Abandoning First Draft for the Post Apocalyptic... for now

Here's a first draft of another kind. I don't think memoir writing is for me at the moment, so here is a voyage into an imagined future instead. I promise this will go further (because it already has!). I have scheduled a new segment to go on at about this time each week.

Again, I am simply playing with an idea here. I think with speculative fiction one begins by creating a world.

For now, the setting is an isolated house located in a dying or recovering forest. I thought the story could be told from the point of view of a child:

One

           ‘Once upon a time,’ stories often began, ‘there lived many, many people in the world.’

Ma stopped talking for a moment and sat very still, looking in the direction of the open window with the curtain that moved its corner back and forth, in small flutterings. Dalyon lay tucked in his bed with his purple alligator, waiting for the way that the story would tell itself this time.

‘This was the time before the final Great War. The people didn’t have enough to eat, and they didn’t have enough to drink, and many fell ill. Even the air was not safe to breathe. In those days there were many bad things happening in the world, Dalyon. The earth was suffering too, so it tried to do whatever it could to heal itself. It shook, and it vomited, and it sweated, melting ice and snow that had covered its mountain tops for a very long time. There are some places where people used to live, that are covered with water now, and other places where great cities once stood. Some have been buried beneath the flowing mud. Some collapsed when the earth shook, and they stayed that way. And then there were the wars that raged across the surface of the Earth. It was a very hard time for people, Dalyon, and it seemed for a time that nobody would survive.

The people talked and talked about different ways to make it better, but they could not agree upon a proper course of action. So in the end they did nothing. It was easier to talk than to change the way things were done. They went on doing the same things they’d always done, which were the things they had become very good at. They were very good at making money, at arguing, and at killing one another. Almost everything that they knew and made was taken and used for waging war. When it was all over, most of the people were gone.’

‘Gone,’ Dalyon echoed.

‘Yes Dalyon, lost to the earth. They were no longer. It seems that people weren’t as big and as important as they thought they were. The Earth was bigger and more important. The people had forgotten that the Earth is a living thing.’

Ma’s eyes were staring into the distance far, far away. She continued to speak about the Earth as a living thing. ‘The Earth is our great mother, but sometimes I think she is a heartless mother.  Or perhaps she was just very sad. I think she must have wanted to start again, to clear herself of whatever had made her sick, which was greed and war, and bad feeling. As it turned out, wars were nothing compared to the way the Earth could fight back. In the process she destroyed many. Eventually things settled down. Some families were lucky enough to survive in small pockets.’

Ma stopped talking. She forgot that she was telling a story and sat quietly on the side of his bed with her eyes flicking back and forth, and with drops of water forming on her brow. She had got stuck on the part of the story about the small people in small pockets.

Dalyon didn’t mind. It gave him time to think of the small families in small pockets. He thought of the family in his own small pocket. He thought he could carry the small family around in his pocket, and he could take it out to play whenever he wanted, then put it away again.  He thought about the little people clinging to his hair as he swung back and forth on his swing. He thought about the small family sitting around his bed when he couldn’t sleep, telling him stories about all the small pockets where they had sheltered from the wars and the Earth’s sickness.

Ma rested her hand on his arm. She had more of the story to tell. 

‘Now the world has many places separated by seas which are made of very deep water. The water is so deep that if you stood in it, it would be over your head. If you put this house in the water, the water would go over the top. If you stacked many houses like this one on top of one another, the water would go over the top of them all. The water in the sea goes on and on. It is spread out over a very big area, Dalyon, much bigger than the distance that you would have to travel to pass through the forest of trees that lives around this house. The water fills the spaces between the different lands. People used to travel across it in boats that floated on the water, and in planes that flew like birds above the water.  People were very clever at making things like this to travel far, and to travel fast, but they weren’t clever enough to know how to live in peace. When the wars, and all of the other things that happened, passed, there were… in the whole wide world there were just a few thousand, perhaps ten or fifteen thousand. People. That sounds like a lot, I know, but it isn’t many. They were all spread out in places, on land separated by water and by mountains. I was one of those people, Dalyon. I lived with my father and my mother in a small house at the bottom of a mountain, far, far across the sea. They moved there before I was born, to get away from all the trouble. They tried, but they didn’t quite escape. There was something in the air, they said, left over from the war. When I was still small, not very much older than you are now, my mother died, and soon after that my father died, and then I lived by myself until I was grown into a young woman. I didn’t feel alone Dalyon, not really. My mother seemed to be there to teach me and to watch over me. I felt she was still there, although I couldn’t see her. Perhaps I could hear her. Then I couldn’t. She’d gone.’

