Time Stopped
We didn’t know the world as we knew it was going to end. That our easy, everyday living was going to become so very difficult. We in our blind arrogance broke the world. We had been warned, we knew of the extinctions but like Nero we fiddled while our world burned.
It didn’t happen in an instant. The cracks appeared but we ignored them. They widened, we still ignored them. After all the damage wasn’t visible, to the privileged, it was easy to pretend that nothing bad was happening elsewhere.
How was it easy to pretend you ask, it was a simple as picking up a glossy magazine and being diverted by our imaginary friends and acquaintances? We thought we knew these glossy pictured people whose faces smile up at us from tabletops. Just as if they were family photos.
These well known strangers who appeared on screens in our living rooms and displayed the way in which our lives should be could be lived. Their words were gospel. Scripted pearls fell from their lips and were gathered up by the masses and held up as shining examples of reason.
Our world broke and burned and we like Bacchae danced in drunken madness. The world broke and time as we knew it stopped.
Spiral Descends
I looked at the old woman hunched by the fire telling her story of our broken world. She still had pride that she had lived before the now. For us the now was her broken world. We knew nothing of gloss, surrounded as we were by the bits and pieces of broken technology. Scavenging for what little food we could get, keeping ourselves out of the hands of the users and abusers. There were still those you lived well beyond the squalor of the broken cities.
I stood wrapped in the shadows at the edge of the firelight and felt the coil tightening inside. I had an urge to smash something. She talked of a time when they had freedom, they had choices, and they could effect change. But they threw it away, and now she sits here and bewails the loss, reminiscing of beauty. My anger was warmer than the miserable fire she sat beside.
How much of a loss would it be if she fell through the cracks of this broken world? People come, people go and no-one really know where they belong. She didn’t belong here.
Darkness Arises
This was the third body we had found with its head smashed in. The third traveller who had shared our fire I could only conclude that some-one from out camp was the killer. The sanctity of human life was not held in high regard, not the way it had been in the old world. The only value of life now was the ability to provide, to be a productive part of the group. Was this killer a productive part of the group.
As a territory guard I had a responsibility to keep danger away from our group, but if the danger lurks within the group what then is my responsibility. Quickly the body was stripped of all useful items. I turned back to the camp my immediate responsibility was to let our leaders know.
That night I watched the members of our group, one of them was allowing their darkness to arise. The question in my mind was; would that darkness, engulf us all? Would someone’s hunger for violence mean that every day of our lives we would have to watch over our shoulder waiting for the darkness to overtake us?
The sanctity of human life is not held in high regard, but each of us does hold our own pitiful life in high regard.
