Draconias Galactica
First time out of the vault
Well, here's part one of, I don't know...4ish, 5ish part story I'm writing. Here's some background info (which should be in the introduction that I really should get around to writing, but I'm lazy; be glad(?) you got anything at all!): the narrarator (don't expect anybody here to have names, they rarely do with me) is the main charecter. The whole series is a bunch of flashbacks, until the conclusion, so if you see some weird present tense sentences pop up, that's the way it's supposed to be. The first part is set in the town of Port, which I threw into my stupid Great Trading Ring place from my last fic, FOR NO APARENT REASON AT ALL!!!! Well, there is a reason, but it was a stupid one born of writers block. In the first part, the nararator is recalling when he was about 8 years old. Got that? Good, now read. READ LIKE YOU'VE NEVER READ BEFORE!!!
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Looking back, this all probably started that day with the girl and her doll. Well, for me at least. For my brother, it started about a year earlier. The day Dad got killed.
That day, Dad went out to hunt down some geckos. He thought it would be nice if we actually ate that day. I don’t remember much about him, since I was only seven or so at the time, but he liked being able to provide food on a daily basis.
We couldn’t just grow brahmin for food. Mom’s side of the family, they didn’t like brahmin. Her and uncle Roge. They never told me why, but they both hated brahmin. So Dad had to go out and hunt down some food. Geckos, mostly.
Geckos didn’t have much meat on them, so they were good for pretty much one day only. Anything larger than a gecko was usually a deathclaw or a radscoprion. Nobody hunts those for food. They’re not that stupid.
So Dad went out to find a gecko or two and put some bullets in them. My brother went with him. They hung out a lot, my dad and my brother. Me, I spent most of my time with my mom. She always needed some help around the house.
The house was whatever building we were living in that week. All of them were falling apart. Some just faster than others.
The bomb wrecked everything. My mom told me about the bomb. I’ve seen Dad throw bottles of old beer with a flaming rag in them at collapsed buildings, so he could make a door. They’d blow up, and destroy everything around them. Mom said the bombs, they did the same thing.
The beer bottles blew up a small circle. The bombs blew up the whole world.
Mom taught me a lot of stuff everybody knew before the bombs. She taught me how to read, how to write, how to add stuff. She said everybody knew this before the bombs. They had to, it was a law. There aren’t many laws anymore. Some towns don’t have any. Port had a few - don’t kill, don’t steal, and don’t rape. Break any of them, the rest of the town was likely to get together and kill you.
Mom also had books, books from before the bomb. Well, that’s pretty much the only type. Unless you kept a journal, like I did. And even then, the blank journal, the paper and the cover, it was made before the bomb. I’ve only seen two or three books made after the bomb. But I read anything I could. Mom had a lot of books, before the bombs fell. So I read through all of them. You can learn a lot reading books.
I learned about animals that were all dead.
I learned about towns that were gone, or wrecked like Port.
I learned about machines that used to fly like bugs, that swam like fishes, that ran like dogs. The dog machines are the only ones left, and they’re just good for the wheels they have.
About the only thing I did learn about, that wasn’t gone, destroyed, wrecked, or ruined, was how to study people. How to watch them, how to understand them. Well, in theory at least. I’d spend days on end watching the other kids through my window. They’d play, and I’d watch. I’d write down what I saw. I’d try to predict what they would do. I learned a lot about people that way.
I didn’t go outside much. I was usually either helping Mom with something, or too busy reading. I must have read every book we had ten times over. All that the other kids would do was run around. Chase each other. Kick things. Waste time.
I was actually doing something important, or at least I thought. I was learning. Mom always told me I was smart. And not to sound stuck up or anything, but I was. I liked learning things, things that those other kids probably would never learn in their entire life. But studying people, that was what I did most. That’s how I got started with writing my journal. I’d just take notes on the other kids.
Charlie likes Susie, that’s why he keeps shoving her into the dirt.
Susie likes Mitch, which is why she keeps kicking him in the balls.
Mitch is an idiot, which is why he keeps letting Susie kick him.
