Simon grew up a lonely child. He had no siblings; his parents’ application for a second child license had been rejected, and his parents by law had to undergo sterilization. He was artistic and intelligent beyond his years. One obstacle hindered his expression severely, a permanent stutter that made verbal communication almost impossible. He found his creative outlet in drawing, and his parents often found him outside sketching the warplanes that constantly flew overhead.
He always seemed happy enough, but it disturbed his parents that little Simon seldom smiled. He sometimes did, but it was a sad, sardonic smile that did not fit the face of a child. He would then wander off and draw something else.
The world was tattered for the Hayes family when the Indochine Francais Pact invaded the Siberian oilfields. The world’s first real nuclear war since the Three Days War between India and Pakistan at the turn of the millennium erupted with a fury unmatched in a century. Most of Asia and Eastern Europe were wiped summarily off the globe. Much of the rest of Europe was made uninhabitable, and the French Socialist government eagerly accepted the invitation to relocate to Quebec.
The Hayes family sat outside each night for two months, Father slowly sipping a dry martini five parts vodka one part vermouth two olives on a plastic cocktail sword and when he was feeling festive perhaps one of those little umbrellas that looks decidedly uncouth sticking up from a martini, Mother’s hand always absently wandering to the holotech interface behind her left ear that she kept hidden from view by wearing a stylish and retro bobbed coiffure tucked coyly behind her ears in little-girl style even when she quickly approached the age of hot flashes and the cessation of natural fertility, watching the orbiting nuclear deterrent systems destroy the hundreds of ICBMs being launched at Canada and the United States by the remnants of the corporate Japanese-backed Siberian Alliance. Simon remembered his mother’s tears and hushed conversations that his parents didn’t want him to hear. He heard and understood far more than they knew.
America took a passive stance in the war, not launching any weapons, just shooting down missiles launched at them. The hope for a diplomatic resolution to the war was a long shot, and became an impossibility when a four-gigaton fusion weapon overshot its intended target of Toronto and airburst over American soil, wiping most of western New York off the map.
America was in the war with a vengeance.
American pilots went on scalping runs around the globe, scouring Siberia, Japan, and the remnants of the French Indochinese Alliance. The war was quick, efficient, and bloody. America secured itself as the only remaining world power, sweeping out and annexing those territories that it had not entirely devastated. French officials looked on in terror from their secure bunkers in Quebec as America took its revenge for being dragged into a war that had not been its own.
By the time the dust of the war had settled and life returned to a semblance of normalcy, Simon was on the verge of adolescence. He was still a quiet young man, and his introspection became a great concern for his father. His mother spent most of her days in an alcohol and holotech-induced haze. The shock of the war had been too much for her, and she found solace in the blissful artificial worlds created for holotech. When Simon’s father took his own life, no one was terribly surprised. He had been a successful businessman, and when the war broke out he began dealing in communications holotechnology. When it was revealed that his company had been a major supplier of crystalline holotech to the French, the government began an investigation. He would have been executed before long if he had not taken his own life. There were many executions in the years after the war. The Allied States of America were ruled with brutal efficiency from the Wind River complex.
Simon turned his creative energies to writing during middle adolescence, penning wonderful examples of naïve teenage angst. He wrote to escape: there was nothing to do in Harkness, a tiny fishing village where the only excitement was the Saturday night bingo and dance at the American Legion downtown. He wrote a novel that he was rather proud of detailing the destruction of the planet by alien forces. It was trite, it was overdone, it was brilliant. “Deus Ex Machina” was rejected by twelve publishing companies before Simon burned it in anger. He watched the pages blacken one by one and die like his unborn children in the fire.
At age eighteen, he discovered the opposite sex seriously for the first time. Oh, he had had girlfriends, or rather, he would go out on dates with girls. None of them seemed to understand the enigma that was Simon Hayes. His stutter didn’t help. She had been different; she had listened, at least for a while. Her name was Brigid, and she shamelessly tore out his heart and threw it into the dust. Simon blindly pursued her for over a year before witnessing Brigid and his best friend in a more-than-just-friendly embrace. On a trampoline. Naked. It was then and there that Simon decided to become a poet.
He had his share of internal strife. More than his share, in fact. Simon more than simply concerned his mother anymore when she came out of her fugues. He frightened her. She once questioned him about a notebook of poems she had found scrawled in his eccentric handwriting. How could he write such dark poems? Sure, they had their problems, the war, the death of Simon’s father, the de-ratification of the United States Constitution and the dissolution of the Union, the police state that the Allied States of America had become, the Almost-Second Civil War that had been narrowly avoided when the President selected his political rival Cervera as his Secretary of Defense, but why write about such sad things? Life was good. We had won the war, hadn’t we? Cheer up, Simon! And who is this “Brigid” girl anyway?
The look Simon had stabbed at his mother silenced her, and an abrupt and awkward silence followed. In fact, she never asked about his poems again. They talked very little after that incident.
“Poetry.”
“What about it?”
“You wrote poetry?”
“A little.”
“Can you recite any of it for me? I used to love poetry. I still love poetry, just haven’t had any time to read in… well, years.”
“Ms. Flynn, it’s been a long time.” He said it seriously, but with a sly smile.
She persisted. “I bet you still remember some of it. Especially the poetry about Brigid.” She enunciated the word like a hypothetical annoying younger sister would, taunting her older brother about his first date. Briiiii-giiiiid.
“You won’t like it, Ms. Flynn.”
“Call me Maggie. And let me be the judge of that!”
“Fine. You win again, Maggie.”
He thought long and hard, and then began to recite.
Shadowroom:
She was here once I
Remember so so long
Ago many weeks months
Years (How long?) since
The essence of her the presence
Of her pervaded these walls
Lavender walls within which
Hell is contained she
A constant for so long held
On to the phone right here
On that summer night and talked
Me back while the music
Played its dirge from
The happy past under false
Pretenses it played and she
Sang and I SNAPPED at
The voice so like beauty
Thoughts of emerald eyes
Burning in the dark on
That special night when
Hopes and dreams became.
This room is.
A reminder of her essence to me the feel flaxen
Radiance of sunlight hair
Gold painting the impossible
Beauty shine light waves upon
Waves sent to me scent to me
Her scent in these walls
In the shadows in the light
Lilac scent of lilac