80 AP (80 Years After Peace)

There’s an exact moment of our perfectly planned lives where everyone walks the streets at the same time and we lie in wait for it. Each of us, stationed at different points throughout the city holding a stack of cleanly pressed papers. If we had covered our steps well enough, no one will know we are here, maybe no one knows we even exist.
By now the school should have realized that I was no longer going to be present in class. Who would come to school when they are wanted for murder? And not just murder but the murder of one’s own grandfather. Who would risk being arrested let alone live through the great shame that comes with such an accusation? I for one cannot risk either because I am innocent.
For eighty years, our world has been perfect and peaceful, that is in the eyes of our esteemed government. The world before that was in turmoil. Wars plagued the earth killing innocent people, whether they had held a gun or just walked the streets hoping for a normal life. Human inventions also littered the earth, their fumes destroying what was last of our air and new wars over whose resources belonged to who began.
When nation’s populations decreased due to the killing and famine, a group of humans stood up, wishing the turmoil to end. The group was led by a man named Villo, a man whose wealth and eloquence won the hearts of many individuals. Villo had a plan to unite the world and using his skills, he was able to do so. It took many years, but soon the wars and greed diminished and people began to call the era a time of peace. But in order to achieve what he would call peace, Villo had to change the world using specific rules and regulations. He started with the banning of vehicles and then after much convincing, he was able to ban books.
He told the world that books were the main source for all new ideas and new ideas were what birthed war. This was a time of fire. Police came knocking on our doors as families handed over their books that they had collected and treasured over the years. Bonfires littered the streets and townspeople stood gazing into the coals, watching the only source of their history go up in flames.
For a time, the world was happy… then Villo became power hungry. He felt that the only way for his world to be truly perfect was to create a race that was once called superhuman. Anyone without blonde hair or blue eyes was frowned upon and teachers were told to re-enforce this.
I remember sitting in my hard school seat, my blonde hair and my blue eyes sparkling, watching as my brown haired and brown eyed teacher instructed that we were all better than her. Soon, we all believed her. I was praised for the beauty of my appearance and my head became filled with arrogance. I would scoff at those not like me as they passed me in the streets.
My grandfather tried to teach me differently but it was difficult, especially when you’re conditioned your entire life to think otherwise. Then his words began to sink in.
I was walking home from school one day when I witnessed one of the abductions. In our world, there are things that we do not speak of. The abductions are a form of some of those things. The non blonde blue eyed population was increasing, and they were seen as a threat until slowly some people belonging to this group began to disappear.
The girl was hunched over, carrying a large sack of grains. I watched from the street corner as she put down the sack and wiped her tanned brow. As her eyes were closed, men dressed in black slipped from the shadows of a nearby alleyway and grabbed a hold of her. She fought back, her legs kicking in the air, her skirt tearing. The men yelled at her to stop but she only continued to retaliate so one of the bigger men took a bayonet from his side and hit her over the head with it. Her body went limp and she sunk to her knees. The black hair covered her face as blood dripped from the wood on her head, down her chin, and onto the cobblestone street. She looked up from the ground, hair falling from her face, and looked over to me with golden eyes.
I stood still, shocked at what I’d just seen. The men quickly pulled the girl from the ground and dragged her into the alley. I didn’t move for a long time after that. I remember my grandfather getting angry with me as I walked in the door, late for supper. I listened more to what he had said after that day.
He would tell me stories he knew from books that his parents used to read and stories about what the world used to be like when people were free to do as the pleased, men and woman could choose their jobs instead of getting them handed to them by the government. I began to feel hopeful for our world, hopeful that it could change and young girls wouldn’t get beaten on the road just for the way they looked. I began to treasure what my grandfather told me.
They killed him for his beliefs. That’s what Finn had told me, they distinguished him as a threat, assassinated him, and then accused me. I remember the smell that filled my house that night. It was the smell of iron, dirt, and blood. The blood that painted his walls and the sheet that was wrapped around his lifeless body. When I was kneeling at his side, his blood poured onto my hands…

I looked at my hands in the light of the evening sun, and the pit of grief reformed itself in my stomach. Finn looked over at me from where he was perched on the building rooftop.
“Are you okay Colin?” He asked, looking at my hands.
I nodded curtly, “Yeah… just remembering…”
“He died for a great cause.” Finn said, smiling sympathetically. I smiled back; I knew the cause he was speaking of, me. I was the one that decided it was time for my grandfather’s idea to become a reality.

After he’d been killed, I found a hatch in the shed as I looked for a shovel to bury him with. I’d never seen the hatch before but deep within myself, I knew my grandfather wanted me to find it. So I opened it and climbed down into a dark room.
Matches and a lamp lay in wait for me and as I put the match to the wick, I jumped back in surprise. Books. They lined whatever space was available in the walls. Thousands of them, some piled on the floor, some piled on a series of desks placed around the room. There was an entire nation’s history lying in secret beneath my shed and my grandfather had never told me.
At first I felt anger, anger for his secrecy, and anger that he hadn’t shared these with more people. Then I felt an immense amount of yearning and I dove into the pile of books. It was when I came across a book entitled the Holocaust, that I stopped. He’d mentioned this word before.
I opened its pages and began to read. Word after word of pure terror and slowly as I read further into the book, I began to feel fear. This piece of history had repeated itself and no one was aware of it. The dictatorship of Hitler… the discrimination…. The Arian race…. The genocide…. It had all happened again. I sat crying in that room for a long time, crying for my nation, and crying for numbers of people that had been killed all because we’d thought we were better than them. A rumbling shook the room…

