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Our teacher enjoyed telling stories about the human race.
“Our evolutionary predecessors” he would say, “were parasites.”
He would lean against his desk, at a particular time of day, and pull a face. That was the cue, before dragging a finger up and down his cheek as the words began to slide off his tongue. His face would become distorted and crumpled when he spoke, as though each nuance in tone was a gust of wind across his cheek. They caused his features to fluctuate incessantly. He flew like a sheet hung out to dry in the early morning, aching to fly up and drown in the ineffable. The eyebrows would roam across his forehead, bouncing with each description of a particular action or event he found surprising.
“They would sit, often solitary, for hours…”
Towards the afternoon he would start staring through the wall for minutes at a time, seeing blood and dirt behind the cream-coloured stucco.
I approached him after everyone else had left. I loved the smile he made when he knew a question was coming, and the curious way in which he knew what you were about to ask before the words had even shivered in the air. He said he could see it through my eyes as it slipped down on its way to my mouth, that it was a little green flash behind my retinas which he read like a barcode.
“Shall we go and sit on the roof?” he said.
The building was comprised of only two rooms - the classroom and the store cupboard. A small ladder climbed one of the outside walls, hidden in the shadow of the schoolhouse. When I climb up towards the end of the day the wind likes to rush down the hill behind me and sweep up my top, whirling around my chest and throwing me up the last few rungs out into the blazing sky.
I jumped up and allowed the wind to roll me across the roof, letting it catch me under the arms and gently flip me over several times. I slid to a halt in an upright position and braced my heels against the roof’s edge, but the wind wasn’t finished playing and frustratedly pulled at my hair. I didn’t much feel like flying that day.
“Be careful”
He followed me up and was lifted forward a pace or two, like a spaceman, before asserting himself.
“That grass looks soft and bouncy but you’ll easily break a leg.”
I looked back and my hair clung to my face, turning everything a blotchy brown. He’d planted himself in the middle of the roof, looking out over the fields towards the houses.
I shouted “Tell me!”, but he didn’t hear. The wind was roaring past us now, screaming in annoyance as we delayed its journey to the ends of the earth.
“Tell me! Dad!”
Still no answer. Blades of grass torn up with the wind flashed by, making tiny marks against the sky like on ancient film reels they find deep underground. Beautiful women and children smiled as the world around them shuddered and flickered. All dead now.
“Dad!”
He noticed me this time. His face was glowing. His eyes were shielded with one hand and the other was cupped around his ear.
“Tell me about the humans!”
He laughed and waved his hands around his ears. All I could hear was the occasional vowel as he spoke, but he was pointing at the ventilator. I scuttled over and he walked across like a cowboy with his thin linen trousers going deafeningly ballistic. We lay behind the metal box protruding from the roof and everything became multi-layered. In our little shell of silence I said to him, leaning in close:
“Tell me about the humans. Tell me everything.”
“They weren’t as different to us as most people liked to think.”
He looked into the back of my head, checking to see that the little sparks were furiously colliding with each other as I sat, attentive.
“What they really lacked was… understanding.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were so scared, and lonely, that they procreated exponentially”, he said, “in an attempt to fill a void they felt inside themselves. Despite blanketing the surface of the entire world-“
“The entire world?”
“-every square mile. Despite being utterly submerged in themselves, the void they felt remained indiscernible. They never really understood themselves.”
I sighed.
“But they weren’t all bad. Not all barbarians. You mustn’t think of them of a different species. They’re commonly referred to as our ‘prototypes’, if you like to think that we have a designer. Juvenile, but still massively intelligent in comparison to the rest of the organisms on this planet.”
“Have you ever seen any human remains?”
“They looked just like us.”
“But they weren’t like us.”
“No.”
“They were parasites.”
He turned his head against the ventilator to face her, smiling.
“Do you know why the sun changes colour when it sets?”
I was silent for a moment, then squinted at the horizon in an effort to find the answer sandwiched between the billions of particles of air that separated us, on the schoolhouse roof, from that furious titan.
