Excerpt: Turning and Burning

The sun was shining brightly and he knew enough not to stay in the direct sunlight. The danger had been drilled into him since before he could remember by his mother. “Siesta time is important, little one. The sun will burn you – a by-product of the Burning Times. You must stay inside.”

“But what if I’m not close by, MeMa?”

His mother, her long honey blond hair pulled back into a braid that would brush the top swell of her ass when she walked, squatted in front of him, her long homespun linen skirts brushing the dirt. Holding his arms tightily above the elbows, she looked into his questioning eyes and said, “You hide then. Keep from the sun as much as possible and hide. But you must promise me to come home quickly as soon as it is safe again. Okay?”

He had nodded then, scared by her tales of sunburns bad enough to blister within minutes of exposure, bad enough to kill if a body was caught out without proper protection. He didn’t like these stories, preferring her tales of gentler times – times before the land caught fire and the sun flares began. Those times were filled with gentle creatures who had walked the forests, green grasses as tall as a man that waved in the gentle breeze, and water that was plentiful and clean enough to drink without boiling and pills that made the water taste metallic and flat. Those were times he had never known but his MeMa spoke of with longing. It was when she talked of those times that he realized she had lived then – and had survived the great burns. Not many people had, relative to the world’s population before the sun’s flares had sent waves of heat and radiation that had changed the world forever. MeMa had told him once that over fifty percent of the population of the world had died in the fires and another ten to fifteen percent had died in agony from radiation burns. He couldn’t really fathom those numbers. All he’d known were the small villages – a hundred or so people gathered together against the elements. With that frame of reference, how could he possibly imagine a place where millions of people lived in houses stacked to the sky?

Things were better now, he decided as he looked out over the scorched land. When the wind was right, it would blow the lingering haze from the fires away and he could see all the way to the ruins. MeMa had told him once that she had grown up near here. Her parents had moved to a place where people were so plentiful they had to live in tall buildings, one house on top of another: a city she called it. There were no cities now – just ruins like the one he could spy in the distance, great fragmented spikes of tall buildings reaching into the smoke-filled skies. Many many people died in the cities. Many of the survivors fled the cities and took refuge in the small towns and villages.

Sometimes he wished he had lived in the before times. To see a city teeming with people would have been wondrous indeed. Now, there were tiny little villages, filled with fearful, superstitious people. Places where strangers weren’t welcomed easily, where people had to prove themselves worthy of belonging or risk being thrown out into the burning wilderness to live off the land or die trying. He and his mother had been out there and the village was nicer. His mother often told him, as she instructed him about how to act, how to speak to people, whom to avoid, that they had barely survived on their own in the wilderness. She often talked to him about how important it was to fit in and to not get into any trouble here. He would nod and listen carefully and it felt like he was walking on the shells of fragile eggs, afraid to step too hard for fear of breaking them. He didn’t like the feeling and told his mother that maybe they would be better off on their own. It was the only spanking he could ever remember receiving at her hand and, as he dried the tears from his face, he vowed to never say anything or do anything that would put him in the position of receiving another spanking from her. Even though she had hugged him after, it didn’t erase the humiliation and fear the act itself had instilled in him.

The wind picked up again and blew his long curls across his face. Sighing, he reached a grimy hand up to push his hair back again, his other hand holding tightly to the crude pencil and parchment he’d been writing on. Balancing precariously, he tucked the parchment into the tattered old book on his lap, clasping the two in his knees before putting the pencil between his teeth and using both hands to finger comb his long hair into a rough queue at the back of his neck. Wrapping the rawhide cord from his tunic around his hair and tying it off, he was too distracted to watch for predators. That, he decided later, was the only reason he was caught off guard.