You can learn a lot about people by spending most of your time watching them. I watched my brother a lot. Sometimes, it was like I was watching myself instead of him. Me and my brother, we’re twins. Not a lot of people know what that means. At least, a lot of people born after the bombs. You had to know things before the bombs, it was a law. I guess one of the reasons why I didn’t go out much was because I could just watch my brother, and pretend that was me out there. Most, probably all, of the other kids, they didn’t know I even existed. That was how little I went out. Looking back, maybe this all started earlier than I thought.
But I watched my brother. I watched him most of all, probably. That’s how I know that on that day this whole mess started for him. Me too, maybe. Because Dad, his best friend, was killed by wolves in front of his own eyes. Because when you die, you’re just not there anymore. And that made him upset.
After that, he changed. He used to be one of the friendlier kids out there. He’d break up fights. He’d get everybody to play together. He was nice.
After that, he’d start fights. He’d break everybody apart, just for the heck of it. He was becoming an real jerk, fast. The only people he was still nice to were me and Mom. And Uncle Roge, when he stopped by. Which he didn’t do that often.
Uncle Roge was in the business, according to him and Mom. They’d never say what that was. All me and my brother knew was that Uncle Roge helped out Mom a lot after Dad died. He’d bring over food, money, stims, stuff like that. We liked it when Uncle Roge came over, since that was the only time Mom would let us go out hunting. She was too scared to let us go out on our own, I guess. After Dad got killed.
After Dad got killed, my brother turned into a real jerk. I knew it. Mom knew it. The kids knew it. But nobody tried to do anything. Mom said it would pass, and to just leave him be. I did. I just kept watching him, like I did with the other kids. Like I always did.
The only time me and him would talk was at dinner, sometimes. Or before we went to bed. We talked a lot less after Dad died. Everything changed after Dad died. And my brother never changed back to the way he was before.
But for me, everything started on that day with the girl and her doll.
I woke up late that day. It was already about 10, judging by the shadow of the sundial we had in our yard. I read about them in a book once, and thought it would be helpful to have around. Even now, you can only get electricity in the big cities, and that’s usually only if you own the generator. I thought it would be nice to know what time it was. But, after all that was done and over with, the sundial was the first thing I destroyed. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was the first thing I saw that day.
The first thing I did was I went to look for Mom. There was probably a reason she hadn’t waken me earlier. Our house wasn’t that large, so it didn’t take me long to find out she wasn’t in there. The house we were living in at that point, it had three rooms downstairs. The big room, where the stairs and the door were, and the window where I watched the other kids from. And the two side rooms, a room that would probably be best called a kitchen or a dining room, and a room with a hole in the ground that served as a toilet.
In the backyard, we had seven rows of corn. That was how we got most of our food. We used to have cans with food in them, but after a few years, all the places that they were stored in were emptied. So we had to either hunt, or grow stuff. With Dad gone, growing stuff was our best bet. The dirt around here wasn’t as bad as some places outside Port. We had some underground water, and a well, so it wasn’t as dry as most everyplace else.
There used to be a lot of arguing about who owned the well. Dad and a friend of his settled that eventually, by bringing out their riffles. That was the first time I saw Dad point his riffle at something other than an animal. He shot a few people in the legs, and nobody ever argued about the well again. Everybody owned it.
I didn’t think that was nice, shooting other people. Even if it wasn’t going to kill them, and it was because he had a good reason.
My brother, he was impressed with how Dad stopped the fighting, how he made it so everybody could have the water.
But Mom wasn’t out in the garden. I didn’t know where else to look - most of the time, I was inside or in the yard. Port was bigger than that, but I never went anywhere else. So I went back inside. I’d probably just have gotten lost anyways.
Since I didn’t have anything else to do, I pulled my journal off the windowsill it sat on, and opened it up. Inside were pages filled with names and actions. Who did what with who on when. I wrote down everything I saw. I knew each and every one of the kids out there, even if I didn’t know their names. I knew what they’d done. I thought, if I knew what they did with who and when and why, I’d know what they’d do.
I wrote a lot down about my brother. I thought I knew what he’d do.
I never bothered to write anything about myself in that journal. I thought I already knew what I’d do. But that was before that day with the girl and her doll.
