World Building of Mearth & of Earth

OTHERBORN: Preview Chapter: 3

EPISODE 3

Before the school and then the town bubbled under, I still had parents and a life. I spent too much time in my head. Real problems were overpowered by mental voices and unwelcome thoughts. Isolation, self-centeredness, everybody calls it something else. Was it a waste? It seemed to matter, truly matter to me once.

Till now when my world has busted apart.

And no, not figuratively, not in the casual sense of too many things going wrong, too many cloudy days, or a relationship turned sour.

My world literally broke. As in, to pieces. As in, I could see its insides and everything, the oozing magma and the roots all exposed and torn. The slabs of the school in red glowing goo. Tilting, then under. But this wasn't the whole of it.

Most of the people and maybe the planet I knew had gone too.

The White Fox laughed when I told him this. Foxes do that. "He he he."

It's really quite obnoxious. I snapped, "Stop mocking!"

He replied, "I was just coughing," and skittered away, perching on a boulder and staring down at me.

"Why do you always have to take the high rock?" I asked.

He told me to stop fretting and that if I worried, I would only wind up feeling more neurotic than I already did, and then he said something else that I start to remember . . . before forgetting it like it never happened. Dreams are awfully treacherous. They escape you when you need them.

Yeah, my first encounter with Fox was a dream. A weird dream. Still I wondered, as soon as I woke, if Fox was more than a fabrication of my subconscious.

Is he real?

I had no idea back when I had that initial dream what was to come. Fox and I spent what seemed like hours talking, and I understood what he told me, but when I woke to the smell of the sulfur and rotting food in the rubble, the only thing I could remember was his long pale body, like a napkin extended in the wind, and his flicking pointy ears that seemed to hear the future.

Maybe if I really try, I can remember what the fox said. Isn't that a song or something? "What Does the Fox Say?"

I guess the imperceptible beginnings of everything I was about to go through explain what my subconscious wove that first dream from. It's funny how things blur when you're moving fast, in a bus or in a memory. Isn't that kind of dreamlike, too?

* * *

Where am I?

Maybe six months since the catastrophe.

I try to keep track.

You can't tell anymore by the temperature, the weather, the plants. There's not so much left, not even seasons. Everything's all mixed up. No one keeps time, no one among the ones who are left. The clocks died ages ago, but they tick on in sunsets and the plunking of birds dropping out of the sky from malnourishment. We can ignore the ticking, until it gets too loud, or until the alarm rings, the alarm of Armageddon, not waking us but signaling our eternal collective sleep.

There hasn't been any way to receive news since all this happened. Is it better or worse out across the wastelands? Anywhere? Anyone else out there alive, unbroken? We may never know.

I walk on the Crust.

Prior events flash into my mind again, clear as if it's suddenly ordinary to be back in school and faking my normal, but I'm entirely sure I wasn't normal at all.

Anyway, Armageddon didn't start in our town and it won't end here, not until Earth's all done with us and satisfied, herself. It'll take centuries maybe—glacial time. Of course, our parents tried to protect us with emergency broadcasts on the government news, warning us about the quakes headed our way. We just grew complacent and registered, too late, the scorching fact that our turn to die had finally arrived when no one climbed out of Granite High ever again.