I looked down below the building. People were walking out onto the streets, men heading home from their jobs, woman from their socials, and children from their schooling. This was the exact moment when everyone poured into the streets at the same time.
“Are you ready?” Finn called from the other side of the roof.
I smiled and looked down at the papers I held in my hands. He’d been planning this for years …

The police had come to arrest me but Finn rescued me. It turned out that while he was busy guarding his secret, he’d made a large amount of friends who shared his belief in the matter. Finn was the first to approach my grandfather and because of this, they had become great friends. He was the man that my grandfather had appointed to me if ever something were to happen to me since I had no parents to go to. The time I spent with Finn, was the first time I had actually felt like I had a father. My grandfather was always the wise one but with Finn, I felt like I had someone who could be both a provider of wisdom, and my friend.
My grandfather had been making plans behind my back. In the woods far back behind my house, a lodge had been built, and within that lodge, a printing press. After a week of working alongside these people who wished the world to change. I decided it was time to put the printing press to work. We were going to mass produce pages and pages displaying excerpts from the book describing the holocaust. And when the town’s people walked into the streets, we would throw those papers down from the roofs and it would rain the truth upon them.

I looked at the paper that I held in my hands, and smiled. It was time.
Finn looked over at me, his face matching my smile, and took a mirror from his pocket. The sun reflected down onto his mirror and suddenly a chain of flashing lights reached across our town. Footsteps reached my ears.
I looked behind just as the rooftop door burst open, and police ran onto the tarmac. Someone had not covered their steps.
“Now!” Finn shouted, panicking. And he threw his papers down just as a gunshot sounded and my papers went flying. White mixed with red, and I was falling. I looked up to the rooftop, Finn’s tear soaked face looking down. He had been like a father to me… I looked beside him and saw my grandfather smiling down upon me. Then my body hit the cobblestone, and the last thing I could think was “don’t shoot the messenger.” My blood flowed through the cracks in the road as fingers picked up the papers strewn on the ground. Red stains accompanied the ink. People all over the town were reading the truth and those first lines “it all started with a man named Adolf Hitler.” Eighty years After Peace and we would have it again.

Iron

There is an old man who sits on the corner of Beth and McKay Avenue and talks. To any passerby, his words would sound like the ramblings of an insane man, but if you listen, if you truly tune into what he is saying, something within you is stirred because deep down, you feel that whatever he is saying is the truth.
I was walking to work when I first listened to him. My mind was empty as I walked down those busy streets, too used to my daily routine. At times like that, any thought could have popped into my head but instead of my own voice filling my empty mind, his voice took over.
“Iron.” He had said and it was the seriousness, the sheer intensity of how he delivered that one word which caused me to look over and meet the emerald green eyes of the pale old man. His facial expression did not change and he kept his piercing stare as he continued to speak.
“Iron fills this city and people do not understand the poison that it holds for both the mind and the body. The buildings poison the mind to believe there’s nothing else out there and the body becomes polluted, impure, plagued with disturbance. I see the evidence in the sunken faces of youth and the bodies lying broken on the sidewalks. This is why they exile us here from my world. They exile us to become poisoned and die.”
A tear formed at the edge of the old man’s eye and I stood back in alarm. A pit formed at the base of my stomach and I turned away from him, too afraid to stay. I tried to push his words from my mind and hurried on to my office.
The words came flooding back to me around midday and they peeled away at my mind until they were the only thing I could think of. Something about what he had said disturbed me and I knew I had to go back to him. So I gathered my things and slipped out of the door unnoticed.
He was not in the same place as he was in the morning. I scanned the corner for him until finally my eyes caught the sight of a pale figure sitting in the darkness of an alleyway.
“I’ve been sitting here for two years and never have one of you creatures come back.” He said as I slowly sat in front of him and gazed into his weathered face.
“Your world.” I whispered, hoping he would take the prompt, and he did.
“Ah yes,” He sighed, “my world.”
He smiled nostalgically and began to tell me the story of his world. There is no iron in his world, he explained, for his people are allergic to it. His cities are built with stone and wood. He told me that humans don’t realize that they too are allergic to the iron. The body requires wilderness and nature to be truly calm. When he finished, he told me he was exiled by his people and left here to die.
Slowly, his eyes closed and he fell into a deep sleep. I knew then that it was my time to leave. His story lulled me to sleep later that night.
The next morning, I looked for him again on the street corner but he wasn’t there. I walked to the alleyway and searched for that pale face. There was a quilt with beautiful patchwork lying in the dirt of the ground. I walked into the darkness to get a closer look.
The quilt moved suddenly and a hand shot out grabbing my own. I looked down upon the old man but his face was so caved in and ill looking that he was almost unrecognizable.
He smiled and whispered, “Thank you for coming back.” Then he closed his eyes and continued to sleep with a smile on his face. I shook my head sadly and wondered if I’d ever see him again after today.
I left for work early the next morning before the sun rose and quickly ran back to the alleyway. It was empty and the darkness seemed sad and haunting. I knew deep down that the old man would not be there anymore.
His quilt lay in the dirt but this time, it did not cradle the old man beneath its patchwork. I put my bag down and sat on his empty quilt. I watched as the sun rose beyond the city, painting it in gold and I swear, just then, that I caught a glimpse of another world, his world, just beyond those buildings.