Burial
Sites of Tomorrow
Queenie
felt the need to sit for a minute. It felt rather off for her to be so tired so
soon, after all it had only been about fifteen minutes since she’d gotten off
the monorail that dragged her safely over the ashes of former London.
Neo-London wasn’t anything grand, like its predecessor had been, and not as
many people had lost their lives as in some of the more major cities. Maybe
chalk that up to the fact that London had been prepared for bombings, had been
prepared for them. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t really matter if
you crippled England because it wasn’t a threat on its own, but it was a
stronghold.
Queenie took off her boots, and
curled her toes underneath her wool socks, and extended her leg. She braced
herself over the rubble of a ruined building, that rested somewhere between the
safe zone, and the fallout zone, and she couldn’t for the life of her but
wonder if she was taking a risk even breathing the same air within miles of
that offshoot of radiation. She slipped her foot back into her boot, and then
proceeded to do the same thing with the other one. Her toes curled, evident
beneath her socks, and she stretched, and braced herself and she closed her
eyes and side. She slid her foot back into her boot.
They had been a gift from her
father, the boots, he had found them, “On the body of some woman in an alley,”
he said, and he had said it without emotion, or remorse or thought. Queenie
thought that maybe emotional connections had died, that the consciousness of
the world of the pains of others had been driven underground by the successful
of hateful men in destroying the known world. Her father wasn’t a hard man
though, and it was probably more clear, she knew, that he had simply
acknowledged that that woman’s problems were over. It wouldn’t be hard to
believe that he had looked at that stiff lifeless body, in whatever stage of
dying it was in, and thought Queenie wears that size. It would have been
instinct that led him to pull them off of her, and to ignore the smell of
rotting flesh.
That was before he had been gunned
down over a gallon of milk at the supermarket. Spoiled, out of date, chunky
milk, that had been sitting abandoned in the powerless supermarkets. Warm milk.
The man who had shot him didn’t know it was hot warm, pointless milk, he had
only since an ounce of hope from his past, and he had known Queenies father. He
had seen him around, they had hunted together, shared battle stories, survival
stories. Queenie was never sure why the man felt the need to pull a gun on a
friend and blast him into nothingness over the gallon of pointless milk. The
only reason she had known about it was because he had come to the shelter and
had brought the gallon and put it in Queenies seventeen year old hands, as
though he were handing off the last remaining property that her father had ever
owned, as if it had been willed to her upon his death.
Queenie was now twenty-three and she
didn’t think she’d ever shoot someone over a gallon of milk, but she never
ruled it out, because you never knew.
She bent down to touch her toes and
felt a shadow encroach upon her. Not so much a shadow, but a presence, but like
a shadow it was silent and shifted the allowance of the light that hit the
pavement. She pulled her knife from the sheath in her boot and she gripped it
in her fist. She felt her muscles tense, she shifted slightly in her step to
allow her to drive the blade through the air and on home. She breathed as the
presence grew closer.
Then Porter whined. He cried out his
doggish whinny, and Queenie loosened. “Dammit, P,” she said as she looked down
between her legs at the cocking head of her collie. He was a runt, smaller than
what might be typical. She slid the knife back, secure in her boot and stood up
fully, and turned around and leaned down. His head had been tilted but not
because of curiosity but because of a Harry Potter backpack’s shoulder strap
was clenched in his jaws.
Queenie took a knee in front of
Porter and rubbed her hand against his forehead, and the knotted mane like hair
of his body. Porter dropped the background onto the ground and licked up and
down Queenie’s face, before sitting obediently on his hind legs and staring
intently at the backpack. In truth Queenie didn’t know anything about Harry
Potter, but it looked rather silly, and the only reason she knew that it was
Harry Potter was because it was written in striking gothic lettering at the
top. But the picture depicted on the surface was of three twelve-year-old’s
pointing sticks at an invisible enemy and wearing fancy robes.
She took the backpack into her hands
and noted how the condition hadn’t looked like it’d belonged amongst the rubble
like the rest of the shambles, and bones that haunted these streets. “Good boy
P,” she said, she leaned down and kissed him on his forehead, and moved her
attention to the backpack again, she lifted it up, and Porter laid full onto
his belly, and laid his furry chin on his furry paws as though he were
anticipating the reveal of the contents. Maybe a moment of levity could ensue,
maybe a tennis ball was hidden inside, or a chew toy.
