The Things They Carried

I’ve always hated Ash Falls.

The village is the eldest of it’s kind and it definitely shows. The buildings have sagging skin and look like haunting shadows at night.

The houses here are more like shacks and huts piled on atop the other in crooked rows and columns to form makeshift neighborhoods. There’s a common color scheme in every building and home here; natural.

No one used paint or ever has the money to waste on something so petty, so the once beautiful buildings are now old and decaying and the color of dead flowers and grass.

Flowers scarcely grow here, the ground is dry and caked with dirt, the roads cracked enough to cut the bare feet of the small children who play in the roads during the day.

Everyday during my lessons I hear laughter from outside the broken window of what’s supposed to be our kitchen. The glass is matted in a thick layer of dirt that would take ages of scrubbing and a good soak to remove, but we done have water to waste on commodities like clean windows. So we just take our hands and rub away what of the crud we can and move on with our lives. A clean window never saved anybody during the Raids anyway.

“Feya!” Someone shouts from behind me, and I instantly recognize the voice as that of my mother. “Come on, we have to get to the village center before 5 o’clock!”

I close the book I had been reading. It had fallen out of the bags of one of the soldiers during a Raid. He had seen it fall and watched me pick it up slowly, before handing it back to him. He had reached out a gloved hand to retrieve it, but decided last second to move on to raid the next home. I kept the book.

It was old, like everything else around here, and dirty. Some of the pages were torn and creased from wear. My mother had read the book to me numerous times over the past three years since that Raid. I had read it even more times and had nearly committed each chapter to memory.

The Things They Carried it was called. I couldn’t tell who it was by. Part of the cover had been ripped off, it was the part displaying the authors second name. Tim something-or-other was his name. He had written a war story. It was sad, but not too sad, more thought provoking than anything.

It made me think about the Revolts and the Raids, and the people involved. Especially, the people involved. How could I not?

It talked about a character named Timmy.

And how he was drafted into the Army, when that was still a thing. I had never heard of it before mother read it to me in the book.

“Mother, what’s an Armee?”

“Oh, uhm, it’s not around anymore. It ended during the Attilian Era. It was this big organization of people who fought with other people from around the world. It’s long gone now baby...long gone.”

He didn’t want to join because he wanted to be a doctor of some sort. But he was actually just afraid of dying really. It must be scary to think of dying away from the people you care about most, or just dying at all, I guess.

People deal with fear and death in different ways. Timmy dealt with it by sorrow and trying to run away from it. I wonder how far he would have made it? He went to this place called the Rainy River where he was going to escape into this place called Canadia or, was it Canada?

My favorite part of the book is the little girl who dances after her family was killed. It was how she dealt with death. She danced it off.. I wonder if I would do the same if Haz died.

“Feya! Let’s go!” My mother yells through the cracked window from outside the dusty kitchen.

I drop my book on the box that’s turned upside down that we use as a table and slip on the only pair of shoes that I own.

When I move the boards of wood that we use as a door, streaks of warm sunlight leak into our home. The sun should be setting soon, which means we have to get moving.

Bad things happen when people are out at night around the Falls. At night is when the Aliens come out. Aliens are what we call the drone the Atillian Force sends out to keep us all in line.

I remember the last Revolt like it was yesterday, because it was yesterday.

“Feya! Haz! Get inside and get down, NOW!” My mother screamed from outside.

Haz picked me up and carried me inside just as easily as if he were carrying a piece of paper. He hid on our bedrooms in the dug out closet. All we could hear was the shouting of peasents outside andthe blasts from the drones, all of that under the sound of flesh being torn through by the swords of the Attilian soldiers and their bullets flying everywhere.

That’s why we have to go to the village center.

We have to repent for our sins.

Notes

This story is also available on the One Direction Fanfiction website, as well as my Wattpad account:

WP: kingtristo
IG: kingtristo
SC: zzynell