Ma had been sitting on the edge of Dalyon’s bed, but now she stood up and walked to the window. She pulled it closed with a bang, and the curtain fell still and silent. She turned back, looked at Dalyon, and smiled. ‘You know what happened next, don’t you? One day a man came walking down the mountain.’

‘Papa Terry.’

‘Yes, Dalyon. He brought you to me. Then he brought us here.’

Ma came back to sit on the side of his bed before she spoke again.  Now her voice was soft, and she sounded as if she were asking a question. Dalyon searched, but he couldn’t find the answer, so he couldn’t tell the question.

‘The man brought others too. Not here. Somewhere. I don’t know where they are now. He found them and he saved them, you see. We all came here by boat. After we landed, we went our separate ways. I went into training for a year. You won’t remember. Do you? I hardly remember it myself. They seem to – ah,’ Ma shook her head. ‘No. It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

She let her eyes drift over Dalyon’s face. ‘There is one thing I do remember very clearly – my first sight of you, and how I felt then, so strange, as if I had met my destiny. When I first saw you, you were such a tiny baby, all bundled up against the cold. He told me you were very special, Dalyon. All children were special, but you were a special boy. They said you would have a different way of thinking. They knew this would be so from a test that they did on your blood. That is why they chose me to be your mother. Perhaps I am different too. Difference is a good thing – it can make us strong, you see. The people as a whole are stronger, with difference. They said that before the war, people were afraid of anyone who was different and that they liked everyone to be the same as them. Once there were many languages, but by then there was just one, called English. Other languages were forbidden. People were afraid to speak them, even at home. People were watching – the people who liked everyone the same as them. They wanted to destroy everyone else. That was a very bad thing. Now we are not like that, praise to the Great Mother. War and Mother Earth made the world change. Everything changed. People changed. Those that were left. Now we are all part of the Great Mother’s experiment, you see.’

Ma’s voice grew quieter as she said those last words, and she stopped speaking again for a time. As Dalyon waited he held the purple alligator up to see how it looked against the dimming light coming through the space between the window’s curtains.   Most of its colour was gone now and just its shape could be seen outlined by the space around it. Ma’s face was an outline too. There was some light coming through the curls in her hair. Dalyon looked around the room. The colour was seeping out of everything. Even the story that Ma had been telling, seemed to have been drained of colour. After a while she spoke one ending to the story she had been telling. She laid her body down on his bed with her face next to his ear, and she spoke it in a whisper.

‘I tell you this story so that you will remember one day, and think about how to make the world safe for the children of the future. The whole story has been written down in a book so it won’t be forgotten. I want you to remember that book, Dalyon. Do you understand? I hope you can.’

Dalyon still did not know what Ma was asking, so he said nothing. Ma sat up again, wiped her hands over her eyes and her face, and let out a slow breath. She spoke the second ending to the story in a loud, cheerful voice.

‘So that is how you came to live here with me, as my little boy. This place used to be called Australia. We were brought here because in this place the land is very, very old and magical, and because it has survived. It sleeps peacefully here. Now all the wars are over and the earth is healing. There is nothing left to fear. We came, and now we will live happily ever after,’ said Ma.

She bent over to kiss him then, and to stroke the hair away from his face. ‘Go to sleep little one,’ she said.  ‘The moon is thin tonight.’