-empty fields. He was very still, clutching a hole-ridden, dirty plastic bag in one hand, a shining apple in the other. A cold breeze dashed around him, but he hardly shivered. His eyes, the sort of dark eyes that gave away nothing about a person, remained fixed on the horizon. He could have been dead, for the emptiness of those eyes. The nearly black irises kept everything concealed.

The sky, a blazing, brilliant expanse of blue, seemed to swallow the small figure whole. He may have felt himself being swallowed, but his feet remained firmly planted on the ground. They were dirty feet, covered in grime and cuts. Every inch of the skin that stretched tautly over his heel and sole told of old lacerations, wounds shallow but wide enough to leave their testimonies in the form of sad white lines. The dirt that coated these stretched up to where they couldn’t: his legs, his arms, even his face were all dirty. Not that he cared. How could he? He’d never seen his reflection; there were no mirrors left, as far as anyone knew.

His hands, long-fingered pianist’s hands, just as grimy as the rest of him, loosely held the apple. He finally shifted, brought it to his mouth. He watched that amazing blue sky as his teeth dug into the apple’s flesh, cleanly prying out a chunk. Juice spurted over his tongue, his gums. Still he stayed practically unmoving – a thin little statue who had found himself in the wrong piece of art. He had never tasted anything like it. Nothing quite so sweet. The bite of fruit sat in his mouth a long time, the sugars suffusing his saliva until all he tasted was that strange new flavor. Eventually he swallowed, took another slow bite. Behind him, there was a whole orchard full of apples, fruit that waited to be picked, just as ripe and round as the one he marveled at as if it was the only one.

It would all be gone soon if he didn’t hurry. The others shouted, laughing eagerly, greedily. They ran from branch to branch, filling their pockets, their bags, their hoods. None stopped for even a taste. All that they cared about was that intoxicating idea of having enough – for once, maybe they would have enough.

They would, in a way, and the boy knew it. Really, they would have too much. He knew that they would eat apples for weeks and weeks. They would feast on it until their breath stank of the saccharine juices and their teeth rotted. They would eat it until the sight of that shining pink skin would make their stomachs churn. They would eat and eat until they vomited, and then they would eat some more. What else was there to do, after all? That was the way it had to be, the way it had been for as long as any of them could remember. Starvation and plenty. Again and again they fell in and out of hopelessness, a wheel spinning in slow, methodical lurches.

In a way, the boy sought to break the cycle, to stop the spinning. For just a moment, he neither starved nor gorged; he waited. For what, who knows. Salvation, maybe, even though he had no clue what such a thing even looked like. Maybe like the ruby skin of an apple; maybe the inconceivable azure of the prairie sky. Or maybe something he would never find.

He took another bite. I’ll hate you soon, he thought. He shrugged to himself. It didn’t matter. It never mattered at first. It always mattered too much in the end.

*

It had been a war. What else? It was always a war. Violence and hatred and blood – always blood. People so full of blood and the perverse urge to spill it. Pink skin torn into and left to rot. Humans looked so strange at core, the whole world learned. Raw and broken and disgusting.

Maybe there had been wars like that before. Maybe the world had ended and begun a thousand times and no one knew. Maybe humans forgot how to tell stories in the aftermath of things too horrifying for words, and that’s why everyone forgot. Again and again. Why no one knew.

Or maybe this really was the first time that mankind destroyed itself. Perhaps they weren’t repetitive creatures after all, but ones that had slowly been building to a sick grand finale the whole time. Maybe everyone’s last thought – all the innocents’, at least – had simply been “Bravo. You did it. You finally did it.”

After that, there was nothing left but the core. It was too terrible for words, for stories, for memories.

So everyone forgot.

*

A few days after the orchard they found a town. What was left of it, anyway. Before the war a place this old-looking and torn apart would have been considered a landmark. A historical novelty, to be roped off and sold. ‘Ruins’ they would call it, along with other fancy names for a place where people used to live but don’t anymore.

Now, though, it was just another place to pass through. Another series of buildings to wander around in, scavenging for food or clothing. Another lost echo, slow to fade.

They filed through the streets, kicking pebbles. Just a little flock of children. They could have been coming home from school, running to get back to their dinners, taking off their shoes and throwing back their heads and gazing at the clouds. It was like an unfinished painting, where the background had been filled in but the housetops and the books in the children's arms, little details like that, were still missing. And maybe the artist, having a strange sense of humor, left it that way, and titled in ‘Unfinished’ and waited for the critics to praise him for his genius. People are foolish that way. Foolish and cruel.