“No - why does it?”
“I have no idea” and he laughed. “It’s always intrigued me. There’s so much we don’t know. So much our predecessors could tell us.”
He tapped his temple.
“We had no childhood and they never got to grow up.”
The sun touched the horizon and the world turned orange. In the distance the old human ruins had been reduced to silhouettes. That jagged tower still stood though, erupting from the rubble now buried beneath the surface. They predicted it would collapse, but it never did. Apparently, it was a huge clock tower that people could see for miles around and it controlled the minds of an entire city. The people living around there now used it as a sundial. Historians poked around inside it sometimes. They planned on turning it into a museum.
We visited it once, a year ago, before people regarded it with anything but a reverent fear. I looked through the empty window frames and imagined the people that had lived inside it. Rain ran down the strangely coloured stone in great swathes - it had skewered the heavy clouds above my head and water gushed from the wound in every direction. It was a dark morning and a thin wreath of mist hung around its wounded crown. My father was a way off, inspecting something half buried.
I placed my hands against it and looked up. It arched over me like a bridge and then abruptly stopped at its apex - a bridge half built. We regarded each other, this ancient monolith and I, with equal reverence.
“Where were you leading, Big Bridge? Were you on your way to the future?”
I saw the faces of its creators, grinning. Devilish. I took my hands off.
“We got here without you. You messed up. You ruined the world, did you know that?”
The tears were cascading down now, but the tower remained impaled in the clouds and the earth and the tears of all three mixed together and soaked me through.
I watched it descend into darkness from the schoolhouse roof. The earth has nearly recovered now – it’s been almost 400 years – but they think some scars are permanent. There will always be clouds in the sky; salt in the sea.
Father said these fields are the graveyard of a capital city. “Dig down deep enough and you’ll find empty houses filled with empty skulls and all the flesh stripped from the bones.” I imagine them alive, smiling out from the windows of their houses in the instant before they are engulfed in a wave of fire.
Parasites.
“Our evolutionary predecessors” he would say, “were parasites.”
He would lean against his desk, at a particular time of day, and pull a face. That was the cue, before dragging a finger up and down his cheek as the words began to slide off his tongue. His face would become distorted and crumpled when he spoke, as though each nuance in tone was a gust of wind across his cheek. They caused his features to fluctuate incessantly. He flew like a sheet hung out to dry in the early morning, aching to fly up and drown in the ineffable. The eyebrows would roam across his forehead, bouncing with each description of a particular action or event he found surprising.
“They would sit, often solitary, for hours…”
Towards the afternoon he would start staring through the wall for minutes at a time, seeing blood and dirt behind the cream-coloured stucco.
I approached him after everyone else had left. I loved the smile he made when he knew a question was coming, and the curious way in which he knew what you were about to ask before the words had even shivered in the air. He said he could see it through my eyes as it slipped down on its way to my mouth, that it was a little green flash behind my retinas which he read like a barcode.
“Shall we go and sit on the roof?” he said.
The building was comprised of only two rooms - the classroom and the store cupboard. A small ladder climbed one of the outside walls, hidden in the shadow of the schoolhouse. When I climb up towards the end of the day the wind likes to rush down the hill behind me and sweep up my top, whirling around my chest and throwing me up the last few rungs out into the blazing sky.
I jumped up and allowed the wind to roll me across the roof, letting it catch me under the arms and gently flip me over several times. I slid to a halt in an upright position and braced my heels against the roof’s edge, but the wind wasn’t finished playing and frustratedly pulled at my hair. I didn’t much feel like flying that day.
“Be careful”
He followed me up and was lifted forward a pace or two, like a spaceman, before asserting himself.
“That grass looks soft and bouncy but you’ll easily break a leg.”
I looked back and my hair clung to my face, turning everything a blotchy brown. He’d planted himself in the middle of the roof, looking out over the fields towards the houses.
I shouted “Tell me!”, but he didn’t hear. The wind was roaring past us now, screaming in annoyance as we delayed its journey to the ends of the earth.