Queenie unzipped the rusted zipper,
and surprisingly it opened with little resistance. She reached a hand in and
felt a wad of loose-leaf paper, and she tried to grip and collect it in a pinch
between her thumb and fingers and she pulled it out to inspect it.
Porter looked on disappointed at the
hall. He stepped in a little bit, as if he were taking baby steps with his
paws, his butt raised a little in the air as he pushed forward. But he stayed
calm, like a good boy, tail in check, still.
The papers were a mix of story
problem for basic multiplication problems.
Red ink dashed along lines that had been incorrect but having never had
use for mathematics Queenie couldn’t make out just what it was saying. She
flipped from one page to another, crude drawings of strawberries, met with the
dash of subtraction came later. Followed by some more poorly drawn strawberries
and the double dashes of an equal sign. Left blank, no answer, and marked
incorrect with a red dash.
At the top of each paper was a name
Harrison Kent. Written in blocky letters. At the end of the papers there was an
official looking document, written in fine penmanship, by some adult or
another, someone who knew how to be official in ink, and write in finely tuned
lettering. A teacher must have been. The grades reflected the ink marks, D, D+,
C-, and F. An F for the math, a C- minus for the language arts. Queenie seemed
this might be fair, she felt tears swell in her eyes, as she read the
handwritten note at the bottom.
To Mr.
and Mrs. Kent:
It
is with deep concern that I write this note. Harrison is having trouble
focusing in class as of late. We know the bomb drops in the America’s and China
are quite alarming, but I’d like to remind everyone that we are safe in the UK
out of the way of these catastrophic events that are plaguing the rest of the
world. I do not mean to make light of the suffering of our allies abroad, but
we must remember to take care not to draw our children into the conflicts of
adults. The basics of writing and arithmetic are paramount, education is the
benchmark to secure the future.
It
has come to my attention that you have enlisted your son in helping you procure
items during the public panic, asked him to steal items from you from the
corner markets. While the panic is unfortunate, it is not fair to include our
children in the petty act of taking advantage in moments of great distress.
Truly we must show our children a level of strength.
It
has also become apparent that you have ceased in helping Harrison after class
with his homework. When I asked him about this he said, “My father and mother
said it’s pointless to even try.” He has chosen, even when given individual
attention, to make any move to fill in any blanks on tests and quizzes, or to
write in whatever number he feels like, even though he knows the solutions
proper.
Harrison
is a promising student, and until this latest semester he had always
demonstrated a willingness to explore his intellect, to expand it, and grow in
his methods of self-expression. Scribbled recently in one of his notebooks I
found the following poem (keep in mind Harrison has always been a strong
writer, and still attempts some form of expression but this, this distressed
me):
Maybe I may die tomorrow
May be I do
It may be that I do not witness the sunshine
That I do not raise up and reach my potential
How sick it is that the world is painting
itself in blood
How little we care to care for the well-being
of each other
The madness of yesterday caught like a plague
A virus that spread to and from sea to shining
sea
Maybe I die
I know I will
How can I dream of growing up to be anything?
When adults continue to outlaw dreaming
With their bloodletting.
With Sincerest Concern,
Miss Johnson
Queenie
folded that report card up into a square and stuffed it into her boot and
returned the worksheets to the backpack. She zipped it up and stood to her
feet.
Porter’s tail betrayed him and
started wagging as he knew what was to come next. Queenie stood over him, the
shoulder strap of the Harry Potter backpack in her hand just as it had been
resting in Porter’s mouth earlier. “Show me where you got this P.” Porter
barked and jumped up to his feet. He extended his head up, pulling his neck to
take a long hard group of sniffs of the backpack. He ran around in circles as
if he were chasing his tail and he darted off the way he had come. Queenie gave
chase.
There was a long rush of fears that
brushed through her head. She knew the dates of the worksheets, and of the
report card put the existence of Harrison Kent before the bombing of London,
but she wasn’t quite sure she if he had survived that. The backpack while old
and faded, and the zipper corroded with rust, made it appear that it had sat
comfortable away from fires, or shredding hands of mad men she still needed to
know how the boy had gone out.
