Weapons for the Fallen Read online

  That was also the summer that Daddy taught us to play the guitar, which presented an interesting limitation to our connection that we had not anticipated but also initiated changes that strengthened our minds.

  “Welp,” Daddy had said one evening after dinner, “if you are going to be sitting in that chair all summer we should give you something to do with your hands, Georgie Porgie.”

  “Idol hands a’a the devil’s workshop,” Momma interjected with a quote from the bible in her strong southern draw as if Georgie needed convincing. Daddy had played the guitar in the evenings after dinner for as far back as we could remember, and the music was something that signified peace and comfort in an uncertain time.

  I don’t remember what colorful affirmative exclamations Georgie squealed at his offer, but I do remember the shade of her thoughts as her face lit with excitement. It was the bright orange color of the sun when it’s coming up over the trees in June. I felt Georgie’s elation and let it fill and warm the part of me that was worried and afraid for her. I wasn’t lying when I told her that her happiness was my happiness every night before bed. They began to practice every afternoon after dinner while I laid on the couch, letting her do the learning for both of us while re-reading the old magazines that were made before our parents were born. Momma kept the magazines as an archive of the past. They were filled with pictures and stories about what life was like before the war—before the collapse of our territory’s society.

  Georgie progressed quickly, and I would watch the colors of the music dancing in her mind. One night, when Daddy and Georgie had finished their lesson, I lifted the guitar and fit it on my lap awkwardly. I knew how to play from Georgie’s mind, and I wanted to feel the colors for myself. Connected to Georgie’s consciousness, I could read the music, and I knew which cords to strike, but when I did it, I couldn’t play the guitar skillfully as she now could—my body just didn’t know how to. It lacked the muscle memory and physical recognition that could only be fostered through practice. When reading the music and striking the chords, which were actions taken directly from her mind, my efforts sounded clumsy and broken, where hers flowed smoothly. She strained with the effort of trying to push the knowledge harder, and my frustration peaked as my fingers pushed on the chords too softly, and then too hard, and then too slow. My brain knew how to play, thanks to Georgie—it was my body that couldn’t do it. She eyed me narrowly in confusion. We were of the same mind, but our bodies were separate entities.

  “Looks like the affinity for musical talent is spreading around here,” Daddy said at my determined attempts. He began to go through the motions with me. “There is nothing analytical about music. It’s a feeling—you have to feel the music when you play it,” Daddy said to my frustration as I clumsily plunked the chords. That made no sense to me at all, but after weeks of practice and teaching my fingers how to strike the chords correctly, I began to understand what he had meant. Georgie was still better at it. When she played, I would watch the inside of her mind. I could see her dimming the thinking and reasoning side of her brain and embracing the sound, which resembled an emotion inside of her consciousness. I simply could not do that. That summer was only the beginning—subtle differences began to emerge in our minds as we embraced and fostered them. Though, I’m not sure that ‘differences’ is the right word to use because we took from each other. It was more like locational variances in knowledge and skills that were available to both of us. She held some while I held the rest. Our brains began to work as one as we slowly began to focus on strengthening the areas of the other’s weaknesses. The decision was unspoken. The changes in mental focus did not constitute differences between us, because we each used what the other had. By the end of the summer, my analytical abilities were formidable, and her emotional capacity was a tidal wave. Together, we were a singular entity that possessed strength in both.

  2

  …

  DAMAGED PEACH

  OVER THE NEXT few years, life became more difficult. The war that had been raging on foreign shores returned to our territory, and Daddy said that the attacks in the west were going to mean changes for everyone. It was the beginning of the ‘great eastern fast for prosperity,’ as the Authority of the Requital Republic coined it. As a child, all I knew was that this meant that they were taking our food. I remember imagining the Authority as a big greasy fat man in a military uniform with his gut hanging over his pants. I now know, however, that they had begun sanctioning mandatory collections of goods from farms and families in the east to support the troops that were suffering deafening blows in the west. Enemy forces had developed advanced stealth technology that had allowed them to bomb long-range locations effectively. No one knew it was coming until everything was already gone, and it was time to put out the fires and collect what was left of the dead. An assault against the Requital Republic’s resources had been launched, which had completely demolished their major crops and livestock hubs, rendering the land un-farmable in a lot of the central area of the territory. With the resources to feed itself destroyed, the Authority had responded by taking from the people.

  Most families in my town had modest farms that produced only enough to feed their own household. My family had a broad spread of land on a freshwater lake, which meant that we were one of the few in the area that produced enough to sell additional goods for a modest profit at the market and pay local workers to farm our land and sell our goods for us. When the fast happened, all of that changed. The fast took nearly everything from us. We could no longer afford to pay our workers to farm the fields, and they left us in response. The burden of the labor of twenty men rested on the shoulders of my father. Georgie and I began working with him—caring for the crops and harvesting the peaches. Filling our days with labor made our education a task, where it had always been a simple part of our lives before. There were no days off. To get the work done, every hour of daylight counted. We collapsed into bed every evening, exhausted and hungry. We woke up in the morning to a meager plate of food that never filled our bellies.

