The Things They Carried

Haz and I go to the village school.

There is no separation based on age or anything fancy like that. Just one huge room filled with children and two teachers.

I’ve heard there used to be something called grades.

People were separated by their number of years in school.

I think it’s dumb and a waste of time, how long are you expected to go to school? Forever?

Haz and I only go to school 3 times every seven sunrises.

They used to be called days, but with the extinction of clocks, their went time and calendars and all that stuff. We measure time by the sun. We work when the sun is up and sleep when the sun is down.

Today’s lesson; history.

Mother tells me I’ve 15 years old and Haz says he’s 17 years old. She has this system where she makes tally marks in the dirt walls of our house to keep track of the sunrises and the days we were born.

Teacher says the world was different during the time Haz and I were born. The pre-Attilian Era, as we call it.

I don’t remember a world different than the one I live in, I personally don’t believe it was different.

When you believe, you fill yourself with false hope that one day things will ‘go back’ to the way they were.

False hope is the cruelest thing of all.

Mother says their used to be real houses, and hospitals, and churches, and schools, and malls, and Disney was a thing.

She says people were actually happy, we were happy.

I didn’t know I was unhappy until she said that.

“One day, out in the east, a force began taking over countries by force. They used bombs and guns to kill all of the people there. A lot of land became uninhabitable because of radiation and disaster,” Teacher said,

“That force, is what we call the Attilians. They live in what used to be called Canada, one of the last inhabitable places in the world. The eastern world was destroyed to nothing but rubble and mess after they invaded. They took everything they culd and brought the survivers here to what used to be America.”

“They set up systems to separate people. The highests of the high live in Attilia in Canada. That’s queen Attila, her decendants, the knight class and all the important people, or what they deam as important. The Queen is a selfish woman. She kills anyone who stands in her way of world domination. She has everything she could ever want and more, but yet she leaves her people to suffer as we do!”

I’ve never seen the Queen as selfish.

I see her as smart.

She’s breaking us.

Breaking our spirits.

She comes to visit and brings gifts and whatnot to make us think we are important, we revolt, and then she crushes us just a little harder each time.

I wonder if one day she’s going to choose to just kill us all.

I’ve never met Queen Attila, but I have met her daughter, Alana.

Alana and I are the same age, but we represent two opposite sides of the spectrum.

Alana is the head of our society, I am the foot.

Notes