“By bus or car, By the sway of train over a long bridge,/ We wanted to get out.” Gary Soto
by Jessica Shelley
The City’s gray cement horizons prevented early risers from rising with the sun and daydreamers from dreaming. The dull gray light perpetually shown down upon the massive waves of people walking to and from their jobs at equal paces. The faces in the crowd were always solemn, the lack of light casting shadows across sagging cheeks and wrinkled skin. Small children held onto their mothers with equal misery plastered around their eyes and little to no hope of innocence left within them. Their tiny limbs were lost in the sea of bodies. There was no use swimming and so they held on to their parents, their sinking ship, as it was all they had ever known. For these were the people and the children of the future that you may have read about, all fifty billion of them, all equal, all the same, in every miserable way.
The absence of sound in the City just reassured us that our own personal misery was mutual. It was as if the entire population was resting and the City was just waiting for me to take my first breath.
We used ancient clocks that beeped at the turn of every hour to count the days. Without these decaying devises, we would never know of the passage of time. When I was born, my mother told me that the clocks beeped 14 times before I decided to leave her womb. Harper, she called me.
Our building number was #46,990,234 and there was little that a young boy could do in the City except play with the other miserable children.
“Harper, don’t ask if you can go play with the other children in the other buildings. That’s forbidden.” His mother groaned with annoyance, her face drooping ever more with a pathetic frown.
“But, why?” he asked with defeat, even though he knew the answer, since he had heard it many times before.
“All the buildings are the same. The people are the same. Just play with the children in this building.”
And that was that. Harper stayed within his own building with his mother as his only companion for the first twelve years of his life. He had no father. Before Harper was born, his father had decided that he had had enough of living in the City. During his three hundred and fifty thousandth, three hundred and ninety-ninth hour, without telling his pregnant wife, Harper’s father ventured into building #1 with hundreds of others and spent his last hour waiting in a line to be incinerated. He had heard the clocks beep 350, 400 times. He died along with the masses of people who spent their final hours in a line waiting to die, knowing that there was no heaven in a world without a sky.
As Harper grew up, he found it incredibly difficult to play with the children in his building. The other children had an amazing ability to make him feel as hopeless as them, trapped within their concrete boxes, playing with their concrete toys. Harper would try to spend time with them, but just couldn’t bare it. He’d run back to his room and pull out his crayons. With various shades of blue, yellow, pink and orange, Harper would recreate the place in his dreams.
Harper began to spend more and more time within his whitewashed bedroom, drawing pictures and placing them on his walls. But Harper soon realized that he didn’t want to spend all his time in his room, talking to himself and drawing pictures of a world that he’d never find within his own concrete box. So he devised a plan. He waited until his mother was sound asleep and snuck past the incompetent patrol at the door, too dumb to see the young boy crawling on the floor in front of his desk. When Harper reacted the outside, no alarms were ringing in his ears and he was free.
This was the first time that Harper had been in the streets without the massive crowd pushing its way past the buildings. The street was deserted. Harper closed his eyes, took a slow breath and began walking along the street. His heart was beating so hard in his chest that he wondered if the sound of it would alert the patrols. This only made it beat harder. Harper stalled to take a look around him in apprehension, not a single thing moved. That is, until a building’s door across the street was jerked open and a tiny voice called out, “Hey! Hey You! Are you stupid or something? There’s a patrol coming by in the next 10 seconds. Get your butt in here!”
Shocked by the broken silence, Harper crouched and ran, covering his head. When he reached the building, two small hands jutted out and grabbed him by his perfectly pressed dress shirt. “You are crazy or are you stupid? Geez. Maybe it’s a little bit of both.”
Harper looked over the boy sitting in front of him. He had curly blonde hair tossed on top of his pasty white head and a mouth that seemed to never know when to stop moving. “… and why the heck were you covering you head? There’s no use trying to protect your head with your hands, unless your hands are bulletproof!”