The girl was outside, actually. She was crying to everybody around her who’d listen that her doll was gone. It was just some pre-war doll. If it had a name, I never heard it. If the girl had a name, I never heard it. But I knew that girl loved her doll. She always took it with her. Sometimes she’d even talk to it. I always thought that was creepy. Talking to something that wasn’t real. Looking back, then, a lot of conversations I had were creepy.
I listened to her, through my window, far away. She was definitely upset about the doll. So, I thought I’d help her out. Mom always told me to help out others. If I couldn’t help out Mom right now - I wondered again where she was - I figured I might as well help that girl.
I looked through my journal, my notes, my records of who did what when and, sometimes, why. I looked for somebody who didn’t like that girl. I looked for somebody who liked to steal. I looked for somebody who was just a plain jerk.
I found my brother sitting on the well’s rim. I didn’t know where many things were, but I knew where the well was. My brother spent a lot of time there, after Dad died. I could see it from my window, even though it was pretty far away. There was a straight path there.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said back. He was peering down into the well. The well was just a deep hole in the ground, with a 2-foot tall circle of bricks around it, and a bucket tied to a stick in the ground by a rope. I sat down on it, on the other side from my brother, and looked down too.
The girl’s doll was floating in the water below it. The head had been torn off from the body.
I sat there, staring at it with my brother for a few minutes. Above us, some clouds floated by. Nobody ever stops to look, but the sky’s big. If there aren’t any clouds, you can’t really tell, but if there are, you can see just how big it is. I still don’t know why you need clouds to see that.
“Hey, did you take that girl’s doll?” I asked, not sure of any other approach to take.
He nodded, still staring down at the doll, at the water, at the well.
“Why?”
“‘Cause she wouldn’t stop talking to it. That’s all she did, was talk to it!” I couldn’t argue with that - I had a journal full of notes that said pretty much the same thing. She’d play with the others sometimes, but mostly she just talked to her doll.
“But why’d you steal her doll and break it?”
“Because everything breaks. It would have broken sooner or later, so why not stop putting it off and getting it done with?” Back then, I didn’t know what he was talking about. So I just stared at the doll some more. My brother got up, and started walking off.
“You still shouldn’t have done that,” I said, looking up from the doll. “It wasn’t right.”
“Who cares?!” he shouted, storming off. And that was that.
I sighed, and looked back down. The water was too low for me to just reach down and grab the pieces of the doll. I was still intent on returning the doll, but not as much as I had been before. Even knowing that my brother had become a jerk as of late, I still thought that he had to have had a good reason for doing what he did. Stupid me.
I dropped the bucket down into the water, and tried to pull it over to underneath the doll pieces. I managed to get the body the first time. The head washed up against the wall on a small wave, and then floated back out towards the center. I pulled the bucket back up, heavy with all the water, almost too much for my tiny arms. But I managed to get it up, and lifted the body out. I dropped the bucket back down, spilling the water back into the well.
The second time around, I caught the head. After I pulled it out of the bucket, I realized I didn’t know how to get the two pieces back together. I remembered reading something about making glue from animal parts in a book once, but I couldn’t remember which one, let alone where to get any animal parts. It didn’t look like it could be tied back on either.
Everything is falling apart, some things just faster than others. Well, it was bound to happen eventually. I thought, maybe the girl would understand that. Maybe she’d be happy to have her doll back in some form, at least.
I left the well behind me, and walked back to the yard. It was one of the only routes around Port I knew that were more than 10 feet long or so. The girl was where I had last seen her, sitting on a stump and whining about her doll. A few of the other kids had gathered around her, but most were ignoring her. I walked up to her, holding a piece of her doll in each of my hands.
“Here you go,” I said. She looked up from the ground, and into my hands.
“My doll,” she muttered.
“Take it.”
“You broke it. You broke my doll!” She was shouting.
I shook my head, surprised. I didn’t break it, I explained. It was my brother who stole it, and broke it. I was just returning it, and -
“You broke my doll you idiot! You don’t even have a brother! My dad was right, your whole family’s just a bunch of lying thieves who take whatever they want! You idiot!!”
