The myth was these sunflowers smelled like sun and grass and hay. Not that I knew the smells of those either. I walked past these human-sized flowers with a gas mask, pushing along Hakeem, his wheels making the path seem to flow faster beneath us. His backpack kept brushing against my knees and created a rhythm of comfort. He signed to me to look up, look forward at the cloud forming on the horizon and growing. It had a familiar vibration to it in the air that tickled my ears.
I tilted Hakeem’s chair, he used his leather arm bracers to crawl to the ground as I pulled the tarp around the chair and over our heads, diving to the dirt beside him. Chests against the ground, we took a quick peek before sealing the tarp under our arms against the onslaught. The tarp was peppered by a thousand pecks, bending it in towards us, but protecting us for the most part. The locust swarm was bigger this year. According to Teacher, that was a good thing. I was just lucky Hakeem’s chair made the tent big enough for the both of us.
With our faces pressed against the prickly grass, we felt a tremble against our cheeks and then a swaying feeling like a hammock swing, getting stronger and stronger, until we were dizzy, happy to be clinging to the ground we would have fallen to if we were standing. At its height, it stopped suddenly, like a switch on a turbine being turned off.
It took 10 minutes this time for the storm to pass. We didn’t even wait for the last few pelts to end, impatient to get to school and back where we could breathe the filtered air without masks.
I helped Hakeem back into his chair, a routine we perfected into a ballet. I looked around to see the rest of my classmates coming out of hiding, too. They signed from 50 ft away if we were okay. “Fine, and you?” I signed back. They checked for scratches in clothes or skin that might expose them to the deadly radiation sickness of the world around us. They signed an OK and we headed straight again, keeping our distance to increase survival numbers as taught by Teacher and our parents.
But the air still didn’t seem right. A purplish hue instead of the orange glow of our usual mornings hung like damp laundry. The hair on my arms were rising, yet I felt no fear in me. The swarm was bigger than usual but was still a routine. This time, Hakeem touched my hand on the chair’s handle, letting me feel his clamminess and slight tremor. This wasn’t the usual.
He pointed out into the distance, towards the coast and across the sea. The clouds above the water we hadn’t seen because of the locust swarm, and they were gathering, funneling over the ocean. A big column was slowly dipping down under the rest of the hovering darkness. We had read about this in our textbooks, from the time before the nuclear winter even. Before the bombs dropped. And it was happening again? What had we done? What had the adults in white house’s done now?
I picked up a rock, feeling the roughness even through my thick gloves and threw it the 50 ft to our walking neighbor, aiming slightly in front of them so they’d see it, if not feel it. But nowadays, we never missed. It hit her gently on the side like a poke to her arm. I pointed to the sea as she looked up and she started the chain of rocks to walking neighbors. This was such a new event, with adults waiting at home and at the school, our procedures were lost and none useful anymore, so we gathered ourselves to discuss ideas, quickly. We were caught between school and home but knew we had to pick one for shelter. Most of the young ones were scared so we paired them with older ones, Hakeem grabbing the hand of a girl whose gas mask straps mussed her oddly blond hair.
We figured Teacher hadn’t gotten to school yet. We always arrived before him. He might see the cloud funnel and stay in. If he was already at the school, there was plenty of food there for him to bunk by himself for awhile, compared to feeding all of us kids by the school cafeteria alone. Besides, the littler ones were signing mom in our faces as if we weren’t listening.
Back at our bunker village, the adults were standing outside, gas masks and heavy jackets on with more jackets in their hands, which they rushed to put on their kids the moment we came close. The whole atmosphere was rushed. As Hakeem’s arms were shoved into his jacket by his dad, I tried telling our parents of the sea cyclone. “We know,” they said. “The bunkers are compromised by the earthquake, boiling water is just everywhere. Someone died.” They wouldn’t tell us who, so I started looking around, trying to read sadness beneath all the gas masks.
“We have to go. You ready, Hakeem?” his father signed.
A man held his arms up, and stepped towards the gathered. Another approached him and shook his head, gesturing for him to lift his gas mask. The man did, revealing a black moustache like the caterpillars I couldn’t wait to see come back in season this decade. His mouth moved as if to speak to all of us, taking deep breaths to spread his sound. I missed every other phrase because he kept moving his head back and forth, looking at one end of the crowd to the other.
“I know a place where all of us… came from… follow me, trust…” A brunette with a braid, Mandy, came up beside him and started signing to us. He was her uncle and he had come from another town to stay with them. We could go to that town and he could show us the way.
“Why are you signing? Not all of ‘em are deaf. They know what I’m saying and they can pass it on to their deaf kids when they have the chance.” He turned back to us. “We have to…” He stared intently at those nodding, mostly the ones who could read lips like me or who had hearing. The braided brunette continued to translate for him.