“Tell me! Dad!”
Still no answer. Blades of grass torn up with the wind flashed by, making tiny marks against the sky like on ancient film reels they find deep underground. Beautiful women and children smiled as the world around them shuddered and flickered. All dead now.
“Dad!”
He noticed me this time. His face was glowing. His eyes were shielded with one hand and the other was cupped around his ear.
“Tell me about the humans!”
He laughed and waved his hands around his ears. All I could hear was the occasional vowel as he spoke, but he was pointing at the ventilator. I scuttled over and he walked across like a cowboy with his thin linen trousers going deafeningly ballistic. We lay behind the metal box protruding from the roof and everything became multi-layered. In our little shell of silence I said to him, leaning in close:
“Tell me about the humans. Tell me everything.”
“They weren’t as different to us as most people liked to think.”
He looked into the back of my head, checking to see that the little sparks were furiously colliding with each other as I sat, attentive.
“What they really lacked was… understanding.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were so scared, and lonely, that they procreated exponentially”, he said, “in an attempt to fill a void they felt inside themselves. Despite blanketing the surface of the entire world-“
“The entire world?”
“-every square mile. Despite being utterly submerged in themselves, the void they felt remained indiscernible. They never really understood themselves.”
I sighed.
“But they weren’t all bad. Not all barbarians. You mustn’t think of them of a different species. They’re commonly referred to as our ‘prototypes’, if you like to think that we have a designer. Juvenile, but still massively intelligent in comparison to the rest of the organisms on this planet.”
“Have you ever seen any human remains?”
“They looked just like us.”
“But they weren’t like us.”
“No.”
“They were parasites.”
He turned his head against the ventilator to face her, smiling.
“Do you know why the sun changes colour when it sets?”
I was silent for a moment, then squinted at the horizon in an effort to find the answer sandwiched between the billions of particles of air that separated us, on the schoolhouse roof, from that furious titan.
“No - why does it?”
“I have no idea” and he laughed. “It’s always intrigued me. There’s so much we don’t know. So much our predecessors could tell us.”
He tapped his temple.
“We had no childhood and they never got to grow up.”
The sun touched the horizon and the world turned orange. In the distance the old human ruins had been reduced to silhouettes. That jagged tower still stood though, erupting from the rubble now buried beneath the surface. They predicted it would collapse, but it never did. Apparently, it was a huge clock tower that people could see for miles around and it controlled the minds of an entire city. The people living around there now used it as a sundial. Historians poked around inside it sometimes. They planned on turning it into a museum.
We visited it once, a year ago, before people regarded it with anything but a reverent fear. I looked through the empty window frames and imagined the people that had lived inside it. Rain ran down the strangely coloured stone in great swathes - it had skewered the heavy clouds above my head and water gushed from the wound in every direction. It was a dark morning and a thin wreath of mist hung around its wounded crown. My father was a way off, inspecting something half buried.
I placed my hands against it and looked up. It arched over me like a bridge and then abruptly stopped at its apex - a bridge half built. We regarded each other, this ancient monolith and I, with equal reverence.
“Where were you leading, Big Bridge? Were you on your way to the future?”
I saw the faces of its creators, grinning. Devilish. I took my hands off.
“We got here without you. You messed up. You ruined the world, did you know that?”
The tears were cascading down now, but the tower remained impaled in the clouds and the earth and the tears of all three mixed together and soaked me through.
I watched it descend into darkness from the schoolhouse roof. The earth has nearly recovered now – it’s been almost 400 years – but they think some scars are permanent. There will always be clouds in the sky; salt in the sea.
Father said these fields are the graveyard of a capital city. “Dig down deep enough and you’ll find empty houses filled with empty skulls and all the flesh stripped from the bones.” I imagine them alive, smiling out from the windows of their houses in the instant before they are engulfed in a wave of fire.
Parasites.
Last edited by thebadhatter on 2011-06-30, 02:36; edited 1 time in total
