skonen_blades

The badlands are full of unregulated children. They cry in the night while I patrol the walls of The City. My parents were tested for a full year before they could procreate. I have no allergies, no deformities, no glasses, and no congenital jack-in-the-box surprises waiting for me in old age. I’m thankful for eugenics. I’ve heard horror stories of the times before.

Here on the wall, though, I am haunted by the cries. It’s the middle of the night. Wild families in the badlands kill each other for resources, colicky babies cry out for food that might not ever comes. Short lives out there. Such short lives.

If they present themselves at the gate and submit to testing, they can be accepted and re-educated if they meet the gene reqs. Usually, they fail those tests and can’t meet the requirements genealogically. When we turn them back to the cursed grounds outside, they are shunned by their former tribes as a traitor. It usually only takes a few pathetic days for their bodies to be spotted on the plains before it’s taken and butchered and cooked.

They make villages sometimes but usually they’re not prepared for the weather. I think they’re getting dumber out there, not smarter.

We don’t raid or attack. We have everything we need inside these walls. All we do is hoard and protect.

Homo secundus. Second-wave humans. The next rung on the ladder. We have no racial purity here. Everyone is mixed to give us all a leg up on herd immunity. Mix and mix and mix is our motto. Each one of us is a fifty-flavour milkshake, an orchard of family trees so tangled that we have to leave it up to the central computer to tell us who’s safe to mate with productively.

I’ve been courting Renee. We have our samples on file and we’ve submitted our application for children to the central fertility angel facility. Our fingers are crossed. We’ve been practicing a lot during our long nights together. I’m sure once our controls are removed that we’ll be fruitful.

Until then, though, I patrol the walls during my conscripted security shifts and listen to all the babies in the wild. The thousands of the dirty, unwanted babies in the dark, dying by the hundreds every day. Sometimes I see fertility as a curse. Those poor kids never had a chance.

Our children will be loved. Our children will be perfect.


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I

This is the curse of admiral’s mother
Who watches her son sail away.
He stands with a rock for a face on the prow
And is lashed by the sea’s angry spray
Six missions he’s gone and returned to this port
Where his mother still glares out and hates
She cries salty tears like the ocean he sails on
and waits and she waits and she waits.
Six times she has thought of his death on the waves
His yelling while taking on water
She sees him all riddled with bullets and drowning
While sharks slither in to the slaughter
She knew a young boy who resembles that man
Who cried and who spat and who slept
She changed him and taught him and led him and helped him
while time and his ambition crept
From dark timely shadows to age and promote him
And make the man into a leader
An admiral brilliant and cunning and shrewd
And nowadays he did not need her
He stopped by for tea and he left for his war
She’s watching his ship leave the bay
More than an ocean now keeps them apart
She raised him and he went away.

II

This is the curse of the glass blower’s daughter
A copper-haired freckled young girl
A puff from a pipe with hot glass on the end
Had ended her young father’s world.
The kiln held a liquid hot orange, intense
She’d stick the long pipe in and heave
She’d lean from the heat and turn red and she’d lift
And with each sweaty movement she’d grieve
She’d ‘sight’ down the pipe like a glass-blowing sniper
And feel the pipe’s weight in her glove
Bagpipes would split from her lungful of air
And with all of her strength she blew love
Like playing a trumpet with one silent note
With a skin-searing heat that could kill
It ignites both your lungs, just a whiff of this song
Made of grief, melting rock, and of skill
She lived to look down the long length of the pipe
And shape the red lava with breath
A bubble of air in the glass growing larger
A grandchild’s heart cheating death
She sold all her works ‘cept her first broken piece
that was made on the day her dad died
cold tears for his death had hit the hot glass
and shattered the piece open wide
the lesson was clear and she laughed ever since
and her pain was put into her art
her love was her grief and her grief was her glass
and her glass was her still-beating heart

III

This is curse of the garbageman’s niece
Who was orphaned when young by a crash
And shipped to her distant estranged crazy uncle
Who picked up the whole city’s trash
She found a new life in the alleys of others
And toys in what others threw out.
She danced in the junk and sang songs in the trash
Did puppet shows with rotting trout.
She happily stank like her uncle Ovitna
And never knew sadness or fear
Her immune system rocked but her skin was all smeared
With garbage from both far and near
Beneath the thick crust of fish scales and paste
Made from eggplant and old bits of glue
She REEKED with a smile and flounced with a STINK
Made of cabbages, dead cats and poo
Her curse was that she was thought of as a curse
By her uncle for he did not love her
He did not want her there. He did not like to dance.
Now and then he would hit her and shove her.
But for her every day was utopian glee
With her stink and her trash and her toys
She never had friends or kisses or pets
Or schooling or manners or boys.
Her curse was a curse by our standard, not hers
For she lives her days with a smile
She’s laughing there now in the festering trash
And she’s been laughing all of the while.




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