Ultimately, we all decided to follow the locusts, which also meant following Mandy’s uncle. Weighed down by our radiation-proof long travel jackets, we headed away from the coast, away from our destroyed homes and whatever else the locusts might have been running from. But stomping on the locust corpses was getting harder as they caked the undersides of our boots and clogged Hakeem’s wheels.
Lagging behind, the uncle approached the two of us. He lifted his gas mask to uncover his fuzzy moustache. “You should leave him behind. That chair is not going to work through the path I’m making. We’ve got some heavy hiking to get through and you’re going to die out there dragging him along.” I was incensed. How dare he say that. And to Hakeem as well. I walked us away but Hakeem had his hands free to speak for the both of us. He continued to curse him out over his shoulder in 12 languages. The profanity at least made me laugh.
I was walking over to the forest still debating on picking up a branch to club this uncle with when I saw a flash of light in the dark boughs. I kept Hakeem facing it, his body tense so I knew he saw it too. I looked over my shoulder and picked a rock and threw it at Mandy, closest to us for trailing along after her uncle.
Her uncle got beet-red fast and his mouth moved faster. “What are you doing hitting her with rocks?! I’ll hit you with a boulder you try that again. Try me, you little squirm.” I signed quickly that Mandy had to get her uncle to be quiet. The creature we saw was watching, listening like we couldn’t.
“He’s going to get us killed,” I signed, my hands flashing quickly at my stomach so the creature couldn’t see the movement.
But he didn’t quiet down. He kept screaming in words we couldn’t care to hear. “What do you mean?… He’s just… power games.” I turned back around, seeing in the trees’ shadows red gore across a Chernopig’s face. Hakeem signed, “Alone.” We were lucky for that. We’d just play rabbit then.
I could see its haunches now as it climbed out of the undergrowth. Just before they twitched, I signed, “Rabbit!” over my head. I saw a bit of clouding over its eyes as it leaped past us and onwards towards Mandy. She stared it down, stepping in front of her still screaming uncle to move and create attention for the Chernopig to follow her. She went off at a sprint once she knew it was zeroed in on her. The rest of us headed for the brush at the edge of the forest.
Once we were hidden and still, Mandy rounded back towards us. She was one of the fastest runners but she was running out of steam. And the aggressive Chernopig wouldn’t stop after tearing at her, he’d go after all of us.
Mandy’s uncle was still standing in the open about to open his mouth and uselessly talk some more. Another parent of our school grabbed him and put the nose of his gas mask against the uncle’s ear. It looked funny, but Hakeem told me to pay attention to Mandy. We were next.
She dove into our bush, rustling it. I ducked my head, grabbed tight onto Hakeem’s chair and put a smile on my face. Just like at recess. The Chernopig rounded up onto the brush and we headed out, racing away, wheels flying, my head down at Hakeem’s height to see his quick signs and suggestions of direction. I one-wheeled our turns and zig-zagged and raced ahead, taking a break by putting my foot on the bar and Hakeem leaning forward. We took it to the next kid in hiding. Diving into the bush, I had to tilt Hakeem’s chair to duck us down beneath the short vegetation.
We all kept at it, sending silent signals behind the brush to each other and quietly running down the large warthog, spitting and foaming from his mouth, screeching in anger, and slowing down. Tamzeed was having trouble doubling back towards us, stuck in the green plains of grass. He kept on running, further from the forest. We lay in wait, and worried until his footsteps stopped having the soft thud of grass and instead scrapped against hard-packed dirt. He had made it even further than our eyes were scanning for, the desert features of tumbleweed, cactus and dry grass dotting the landscape near him, all different shades of brown. Of course, the clouded eyes!
Tamzeed dove and to the Chernopig, it seemed like he had disappeared in the landscape of tan. Tamzeed kept still so the branches wouldn’t move or rustle in his wake and alert the predator to where he had gone off. Luckily he was tired out, so he decided that was enough exercise for one day. The aggressive hog walked off, back to the forest, missing those still hiding in the brush in his fatigue.
We had a choice from here. Continue in the wake of the dead locusts, or go across the desert Tamzeed had used for cover. It was my idea to go through the desert, figuring no difference between a natural desert and a forest deserted of food to eat, each plant and animal chemically peeling from radiation sickness. It was either a natural or unnatural desolation of usable resources.
Hakeem also brought up the question of why the uncle left his town in the first place. It brought suspicions on the loud, lazy-hand who would constantly be attracting the beasts to us with his noisy speech. We had this conversation in sign, so the uncle only learned of our thoughts once we had made up our mind and convinced our parents
Mandy translated our decision to her uncle. His reply was interesting. “We shouldn’t separate. We should head to the nearest civilization. Every minute, the earth is trying to kill us.”
“Seems only fair, since we had tried to kill it,” I told Mandy.
When her uncle caught up, he kept arguing. “At least we were able to subdue it to our will over here. The deserts have never been subdued.” He gestured vaguely towards the hard packed path, fear in his eyes clouded by anger.