  “It will last longa’ if you take smalla’ bites,” Momma would advise at the breakfast table. As a child, it wasn’t significant to me that Momma never had a plate of food in front of her at breakfast, or that Daddy was already out in the field working when we were called in to eat. In hindsight, I can clearly see what she was sacrificing for us, as she sat straight-backed and proper at the table, hearing us complain about the small portions. It is only apparent to me now that she was sacrificing her share of the food to make mine and Georgie’s bigger, while Daddy was already out working in the orchards, none the wiser.

  Momma was a history professor back before Georgie and I were born. She says that back then, things like widespread knowledge and education for everyone were not only allowed, but encouraged. She frequently spoke of the history of our territory and what the lives of our ancestors were like before the great fall. She says that the territory used to be separated into fifty different states, and everyone got to make decisions together about what would happen, and how they wanted to live their lives. She says that there was equality among people and that anyone could become anything that they wanted with a little hard work. She used to tell us that one day the war would be over, and we would rebuild and become that once-great place again. Daddy always said that she was a dreamer. As a realist, I was inclined to agree with him.

  I’ve seen pictures of what Momma looked like before I was born. She was beautiful—comparable to a pink and orange summer sunset—the kind that you can’t help but stop and admire. Though the years have faded her golden hair and skin, I still sporadically see glimpses of what she used to be. She is still as beautiful as a sunset to me. Even under dire and inhospitable circumstances, she still fixes her hair, keeps her fancy wardrobe of dresses in good repair, and clings to her strong southern aristocratic accent, despite the fact that poverty and oppression have beaten the desire to do any of those things out of nearly everyone else in town. I would probably be more understanding of her passion for dreaming about what used to be if she hadn’t given us ridiculous names in honor of her undying love of our territory’s past. My name is Carolina. That’s right, the most ridiculous four-syllable atrocity of a name that has ever crossed a new mother’s lips since the rise of humanity. To make matters more pointed, she calls me Lina-bean, in public. My sister’s name is Georgia—not a bad name in comparison to mine. Momma says that they are two names of former states in the region where we live. She says that our region was the last to fall to the Authority of the Requital Republic, and it will be the first to rise again. In unfiltered rebellion toward her misguided decision to namesake defenseless children in honor of a dead society, Georgie and I decided to rename ourselves when we were nine. We accomplished this by chopping as much of my given name off as possible without actually coming up with a new name entirely. We tell people that my name is Roe. No ‘Car,’ and definitely no ‘Lina’—and I added an ‘e’ to the end, just for good measure. The obstinacy that I had toward something so trivial makes me laugh now. But, ‘Roe’ is what I’m used to, so that’s what I still use. Georgie’s name was easier to morph and didn’t require as much work—perhaps that’s because hers wasn’t as bad to start. Momma responded to my name’s hack job with amused irritation.

  “Well, Lina-bean, what you call yoa’self doesn’t matta’ ta’ me, as long as you rememba’ tha’ sig’nif’icance of yoa’ name, and whe’a you came from. Evere’one should rememba’ the’a roots,” she said, forcing more sauce than necessary into her already strong southern accent and bringing a martyr’s smile to her lips. In hindsight, it is easier to see that she really was a martyr for Georgie and me. She had kept several old textbooks from a time of enlightenment in the past, and she used them
to mold our minds and facilitate our educations. As we moved on to more advanced topics, she would barter in the town for more books.

  “You girls a’a goin’ ta’ have tha’ same edu’cation that I had, rega’dless of what tha’ Autho’ty of tha’ Requit’al Repub’lic wants o’a does,” she would say, with the conviction of the steel magnolia that she was.

  We didn’t appreciate it at the time; we didn’t understand the effort that she was exhausting or the significance of the gift that she was giving us. Our education, at her hands, is what has ultimately set us apart and created opportunities for me to become who I am today. She taught us to read, write, and use words and vocabulary as a weapon that must be sharpened and honed. She taught us about the basic principles of science, including weather, chemistry, and the human body. She taught us about our history—about what went wrong and how we got to where we are today.