Because what is more cruel than children without books, and children who go barefoot without the joy of choosing to, and children who don’t know the simple joy of having a home? And what is more foolish than an entire race that chooses to create such a world?

That was the world they lived in, though; not for better or for worse, just for worse. When they walked through a library, or what was left of it, and saw a book, they picked it up and then put it down. Perhaps they put it down gently –because after all those years surely there had to be something inherently embedded in human beings that recognized the power of the written word – but in the end they did put it down and left it there. Eventually it would wither and die like anything meaningful does. It wouldn’t even leave bones. Just dust.

The thin little boy – the one from earlier, do you remember him? – stepped on a book and stopped. He looked at it for a long time until a little girl took his hand and pulled him along. He followed and their silent procession continued on.

“Tell me about the waterfalls,” the little girl said. She had been too little, then, to remember the majestic, punishing cascades. All she knew was the plains, which they had wandered across for years now. The boy sighed, but it wasn’t a sad sound.

“They were tall,” he said. “And loud. They crashed down over and over and broke into and around themselves. And if you put your hand under them it was like a hundred little fists beating on yours.” He paused, looking at the longing in the girl’s blue eyes, eyes like waterfalls. “They were frightening. I didn’t like them.”

“Liar,” she said, and smiled. She was right. He had loved the waterfalls. They had enchanted him, not frightened him. It was that queer smile and the calm, quiet way she had spoken that frightened him. The word fell strangely upon his ear and he shivered, broke loose from her grasp.

“Well, you wouldn’t have liked them,” he said, and wandered away, trying to ignore the feeling of those crystal blue eyes on his back.

*

There was a certain quiet madness to an empty world. Like a room painted white. It sent shivers down a person’s spine, made their toes curl and their hair stand on edge. Nothing but radiating silence, wind through hollow bones. Nothing but nothing.

The few people that were left were hollow and silent, too. Not really like people at all, just a few more leaves tossed in the wind. They traveled in packs like animals, mostly, nomadic creatures who never consciously searched for a home. Maybe there weren’t any places left to be a home. How is a child who has never had a home supposed to know how to look for one?

The silence was terrible, of course, but what was the use of words anymore? They did not fix long empty stares, or the blankness of a world that was once a masterpiece of tiny infinities. There was no place for words to go. When uttered they released into the air like a snowy breath in cold and dispersed just as quietly. They flew away and left just like everything else had. There was no point to ever having them in the first place.

The children weren’t wild. But they weren’t the way people used to be, either. There was something wrong with them, like they lacked the intricacies of human beings somehow. Like they were books meant to hold a million words and no one ever bothered to write one. They weren’t even sad; they didn’t know what sadness was.

They didn’t know what anything was. There was no one to teach them. There were no memories to guide them. No stories to remind them that there is, in fact, something about human beings that is special.

That is, if I may, good.

Maybe there is not a natural absence of good in people but simply a tendency to forget about it.

Maybe the same is true of the whole world.

Maybe there are just too many maybes to be bothered with.

*

The grass grew long everywhere. It grew higher than a little girl’s head with no one to stop it. She tenderly pushed through every stalk as though it, individually, deserved her attention. Her care. Each was turning brown and dry in the face of the coming winter and she was afraid to snap a single one. She was afraid to loosen a single seed from their heads. “Those are your children,” she whispered. “You must take care of them.”

The boy heard and went to her, took her hand. She looked up at him – oh, those eyes! – and did not smile. Her brows scrunched as she tried to think of the thing she felt it very important to tell him. Not “I need you,” or even, “I care for you.” She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. It was as though the wind swept it away. “I –” she whispered, and he watched her, those black eyes telling nothing while her blue ones said all that her mouth tried to. The word she searched for had been forgotten, like so many things, but the light in her eyes remembered it.

The boy understood. They walked on.

*

That night it snowed. The air grew chill and still and the stars were so bright. There is something indomitably beautiful and strange about stars (just like there is about people). The children stood and watched them. But what does one make of beauty in times such as those they lived in? What is anything good in the face of all the emptiness and wrongness of the world?

The girl tugged at the boy’s sleeve again. “Tell me.” She said. “Tell me about the stars.”

And he did. “Once upon a time,” he said.

And quietly the snow fell.