I remembered then. I remembered what I had wrote down in my journal, what I had recorded her talking about to her precious doll. Sometimes, she’d say how her father was ticked off. How he had a bum leg now, and how that no-good thief took what was his. I hadn’t know what she was talking about at the time - I was too busy recording it. But I understood then. I understood why my brother had taken her stupid doll, and broken it.
And then, I was mad. I wasn’t going to let her get away with talking about my family like that, about my dad like that. My hands clenched into fists, without my even realizing it, around the doll parts. I shouted a phrase I had heard before, but my Mom had always told me never to use. “Fuck you!” I shouted, as I squeezed the two pieces of her doll in my hands. I threw them to the ground and stomped, stomped hard on them, crushing them into nothing recognizable. Breaking it completely.
The girl was crying as I stormed off back to the house. And I was glad.
Later that night, Mom finally came home. She didn’t say where she had been, and I didn’t ask. She had probably just been out looking for some plant seeds or something. There was a small woods nearby. It was nothing compared to the pictures of pre-war woods I had in my books, but at least it was still alive. Sometimes, somebody would see some fruit in there. Mom always said she’d like to raise some fruit trees, but she could never find any fruit.
It was dinner time. We had a few pieces of meat from rats my brother would kill with his slingshot, and some corn. As usual. It wasn’t much, but it was more than enough to keep going. Mom refused to have brahmins of any sort, eating them or raising them, so our options were limited.
“So how was your day?” she asked, ripping a rat in half with a knife and fork. You could find silverware pretty much anyplace, but you could only use the type that hadn’t been bombed. Those would kill you, if you used them long enough. You had to go to what were called ‘suburbs’, the type of place Port had been before. Nobody bothered bombing the suburbs, because the bombs were so big, all they had to do was just bomb the cities.
“Fine,” me and my brother both said at the same time. It was always ‘fine’, unless something really interesting happened. It rarely did. Mom nodded, and went back to tearing up her rat. Dinner was never a big talking time, we were too busy actually eating to talk. And that’s the way the rest of dinner went.
It wasn’t until later on that night, as I was trying to go to sleep, that I realized what had happened that day. I had started out trying to help that girl, but I wound up making her problem worse. Even if the doll was headless, at least it was still relatively intact. I had destroyed it completely. I did just what my brother did. She hadn’t even noticed the difference between me and him. And I wondered, knowing that I had acted just as he had, was there one?
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Looking back, this all probably started that day with the girl and her doll. Well, for me at least. For my brother, it started about a year earlier. The day Dad got killed.
That day, Dad went out to hunt down some geckos. He thought it would be nice if we actually ate that day. I don’t remember much about him, since I was only seven or so at the time, but he liked being able to provide food on a daily basis.
We couldn’t just grow brahmin for food. Mom’s side of the family, they didn’t like brahmin. Her and uncle Roge. They never told me why, but they both hated brahmin. So Dad had to go out and hunt down some food. Geckos, mostly.
Geckos didn’t have much meat on them, so they were good for pretty much one day only. Anything larger than a gecko was usually a deathclaw or a radscoprion. Nobody hunts those for food. They’re not that stupid.
So Dad went out to find a gecko or two and put some bullets in them. My brother went with him. They hung out a lot, my dad and my brother. Me, I spent most of my time with my mom. She always needed some help around the house.
The house was whatever building we were living in that week. All of them were falling apart. Some just faster than others.
The bomb wrecked everything. My mom told me about the bomb. I’ve seen Dad throw bottles of old beer with a flaming rag in them at collapsed buildings, so he could make a door. They’d blow up, and destroy everything around them. Mom said the bombs, they did the same thing.
The beer bottles blew up a small circle. The bombs blew up the whole world.
Mom taught me a lot of stuff everybody knew before the bombs. She taught me how to read, how to write, how to add stuff. She said everybody knew this before the bombs. They had to, it was a law. There aren’t many laws anymore. Some towns don’t have any. Port had a few - don’t kill, don’t steal, and don’t rape. Break any of them, the rest of the town was likely to get together and kill you.