Impervious to the boy’s abuse, Harper introduced himself.
“Why hello Harper, I’m Jackson, the boy who just saved your stupid life. You’re lucky I was here, waiting for the patrol to pass so that I could go out in the street too. You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.” He replied, irritated by Harper’s lack of gratitude. “Anyways, I think you should come with me.”
Harper followed the boy, wondering where exactly Jackson was taking him. He climbed about ten flights of stairs and when he reached the eleventh landing, Jackson motioned for him to go through an ominous steel door, situated before him. Harper gave Jackson a quick inquisitive glance and then turned towards the door. Without looking back, he turned the knob and was instantly blinded.
He awoke to the sounds of a girl’s giggling voice. “I love it when they faint.” Harper strained his eyes trying to find the girl who spoke, but found it impossible to see. He cleared his throat and pleaded, “Please help me. I can’t see.”
A boy’s voice this time, “Wow, this one sure is a whiner. Where’d you find him Jackson? Cause, I propose we send him back.”
Another voice joined the conversation, “Quiet Lyle, you act as if you were born first. I’m five minutes older. Therefore, I’m five minutes wiser and I say that we give this whiner a chance. Jackson obviously knows what he’s do-"
Harper interrupted the second girl “Excuse me, but who are you? What have you done to me?”
“Don’t worry Harper, you’ll get used to the light soon enough.”
Harper was almost overwhelmed hearing Jackson’s familiar voice among the strangers. But, the words he spoke confused him even more. Light? The light in the City never blinded him before.
“I don’t understand.” Harper’s vision was slowly coming back and he could make out five blurry figures standing around him.
The other boy’s voice started up again, “Well, seems you’re the newest member of the Children of Light. The sixth. Jackson chose you because… so why did you chose him anyways?”
Jackson gave Harper a friendly punch on the arm. “I chose Harper because he was daring enough to go out into the streets while a patrol was roaming.”
The other figures shook their heads and laughed at his carelessness in the face of death. At the same time they patted him on the back and Harper felt a rush of pride turn his face bright red.
Now that Harper’s vision had returned to normal he could see that he was sitting on the floor of a generic whitewashed room. Yet, there seemed to be a brightness emanating from a small crack in one of the walls. None of the strangers spoke to Harper as he made his way to the wall. The brightness that had blinded him earlier was now dancing upon his skin. He moved his fingertips over the crack and felt that it was warm. How was it possible?
“This is amazing. Jackson, this is light?”
The five strangers just nodded and smiled, amused at Harper’s amazement.
They eventually introduced themselves and Harper soon began his true exploration of the City and of the light.
So, he had found friends in the other buildings after all. Their leader, Jackson was from building #46,990,231, the twins Lyle and Mona from were building #46,990,249, and the stern Wallace and the constantly giggling Rhea were from #46,990, 230. They became fast friends due to their shared rebelliousness that led them from their buildings while their parents slept, and into the streets of the City. With their quick feet and youthful energy, not yet destroyed by the hopelessness of the City, the six mischievous companions made their way through the streets, narrowly avoiding the armored men patrolling the area.
There was no space in between the concrete buildings to hide from the patrols; the only space was the one you could stare up at, two miles above your head. Occasionally you could spot an elderly gazing up at the sky for just a moment, but then they would lower their head once again and sigh. It was no longer the sky, the sky they had known, before the buildings were masses of concrete and the light was gray. All they had known, was now a lifeless gray void hovering heavily above their heads.
(not finished)
This is where my story was going:
- sky obscured by buildings, only gray light
- Harper born, finds crack of light in room, mesmerized by it
- Gang of children from several buildings, led by Jackson, become Children of the Light, so Harper, Jackson, Lyle and Mona (twins), Wallace and Rea.
- ends with massive earth quake, tears down city
- sets people free to explore, but instead adults cower in the rubble of the city and the Children of the Light go explore new world
- shows the innocence and adventurous nature of children
