The Country of Ice Cream Star - beyond the book

Of Plague Before

Every Sengle child grow up with stories of the plague before. Tell how the sleepers live in fatness. How they dying sudden; yo, all people who remain alive evacuate for fear. What we know from pictures left, these sleepers being various sorts. Been some children normal, looking mostly like ourself. But most been weirdo pink, with cattish fur instead of hair.

When me and Crow been small, our favorite game been Sleepers Flee. We sneak into some evac house. Pretend we talking telephones, and listening electric music, and that computers show us living scenes.

Then we play the evac bus. We play that it attack with guns. Act how we dying sick, in mystery lands beyond the south. These deaths been scientific done – we learn all signs of their WAKS sickness, its hot fevers and its sores. Our favorite joy been showing how we choke our swollen tongues.

Time I grown to sense, I comprehend these tales be mostly guess. Sleepers made a million books, but none on their evacuation. They never live to write this bad event. So what we know come mostly from newspapers from the days before. In their library, Lowells keep a shelf particular to these. Yo, every little spend some days beside this shelf, in gloating fear.

WAKS begun in Africa, a distant land of hotness. First days, no one mind it much. Was Africans who first gone sick, and they ain’t scarcely die. Africans got a thing they call resistance to this pox. Newspapers ain't tell how resistance work, is said like every moron know.

First unresisting children be Chinese. These come from farther China, gone to Africa for business work. There they catch WAKS, yo every Chinese person die from this. Die in Africa; then they go home in planes and perish there. Soon all China be a land of death, their cities choke and waste.

Ya, then this sickness travel and roam. First week, the Africans is sick, be only normal terror. Then come a week, the Chinese die. Week behind, be sicken people in our Nighted States. Be two weeks more, evacuations done. Then every speech go silent.

Be natural to think, evacuating sleepers fled from WAKS. Ain’t been. They fled their hungry need. These sleepers cannot survive without all needless definitions – trucks and medicine, lectricity and sanitation. Yo, newspapers name a hundred things that we ain't comprehend – dialysis provision, sewage treatment, nuclear decommisioning. Without these science helps, the sleepers fall to murder and starvation. Here, must wonder if these sleepers got no brains to use. Can guess why only blackish children left.

Newspapers apart, our only knowledge come from robbing evacs.

Before we come to Massa, our greats found places sleepers never left. Ain’t evacs, but been lands of bones. Got skeletons in cars and stores, hound skeletons tie up on chains. Sometimes, all skeletons gather in one house. These houses rich in guns. But no child regret that we ain’t find such evacs now.

Evacs that I seen, ain’t scarcely be no dead within. Nor they keep evidences much. Times, we find a diary, but these never be from evac times, was writ in years before. Diaries always be from girls, and be some boring disappointment. Time you growing ten, these never read.

Be also lists of goods, or lists of names with numbers by. Letters left from science places like Con Edison, Verizon Wireless. All these never telling much – is only queery sometimes, person writ a list of goods, and all these goods be in the house.

And often, be an evacuation notice, lain upon a table. Times, is held upon the fridgerator with a magnet badge. One house, I found a notice that been torn in twenty parts. I linger with this notice, guessing how these people anger. Lose any life they know, go out into a perilous nothing. How some girl like me stand tearing this, and sobbing words. How she step outside her house, and walk out to their bus. Sleep in temporary shelter, and she ride again, some train or airplane, to her hiding camp.

And there she die, like every whitish sleeper there and anywhere die. Forgotten nightmares be her journey’s end, gone in some broken place.