Mom also had books, books from before the bomb. Well, that’s pretty much the only type. Unless you kept a journal, like I did. And even then, the blank journal, the paper and the cover, it was made before the bomb. I’ve only seen two or three books made after the bomb. But I read anything I could. Mom had a lot of books, before the bombs fell. So I read through all of them. You can learn a lot reading books.
I learned about animals that were all dead.
I learned about towns that were gone, or wrecked like Port.
I learned about machines that used to fly like bugs, that swam like fishes, that ran like dogs. The dog machines are the only ones left, and they’re just good for the wheels they have.
About the only thing I did learn about, that wasn’t gone, destroyed, wrecked, or ruined, was how to study people. How to watch them, how to understand them. Well, in theory at least. I’d spend days on end watching the other kids through my window. They’d play, and I’d watch. I’d write down what I saw. I’d try to predict what they would do. I learned a lot about people that way.
I didn’t go outside much. I was usually either helping Mom with something, or too busy reading. I must have read every book we had ten times over. All that the other kids would do was run around. Chase each other. Kick things. Waste time.
I was actually doing something important, or at least I thought. I was learning. Mom always told me I was smart. And not to sound stuck up or anything, but I was. I liked learning things, things that those other kids probably would never learn in their entire life. But studying people, that was what I did most. That’s how I got started with writing my journal. I’d just take notes on the other kids.
Charlie likes Susie, that’s why he keeps shoving her into the dirt.
Susie likes Mitch, which is why she keeps kicking him in the balls.
Mitch is an idiot, which is why he keeps letting Susie kick him.
You can learn a lot about people by spending most of your time watching them. I watched my brother a lot. Sometimes, it was like I was watching myself instead of him. Me and my brother, we’re twins. Not a lot of people know what that means. At least, a lot of people born after the bombs. You had to know things before the bombs, it was a law. I guess one of the reasons why I didn’t go out much was because I could just watch my brother, and pretend that was me out there. Most, probably all, of the other kids, they didn’t know I even existed. That was how little I went out. Looking back, maybe this all started earlier than I thought.
But I watched my brother. I watched him most of all, probably. That’s how I know that on that day this whole mess started for him. Me too, maybe. Because Dad, his best friend, was killed by wolves in front of his own eyes. Because when you die, you’re just not there anymore. And that made him upset.
After that, he changed. He used to be one of the friendlier kids out there. He’d break up fights. He’d get everybody to play together. He was nice.
After that, he’d start fights. He’d break everybody apart, just for the heck of it. He was becoming an real jerk, fast. The only people he was still nice to were me and Mom. And Uncle Roge, when he stopped by. Which he didn’t do that often.
Uncle Roge was in the business, according to him and Mom. They’d never say what that was. All me and my brother knew was that Uncle Roge helped out Mom a lot after Dad died. He’d bring over food, money, stims, stuff like that. We liked it when Uncle Roge came over, since that was the only time Mom would let us go out hunting. She was too scared to let us go out on our own, I guess. After Dad got killed.
After Dad got killed, my brother turned into a real jerk. I knew it. Mom knew it. The kids knew it. But nobody tried to do anything. Mom said it would pass, and to just leave him be. I did. I just kept watching him, like I did with the other kids. Like I always did.
The only time me and him would talk was at dinner, sometimes. Or before we went to bed. We talked a lot less after Dad died. Everything changed after Dad died. And my brother never changed back to the way he was before.
But for me, everything started on that day with the girl and her doll.
I woke up late that day. It was already about 10, judging by the shadow of the sundial we had in our yard. I read about them in a book once, and thought it would be helpful to have around. Even now, you can only get electricity in the big cities, and that’s usually only if you own the generator. I thought it would be nice to know what time it was. But, after all that was done and over with, the sundial was the first thing I destroyed. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was the first thing I saw that day.
The first thing I did was I went to look for Mom. There was probably a reason she hadn’t waken me earlier. Our house wasn’t that large, so it didn’t take me long to find out she wasn’t in there. The house we were living in at that point, it had three rooms downstairs. The big room, where the stairs and the door were, and the window where I watched the other kids from. And the two side rooms, a room that would probably be best called a kitchen or a dining room, and a room with a hole in the ground that served as a toilet.
