A gnawing hunger spoke in his belly, and although he was certain that there was food in the kitchen, his sleeping mother gave him all the reason to avoid it for a few more hours. He did not have the luxuries that other children had: two parents with a steady income, three meals a day, education, toys. He was content with Honeybear Brown and the window. He knew that there was a reason for all of this; there was a reason that his father had been taken from the planet and shot into another corner of the sky, and there was a reason that other kids’ fathers were still here. His Papa had been fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to prove his worthiness of such a divine mission at the outset of the Troubles. Other kids’ fathers would die here on Planet One.
“We all gotta die someday, Windy.”
Hunter hated when Honeybear Brown called him that. But of course, Honeybear Brown hated it when Hunter called him “Honey” or “Browny.” Nobody called Hunter “Hunter” except his mother and his father and Father Tristan. The children with whom he once played before the outbreak and quarantine had called him Windy because of his last name. He had called them buggers and crazies and harlots, a word that he did not understand but Father Tristan used to describe the dirty naughty ladies who did not wear enough clothes on the street corners, those dirty naughty ladies who grabbed men’s hands as they walked by and put them where men’s hands shouldn’t go on ladies, that place that you don’t talk about. Hunter felt sorry for the street corner ladies, their once-pretty faces now glittery with the silver, not that that made them less pretty, but once the silver set in, it was best to stay away.
“Hungry, Windy?”
Hunter glared at the bear, glared because of that voice he used, a high-pitched, shrill happy awful voice. Honeybear Brown always talked about the things that Hunter did not want to talk about.
“No. I can wait.”
Honeybear Brown shook his head, causing his one remaining eye to swing back and forth on the strands of thread that served as an optic nerve. “You need to eat, boyo.”
“I can wait.”
The house began to shake with the distant resonance of another transport launch, and Hunter ran over to the window, pulled the drapes back for the first time all day. It was not truly dark yet, more of an awkward twilight, but the few remaining streetlights were on, and the few remaining “harlots” were underneath them, smoking cigarettes, drinking from bottles in brown paper bags. They looked up in unison at the transport in the sky, flashing by faster than any of their heads could track, then went back to business as usual, smoking and drinking and looking for men to touch where they shouldn’t touch.
Honeybear Brown joined Hunter at the window. The boy looked out into the nothing of the world, his only friend climbing up onto the sill.
“Something’s gonna happen.”
Honeybear Brown looked up in silence.
“The little girl. She won’t be there tomorrow.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. Something’s gonna happen.” Hunter picked up Honeybear Brown and pulled the drapes shut again, plunging the room into a darker dark.
“Where’s she going?”
Hunter thought for a while, sat back down on the floor in front of the dead television set, the bear on his lap, his mother muttering something in her sleep from the safety and non-comfort of the kitchen tabletop that would leave a faint criss-cross pattern on the side of her face whilst she slept.
“She’s going to the stars. Just like Papa.”
Honeybear Brown hugged the boy, nodded.
“Just like me.”
“It’ll be okay, Windy. They won’t make you go yet. It’ll be a few years before—”
Honeybear Brown slumped to the floor at the sound of Helen Windham’s footsteps coming down the darkened hallway. In one heartbeat, the stuffed bear had been animated, vital, the only link Hunter had to communication with the world, and in the next, the bear was nothing but a tattered toy again. Hunter shoved his fabric friend underneath the couch, where his mother wouldn’t be able to find him. She never looked under the couch. She never looked at anything anymore.
“Hunter?” Helen broadcast her quiet inquisition into the black room, just in case the boy had fallen asleep. She squinted her eyes, tried to excise his form from the tangle of void that was the living room. “Television on.”
The ancient television snapped to life, although there was nothing but white static on the screen. It was enough illumination for Helen to be able to find her son, sitting quietly at the edge of the couch as he always did. It was always unsettling to catch his gaze from across the weakly-lit room…He had old eyes.
“You hungry, baby?”
She felt it then, that gaze in combination with something deeper, something ineffable. She felt the touch of his mind: such calm, such reassurance. He loved her, she knew, even through her depression, her naps at the kitchen table, the way she would sometimes purposefully drag him painfully around the Catalyst Compound gates. She knew that he understood, and he forgave her for being the young bride of a soldier. He forgave her for giving birth to him, although somehow he knew he fucking knew what that meant for him. He would die somewhere out between the stars, just like his father. He knew, somehow, and she saw that, felt that, in the brief moment of silverthought that he projected at her.
Hunter nodded.
She picked him up, held him close, saw the arm of that old ratty bear sticking from underneath the couch, but she said nothing. She knew that he needed that bear more than he needed her most days.
“Come on. Let’s have some supper.”
He squeezed her around the neck, and she felt him smile. They went to the kitchen, where she made him a hot dog. He would sleep well that night. She would not. She would be too busy thinking about her husband, somewhere out there in the black. She would think about the days before it began, those simple days when
the trucks drove through the town, filled with soldiers with stern faces and jaunty berets and scars and sometimes even blood. In the last days of the war, the trucks drove through the town, stopped for fuel and water and food for the soldiers, and sometimes those soldiers with jaunty berets and stern faces would turn into innocent boys on the wrong continent, just boys with big guns and insatiable appetites both for the local delicacies and the local “delicacies.”
Helen Lofton did not consider herself a sexual being, besides losing her virginity to an overeager prick when she was sixteen just so that she could get the act over and move on to bigger and better things. She didn’t understand what the big deal about sex was until after the war when the trucks started rolling into town, and the soldiers took over.
Walking down the street to the cafe, her copy of “The Stillness Between” clasped in the brown leather gloves that concealed her fragile and shaking hands, she turned to look at the rumble that approached from behind, a great olive green military transport, wounded and tired boys hanging from the canvas walls of the back, wrapped in bandages soaked through. Most of the boys stared at her with a nonchalant desire, more concerned about not bleeding out on the trip to the triage than with getting their dicks wet with a local.
She could feel her heart in her chest, the beats crawling up into her throat and shaking tears into her eyes that threatened to spill over. She was just a schoolgirl holding a paperback on a sidewalk in the dying days of a continental war that had spilled over to include the impossibilities deep within the planet. These boys had been to the front. They had seen their own torn apart by silver fire and armies of light. She felt so young. So sanitized. In their eyes, she saw the human condition in these fading years: resignation and submission to a higher power.