A Wandering Shovel Bite-Sized Story: The First Day

I recently got a group of writer friends to start a Wandering Shovel game. The way the game works is someone gets 'called out' and has to write a piece of 1000 words or less based off a prompt they are given. The other parameter is that each and every story must involve someone getting killed by a shovel in some form. Once someone has finished their story they upload it to facebook so everyone else can see it and calls out the next person, giving them their prompt.

Anyway, this week I got called out with the prompt 'the love of mushrooms'. The piece I wrote is set in the same universe as Maiden Voyage. I didn't quite get to develop some parts of it, but then I only had 1000 words (of which I used 973). Perhaps it could become a short story sometime later. Below is the piece.

The First Day

I was born on the first day. The world ended and I began, a miracle child adrift in the sky. My people saw the end as it approached and fled in a ragtag complex of balloons slaved to one another by a thousand ropes. They feared technology, and with good cause. They did not fear me.

I was hope on the first day, an impossible breath of life as the world seemed dead. All thirty of us, all ten balloons, the only living things we could prove were real. All thirty of us to raise one child. We were a castle in the sky, a bastion of safety in clear air. I could not have hoped for a better childhood. There was so little to teach me. I came to understand language and people but there was no schools or masters for an apprentice. There was twenty nine parents. There was me.

I was then born on the 6209th day. They had stolen something, one morsel of technology to satisfy their craving, because they were impure. They were tainted by that machinery and I was pure as the saccharine sky. My purity was sacrificed. I was told it was for a greater cause. As their collective memory flooded my consciousness and became my own I understood why, but I was still made impure and that made me no different to them. Hope died on the 6209th day.

From the first day I had felt nothing constant. Now there was an anchor inside of me. They had tied me, slaved me to the past. My purpose was to remember, to warn, to protect the future. The knots were too tight. The ropes were too short. On the 6210th day nothing was different save for that anchor. Their survival was justification, was leverage.

I did not know that I remembered for them all. There was nothing to remind me of anything up there in the abyss. The end of the world had not made them afraid of clouds or blue sky. They were not afraid of storms, for they had bigger things to fear. The drifting cloudscape was the embodiment of calm. I never learned panic.

I was then born on the 7670th day. I came to understand what land was. Until then I had only been able to remember land. The anchor in me grew heavier. I was pinned to the ground from that day forth, no longer adrift as I should be. Now there were things to be learned, but I did not have to be taught them. Collective memory provided me all the information I needed about survival. Collective memory did not teach me how that need for survival condoned what they had done to me. They gave me an anchor and I became like them. I was no longer a fresh start, a blank slate, a miracle child. I knew that. I did not understand it though.

On the 7694th day I came to understand. All their memory lay in my head and they grew lazy. They absolved themselves of their memories of the End. I was meant to remember the past and warn the future, but only because they were too weak to do so themselves. They forced it upon me.

On that day we had established ourselves on the ground and were finding what the land could provide us with. We had proven there was life other than ours, but we had not proven there was other life like ours. Back to earth. Back to the beginning so far back even I could not remember it. We were scavengers, still thinking we might be kings.

Twenty nine, and me. Number seventeen found mushrooms. He had allowed himself to forget what they meant. He remembered a delicacy. I remembered destruction, the clouds of death, the pool of burned mutants below. I remembered it all and no-one else did because they were selfish. They were victims of the same flaws in people that had caused the End. I understood that and they did not. So much pain. So much anger. It rose, then exploded all at once inside me.

Here I do not understand what happened, but I remember it, and I remember it as my own memory. They lifted into the air around me. A slow explosion with me at its epicentre. Everything else lifted with them. The recycled balloons which had become tents for houses. The food and water. The tools they had selected so carefully. I took them back into the sky for the last time, so that they might feel what I had felt up there. They could see that freedom all around it but be unable to experience it. They were anchored by me now as I had been anchored by them. They understood.

Then they fell. They returned to the home of their graves. They returned to the mother they had betrayed. They fell.

Most were not people by the time they reached that mother, that home. They collided with blank thuds. Some were still people, lying in pain incomprehensible. Their minds were overwhelmed by the stimuli, like I was if I made myself remember. All their equipment followed them down. Of those that had not died instantly and whose minds had not shut down from the overload of agony a few had the luxury of dying to something that they had not brought on themselves. A crushed body here, a torso flayed by ropes there, a head severed from its body with a shovel lying between. Then the last light blinked out.

I did not die that day, and I never will. But I will never remember. Their warning to the future, their legacy that they thought they could legitimise, now it lies in bleeding consciousness. I refuse to remember. I hope to forget.