In the backyard, we had seven rows of corn. That was how we got most of our food. We used to have cans with food in them, but after a few years, all the places that they were stored in were emptied. So we had to either hunt, or grow stuff. With Dad gone, growing stuff was our best bet. The dirt around here wasn’t as bad as some places outside Port. We had some underground water, and a well, so it wasn’t as dry as most everyplace else.
There used to be a lot of arguing about who owned the well. Dad and a friend of his settled that eventually, by bringing out their riffles. That was the first time I saw Dad point his riffle at something other than an animal. He shot a few people in the legs, and nobody ever argued about the well again. Everybody owned it.
I didn’t think that was nice, shooting other people. Even if it wasn’t going to kill them, and it was because he had a good reason.
My brother, he was impressed with how Dad stopped the fighting, how he made it so everybody could have the water.
But Mom wasn’t out in the garden. I didn’t know where else to look - most of the time, I was inside or in the yard. Port was bigger than that, but I never went anywhere else. So I went back inside. I’d probably just have gotten lost anyways.
Since I didn’t have anything else to do, I pulled my journal off the windowsill it sat on, and opened it up. Inside were pages filled with names and actions. Who did what with who on when. I wrote down everything I saw. I knew each and every one of the kids out there, even if I didn’t know their names. I knew what they’d done. I thought, if I knew what they did with who and when and why, I’d know what they’d do.
I wrote a lot down about my brother. I thought I knew what he’d do.
I never bothered to write anything about myself in that journal. I thought I already knew what I’d do. But that was before that day with the girl and her doll.
The girl was outside, actually. She was crying to everybody around her who’d listen that her doll was gone. It was just some pre-war doll. If it had a name, I never heard it. If the girl had a name, I never heard it. But I knew that girl loved her doll. She always took it with her. Sometimes she’d even talk to it. I always thought that was creepy. Talking to something that wasn’t real. Looking back, then, a lot of conversations I had were creepy.
I listened to her, through my window, far away. She was definitely upset about the doll. So, I thought I’d help her out. Mom always told me to help out others. If I couldn’t help out Mom right now - I wondered again where she was - I figured I might as well help that girl.
I looked through my journal, my notes, my records of who did what when and, sometimes, why. I looked for somebody who didn’t like that girl. I looked for somebody who liked to steal. I looked for somebody who was just a plain jerk.
I found my brother sitting on the well’s rim. I didn’t know where many things were, but I knew where the well was. My brother spent a lot of time there, after Dad died. I could see it from my window, even though it was pretty far away. There was a straight path there.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said back. He was peering down into the well. The well was just a deep hole in the ground, with a 2-foot tall circle of bricks around it, and a bucket tied to a stick in the ground by a rope. I sat down on it, on the other side from my brother, and looked down too.
The girl’s doll was floating in the water below it. The head had been torn off from the body.
I sat there, staring at it with my brother for a few minutes. Above us, some clouds floated by. Nobody ever stops to look, but the sky’s big. If there aren’t any clouds, you can’t really tell, but if there are, you can see just how big it is. I still don’t know why you need clouds to see that.
“Hey, did you take that girl’s doll?” I asked, not sure of any other approach to take.
He nodded, still staring down at the doll, at the water, at the well.
“Why?”
“‘Cause she wouldn’t stop talking to it. That’s all she did, was talk to it!” I couldn’t argue with that - I had a journal full of notes that said pretty much the same thing. She’d play with the others sometimes, but mostly she just talked to her doll.
“But why’d you steal her doll and break it?”
“Because everything breaks. It would have broken sooner or later, so why not stop putting it off and getting it done with?” Back then, I didn’t know what he was talking about. So I just stared at the doll some more. My brother got up, and started walking off.
“You still shouldn’t have done that,” I said, looking up from the doll. “It wasn’t right.”
“Who cares?!” he shouted, storming off. And that was that.
