A Survivor

When I look back to that moment, I can still vividly remember the anger I had felt; the flames of fury building up inside my chest until I was absolutely sure I was going to explode.

At eight-years-old, my small, feeble body somehow managed to well up so much rage in the matter of just a few seconds. My face would heat up with a bright red and I could swear my heart rate would quicken to the speed of light. Boom. Boom. Boom. My ears buzzed with the taunting sound of my heart pumping.

I watched from the doorway as my mother leaned over my younger brother's capsule in our living room. He was so young that he hadn't even been given a name yet. He laid in a steel, cylinder-shaped, ten-foot compartment with sleek and unworldly technology that contrasted sharply with the peeling wallpapers of our home. I hated that thing since the first moment I laid my eyes on it.

Just a year before that day, the Capitol had announced that Earth would no longer be inhabitable after the strike of an incoming meteorite that would cast a long, devastating winter upon us. Fortunately, enough time capsules were made for one member of each household to safely sleep through the entire ordeal and perhaps rebuild once the ice melted away.

Everyone had thought -- expected -- for my widowed mother to choose me; her only surviving son with the temper of a crazed mad-man and a maimed left hand. There was no way her frail figure and weak lungs could possibly make it through centuries of deep slumber. And there was absolutely no way the boy in her stomach would be any different from her previous stillborns.

That is, until the boy did come. He was born silent, but when my mother pressed her ear against the ribs that jutted out of his chest, she nearly cried out. He was alive. Her second son had come an hour before the Departing.

Unlike me, his skin was perfectly clear of blemishes or deformities. His eyes were not discolored and his legs were kicking just fine. How had he managed to survive? I glanced over to his left hand -- all five fingers were reaching out towards me. My vision filled with red as I watched the puny thing that had just taken away my entire world. There was no reason that baby had any more of a reason to live than I did.

"Oh, my little Survivor," my mother murmured into the capsule, holding the babe's limp foot. He just sat in there, clueless with half-lidded eyes. "You poor, sweet thing. Be good for me. You'll live, won't you? Live for mommy. You're so small..."

I clenched my jaw, too furious to cry. Could I even cry back then?

I glanced outside our window. The sky was beginning to darken into a deep purple and blue, flecked with stars and illuminated by the crescent moon. We only had a few minutes left.

Moonlight traced the outline of my mother's coal-black hair, softening her figure into a hunched creature. I was almost mortified by the pity I felt for her. Or perhaps it was guilt for what I was about to do.

My mother held a hand over her mouth as the capsule's glass doors began to close and she said "goodbye" to her second son forever, and before I knew it, I ran through them. I slammed against the back of the capsule, nearly crushing my brother in the process. I cried out as my shoulder collided with a protruding part of the capsule. My shoulder still aches to this day.

The events after that were a blur. In the background, I could hear the faint screams of my mother as she pounded her hands against the glass surface, her breath fogging up the glass. Bam. Bam. Bam. My chest was pounding. Her face was filled with a terror and fury I had never witnessed before; her mouth gaping wide, her eyes welling up with tears, and the unmistakable red that painted her face. She kept hitting the glass, screaming for me to leave before I doomed both my brother and myself.

In that moment, I had completely forgotten my anger. In spite of myself, I couldn't help but watch her with the fascination of a young boy who'd never seen his mother express any emotion besides for sorrow. Despair had an entirely new look on my mother.

The steel doors began to close and the realization that I wouldn't be leaving the capsule struck my mother like a brick. Her banging and screaming stopped and she was still. Eerily still. Just as the doors blocked our view entirely, I could see her mouth forming a sentence. Whether they were kind or evil, I'm unsure, but I know that if I went back, I wouldn't know if I would make a better attempt at figuring out what she said.

Complete and utter darkness and silence filled the capsule with a thick tension that wrapped itself around my throat. I could feel my brother's presence beside me, but I couldn't be sure if he was still alive or not.

After two minutes of nothing, I was almost driven mad by the sound of my own breathing.

Suddenly, in bright-green text, the screen before me read:

"This capsule can only support oxygen and serum for one human. Any attempt to fit more than one human will result in deaths for both beings..."

The text went on, but I was distracted when I felt one of my brother's fingers brush against my left arm. I glanced over at him, the green light reflecting off of his eyes, still half-lidded. I held his fragile hand in my own maimed one and squeezed it tight. He was born to be a survivor, with his fingers that grabbed and pinched.

Unfortunately for my brother, it was in that moment that I, a boy whose birth only brought sorrow and whose existence was only a burden, learned to become a survivor.