  At the peak of our territory’s society, we had been called the ‘United States of America.’ To escape from tyranny and oppression, the territory’s people had fought against dictators and kings across the ocean to earn freedom and prosperity for everybody, and that was what they had named themselves. Over the years, the territory’s leaders had become corrupt, deceptive, greedy, and arrogant. The people had allowed hate, prejudice, and ignorance to divide them, and a house divided cannot stand for long. A disagreement over money and trade with a few other countries had led to the war—a war that has raged on since before I was born. The Great Fall, which is what everybody calls the day that the war was initiated, came like a thunder cloud in the night. It was a coordinated attack between three enemy countries, which destroyed the territory’s ‘gov’nment,’ as Momma calls it. Waves of fire and bombs had hit all major military bases first, entirely without warning. They then turned to the government buildings, focusing efforts on killing the territory’s leaders, and disabling communication. The territory had tried to hide its leaders, but communications had been compromised. With no warning, the territory was scrambling, and its efforts toward defense were feeble. There was no fighting back. The territory was surrounded from all sides, with most of its major defenses destroyed in the initial wave of bombings. They had put the territory’s major leader, who Momma says they called ‘the Pres’dent’ in a big airplane to fly him away, and as the sun broke over the horizon on the morning after the attacks, that airplane was shot out of the sky.

  The country laid stagnant, and in ruins, until the rise of the Authority. This entity was initially made up of a group of wealthy businessmen who had survived the attacks with most of their resources intact. They told the people that they were going to mend the wounds of the attack and avenge the territory’s fractured pride. They named themselves ‘The Authority of the Requital Republic,’ but we just call them the Authority. Accepted as saviors in the beginning, the people praised their bravery and huddled under their umbrella of protection. Once the Authority was established in the territory, however, the people were powerless against them as they began to implement their brutal push for control and dominance, which rendered us all slaves with shackled chains in the form of lighted implants. They are now completely unchecked and unquestioned. So, the territory has come full circle, back to the waiting arms of dictators and tyranny.

  The mandated fast was only the beginning. When our family farm’s productivity decreased with our lack of hands to bring the crops in, my father was punished by the Authority. They revoked his fishing slip and took our boat. We had begun relying on fish from the lake as a source of food to make up for what the fast was taking, and losing that source of sustenance constituted a significant change. Nearly everyone lost their slip that year, and the Authority began combing the lakes and red-lighting those who fished without one, which quickly became everyone who fished who was not wearing an Authority uniform. Fishing lost its appeal when the Authority began using the boats that it had collected from the residents to rake the lake of fish. The collection officials left no rations for the life under the water. From the lake, they took everything.

  It was dawn when we heard the underwater explosions. They were a series of eerie, subdued, gurgling Puh noises that brought goosebumps to our senses with the conviction of unseen destruction. Georgie and I stood on the dock over the lake and watched as the Authority officials dropped explosives into the water that went off under the surface so violently that they rocked the boats and sent waves that lapped over the end of the dock. The officials collected the fish that floated to the surface. I saw our boat out over the water, with the ‘Authority of the Requital Republic’ insignia freshly painted on the side in bold black. It was a set of capital ‘R’s that were joined with one of them backward, nested under a large capital ‘A.’ The insignia resembled a locust, and I remember musing about the sick irony in the fact that they had symbolized themselves accurately. The combing of the lake went on for days, but there was evidence of what they had done to it in the form of dead and decaying matter on the lake shores for months afterward. Some people had begun fishing at night to avoid Authority detection, but the lake was so thoroughly combed of fish by then that it was hardly worth the risk. The genial brim and minnows that had nipped at our toes and eaten bread crumbs from our fingertips at the end of our dock were gone. The smell of their decaying bodies on the shore reminded us of our powerlessness, and the depth of the rage that filled me did not belong to a ten-year-old’s mind. Momma would tell Georgie and me to hide when the Authority came out to collect our harvest after that. She said it was because she didn’t want us to say anything ‘untoward’ in front of them. But now, I know that that was not the reason.

  As the output from our little farm continued to suffer more and more, the Authority began leaving us nearly nothing—so little peaches that there was no point in jarring them. There were not enough of them that there would be any risk of them going bad before we would have time to eat them. I longed for the skimpy plates of food that we had had before. Keeping thieves and beggars out of the fields was a full-time job in itself. Our town had already teetered on the edge of poverty before, but when the fast began, we all fell off of the edge and into the dark chasm of starvation and need together. Daddy began making trips out to the woods to hunt, in an effort to put food on the table that wasn’t sanctioned by the Authority. He had stopped hunting ducks because he didn’t want to call attention to us with the Authority officials patrolling the lake. He had to go deep into the woods to muffle the sound of his rifle. On our last trip to town, he traded his shotgun that he had hunted ducks with for a cart full of rifle ammunition at his Freemason lodge. It was a quick trip because we had unwittingly arrived just after a public execution had happened in the town square. Daddy acted like it was something that he didn’t want us to see, which was confusing at the time. Blood, death, and consequences were not a new concept to any of us.