I sighed, and looked back down. The water was too low for me to just reach down and grab the pieces of the doll. I was still intent on returning the doll, but not as much as I had been before. Even knowing that my brother had become a jerk as of late, I still thought that he had to have had a good reason for doing what he did. Stupid me.
I dropped the bucket down into the water, and tried to pull it over to underneath the doll pieces. I managed to get the body the first time. The head washed up against the wall on a small wave, and then floated back out towards the center. I pulled the bucket back up, heavy with all the water, almost too much for my tiny arms. But I managed to get it up, and lifted the body out. I dropped the bucket back down, spilling the water back into the well.
The second time around, I caught the head. After I pulled it out of the bucket, I realized I didn’t know how to get the two pieces back together. I remembered reading something about making glue from animal parts in a book once, but I couldn’t remember which one, let alone where to get any animal parts. It didn’t look like it could be tied back on either.
Everything is falling apart, some things just faster than others. Well, it was bound to happen eventually. I thought, maybe the girl would understand that. Maybe she’d be happy to have her doll back in some form, at least.
I left the well behind me, and walked back to the yard. It was one of the only routes around Port I knew that were more than 10 feet long or so. The girl was where I had last seen her, sitting on a stump and whining about her doll. A few of the other kids had gathered around her, but most were ignoring her. I walked up to her, holding a piece of her doll in each of my hands.
“Here you go,” I said. She looked up from the ground, and into my hands.
“My doll,” she muttered.
“Take it.”
“You broke it. You broke my doll!” She was shouting.
I shook my head, surprised. I didn’t break it, I explained. It was my brother who stole it, and broke it. I was just returning it, and -
“You broke my doll you idiot! You don’t even have a brother! My dad was right, your whole family’s just a bunch of lying thieves who take whatever they want! You idiot!!”
I remembered then. I remembered what I had wrote down in my journal, what I had recorded her talking about to her precious doll. Sometimes, she’d say how her father was ticked off. How he had a bum leg now, and how that no-good thief took what was his. I hadn’t know what she was talking about at the time - I was too busy recording it. But I understood then. I understood why my brother had taken her stupid doll, and broken it.
And then, I was mad. I wasn’t going to let her get away with talking about my family like that, about my dad like that. My hands clenched into fists, without my even realizing it, around the doll parts. I shouted a phrase I had heard before, but my Mom had always told me never to use. “Fuck you!” I shouted, as I squeezed the two pieces of her doll in my hands. I threw them to the ground and stomped, stomped hard on them, crushing them into nothing recognizable. Breaking it completely.
The girl was crying as I stormed off back to the house. And I was glad.
Later that night, Mom finally came home. She didn’t say where she had been, and I didn’t ask. She had probably just been out looking for some plant seeds or something. There was a small woods nearby. It was nothing compared to the pictures of pre-war woods I had in my books, but at least it was still alive. Sometimes, somebody would see some fruit in there. Mom always said she’d like to raise some fruit trees, but she could never find any fruit.
It was dinner time. We had a few pieces of meat from rats my brother would kill with his slingshot, and some corn. As usual. It wasn’t much, but it was more than enough to keep going. Mom refused to have brahmins of any sort, eating them or raising them, so our options were limited.
“So how was your day?” she asked, ripping a rat in half with a knife and fork. You could find silverware pretty much anyplace, but you could only use the type that hadn’t been bombed. Those would kill you, if you used them long enough. You had to go to what were called ‘suburbs’, the type of place Port had been before. Nobody bothered bombing the suburbs, because the bombs were so big, all they had to do was just bomb the cities.
“Fine,” me and my brother both said at the same time. It was always ‘fine’, unless something really interesting happened. It rarely did. Mom nodded, and went back to tearing up her rat. Dinner was never a big talking time, we were too busy actually eating to talk. And that’s the way the rest of dinner went.
It wasn’t until later on that night, as I was trying to go to sleep, that I realized what had happened that day. I had started out trying to help that girl, but I wound up making her problem worse. Even if the doll was headless, at least it was still relatively intact. I had destroyed it completely. I did just what my brother did. She hadn’t even noticed the difference between me and him. And I wondered, knowing that I had acted just as he had, was there one?