“Subdue? Is that what the nuclear fallout was doing?” Hakeem retorted.
So we split, leaving half our town to travel through the grass and bushes hanging low with dots of red and blue and black, trees whose apples dropped to the ground to create a circle round their trunks, rabbits and boars to watch and imitate, all the vegetation we were told had fed our forefathers, now laced with poison. The desert would have us skirting around a mountain and spit us out in the direction of the town described to us.
We walked at night and slept in the day as Teacher had taught us. Bedtime whispers were about his possible his fate and mourning the loss of wise counsel and lessons he had given three generations now. While most of our grandparents had already gone, he was still making sure knowledge would not get lost between decades. Our parents tooks watches, glancing behind us and seeing if there was anyone trying to catch up, but mutterings of what the earthquake could have done to the school lowered hopes by the third day in the desert. So did the mushroom cloud in the distance, in the direction the other group had headed towards.
By that time, we were running out of rations too, and sleeping in our gas masks was getting tiring. The little ones’ cheeks were getting sore by the leather straps. We thought we might have been using the stars wrong when we started seeing a cloud on the horizon, low to the ground, kicked up dirt from a large group of something passing by or a storm weaving through. We waited for some new natural revenge of Mother Earth under our tarps.
But the dust barely breezed by our tarps after the slight shakes from the ground stopped. I could feel Hakeem’s chair being hit in a arrhythmic pattern, the metal vibrating on my legs. Beside me, Hakeem lifted up the tarp and saw two pairs of legs standing over us. Hakeem threw the tarp behind us and I popped up to put myself between him and the newcomers.
They jumped as I stared at them from behind my mask, the bulbous nose of it pointed upward in defiance. They had no masks on, not even jackets, which was probably more comfortable in the dry heat but deadly dangerous. Straps of leather and linen wrapped round their tanned arms, stomach and bleached hair. Goggles hung round their necks and atop their head, their faces dusty except for large circles round their eyes.
“They’re just kids,” one said. “Well, most of them,” he added as he looked up. “Hi! Where do you come from?” Hakeem slipped the knife from his arm bracer back inside.
These were the desert dancers, the ones with whipping strands of hair and fabric that twirled on their softened leather boots when the sun went down, breathing fire and weaving lights onto their big wheeled transportation. They were a fun urban legend of our town, a tale we liked to imitate in our bunkers at night. Now they were here, squinting at us through their tinted goggles.
“You know those aren’t doing anything by now, right?” This one tapped on the nose of my mask. “The filter is filled and broken, it’s done its job. It’s in retirement now.”
The dancers were breathing air and they had no boils or flaking skin. Their skin was actually smooth, a uniform color, if varied between each other. The adults reluctantly and carefully lifted their masks off, breathed some deep inhalations, and didn’t even cough. Looking down at their kids and their pain, and the desert dancers freedom, they carefully removed the masks from everyone. Hakeem and I took ours off, throwing the masks to the ground.
Once the pink cheeks and red welts were shown from the straps chaffing the little one’s skin, some desert dancers ran to their vehicles. One woman reached into a pouch hanging off her belt and took out a green stalk. She cracked it and keeled in front of our blonde little one, rubbing the opening of the stalk onto her cheeks, leaving a clear gel behind.
“This will help,” the woman softly explained. The ones who had run off returned with more of these green tubes, cracking and kneading them and pressing the goop onto our cheeks until they felt cool and soothed.
Our parents told our tale and asked how the world was holding up, if the wars had started again. The desert dancers were cut off from the world, thankfully, they said. We could be safe from the world’s problems too and enmesh ourselves in nature’s natural struggles. The hearing were relegated to translators so as not to confuse the negotiations.
We had decided to live with them instead of moving forward towards another bunker town. We taught them sign, which they were hungry to pick up and be able to talk like we talked. They found it easier to use our language when traveling inside their jeeps and trucks to keep the pack together. We learned how to build and dance like them, chains and metalwork our new playground toys. We taught the lessons from our teacher and realized the dancers were already using most of them, even the useless foraging and hunting skills, or what we thought were useless.
We traveled with them and integrated, learning from each other and creating a new family with its new lifestyle. Hakeem and I even built a new wheelchair, fuel-powered, strong and fast with big treaded wheels that I could ride on the back of, too. We would fly past the running kids and coyotes now.
One day, Hakeem and I came across a splash of pink in the desert. We came closer to it to find a small tree with a trunk that looked like fingers and human limbs intertwined, holding up a head of pink flowers. I approached it slowly. I now knew the smell of the desert, dirt, metal and oil, of the night sky and sunrise, the smell of sun-kissed skin, of the crackle before a storm. I couldn’t wait to see what a desert rose smelled like.
Inner Monologues and Escapist Realities 