The run brought them to the end of
the block, so close to the monorail station that she was surprised no one had
found the backpack before. Even in her fist, shaking lightly with grade school
math problems she knew it was still in fair condition for carrying rations, or
ammunition. Why hadn’t anyone bothered to collect it. After all, this close to
the monorail station was the safest, and therefore the most raided area. Picked
clean for years.
Porter turned into a townhouse, the
door long gone, probably used to keep someone warm enough during the early
winters. The ash and dust had collected like snow piles inside thanks to the
roof being non-existent. Porter paused a moment in front of a stair case that
ascended, and one that descended, and when he saw his partner was on his trail properly,
he barked, and started to move with a deliberate slowness down the stairs.
The staircase was in fair condition.
The footprints of her father’s gift left behind on each step. A sign she was
here, alongside the second set of Porter’s footprints. She had had Porter for a
few years now. Tied to a lamppost, the coffee shop behind him a mountain of
crumbled bricks and glass. He breathed heavy, draped in the ash fall, dry
mouthed, scrawny, and dying. At first, he considered him for food. Her father
had told her to focus on herself, on her belly, her heart, her head, food was
important. And she wasn’t opposed to eating dog, but Porter, the name on his
tags had said as much, was not just a dog. He was a survivor too, having held
on longer than he should have. Other’s must have seen it too, must have seen
him sitting patiently for his master to return, ready to starve to death as a
loyal companion. No one was more surprised than Queenie herself when she
kneeled down and scratch his ears. She cried for the first time since that
gallon of 2% milk had been placed in her hands. She untied Porter and let him
decide if he wanted to keep on waiting or to follow her. She had walked a mile,
leaving him in front of the burial site of his master before Porter had caught
up with her, and he had never left her side since.
At the bottom of the staircase was a
large family room. Red and blue hued wallpaper lined the walls. Movie posters
for superhero movies did too, and inspirational quotes like, “Hang in There.”
Queenie looked around the dust littered room and looked up to the gaping hole
that busted through the ceiling, at the base of the hole was a bombshell. A
dud. Hadn’t detonated. Speared through the eyes in a downward trajectory and digging into the floor.
That’s when she saw it.
Extended out from the shell in a
lost gripping position the skeleton hand of Harrison Kent. Porter unaware of
the sacred quality human beings put on bones stuck his nose in deep and sniffed
at the child fingers. Queenie was thankful she saw nothing else there, just the
hand, the rest of Harrison lost underneath the shell, the rubble, a sudden
burial he hadn’t been prepared for. Queenie cried again, for the third time.
She brought herself down and close to the hand and laid the backpack down in
the way she thought it might have been held. And she knew why no one had
bothered to loot the pack. The bombshell had put them off from the idea. What
if they had moved in and moved a plank of wood that tipped it, and what was
once just a dud had found its motivation to explode. She placed the shoulder
strap into Harrison Kent’s fist and laid it there. A part of her wanted to bend
his fingers so his grip was more assured, but she didn’t.
She whistled at Porter and Porter
looked at her. His tail in anticipatory wagging stages. He was ready for
command, and Queenie threw her thumb back over her shoulder to tell him to
leave the place, and he barked and bolted from that place.
Queenie placed her palm against the
bombshell that had buried Harrison Kent, and closed her eyes, and breathed a
moment. She reached down her leg and too her hiking boots her father had given
her and she removed her knife. She placed the tip of the blade against the bombshell
and dragged the blade down with an almost muted screech, and white line
appeared as a result of the carving. With several mover movements, and with
deep carvings she wrote, Here Lies
Harrison Kent, Dreamer-Poet. She smiled through teardrops and moved to put
the blade back and her fingers nicked the edges of the folded report card. She
considered a thought a moment, and she thought of her father dead over a gallon
of milk, she thought of Porter on the lamppost, and she thought of the world
she never got to know. She brought the knife backup. And in full she wrote:
Here Lies Harrison Kent, Dreamer-Poet,
Lost as a result of our
blood-letting,
May he have passed mid-dream,
mid-hope,
A child still, a child still, a
child
still.
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