"Yes, sir," I would always say. I never had a reason to doubt him.
Dawn pressed in, weak like a water-fried egg. When I opened the door, there was a bundle of apples piled in a neat pyramid. I paused. No one gave up apples, not in these parts. It was hard enough to even get the supplies we needed.
There was the hand pump for water. There was the crank for the motor to keep our solar-powered car moving. Our chickens kind of roamed free, but if they wanted to use the makeshift coop, they could. More likely than not, they took advantage of the shelter and laid a few dozen eggs. We kept them safe for the most part. They were a big lure for the coyotes and other bigger predators, though, so I didn't want to take too much time to keep them alive.
Survive was the number one rule. Sometimes, that meant taking away stuff that might attract a more immediate danger and risking starving to death.
I bent down to pick up the apples. I needed to make sure these weren't a bait or trap. There were monsters who were sneakier, subtler than the brute force of Skolls.
My mother had been the unfortunate victim of that. They had used children to lure her away from the safety of the house. And then from the safety of the ring. That was the thing that my mother could be counted on. She had a mama bear streak and it extended far beyond her biological child. She had forgotten the rules.
Forgotten about the Door.
Forgotten about the Ring.
And forgotten about Survival.
The cries of the baby filled the air as she ran out into the night. As soon as she ran past the circle, an eerie nothing replaced the screaming child.
My dad realized something at that point. We would be less tempted by our weaknesses if we were unable to hear.
And so he put up the spells from scripture that talked about silence. He walked the entire ring twice. Ever since, we couldn't hear any outside words or sounds.
The fact that I was starting to worried me. That meant the veil of protection was thinning.
Soon, sound. What was next? Scent?
We bathed in holy water for that purpose, and anointed ourselves in oil in order to keep hidden from the monsters wearing people skin. They didn't like anything blessed.
I looked to the mountains on one side of me and then the black nothingness that dotted the valley below. How long had it been since we had brought the car up the mountain? So long that the road was surely not passable if I ever needed to find my way out of the mountain.
The night was coming on faster. Once the equinox happened in a few weeks' time, the night would encroach more and more. That was the worst time of year here. Thankfully there was still some sunshine here and there.
But at night? Things started to get stronger, things that came with the Rave and the sickness. Things that had started to test the wards around the house.
Each year the wards grew weaker and we didn't know what to do about it. Of course, to be honest, it was more like my dad didn't know what to do about it. It wasn't like I knew what to do at all.
But I watched and learned and thank God I did. Because we both knew that dad would die someday. We didn't acknowledge it, but it would happen, and I needed to be prepared.
And so I was.
Sort of. I didn't do what he could do with his scriptures. He was a preacher and so his words were spells all their own. He would walk around the circle as if he were walking along the pulpit preaching love and forgiveness and the healing power of the word. He would reach into the scriptures and pull out the words and throw them to the congregation and we could feel it like a mighty rush.
The power of love and forgiveness.
I didn't have a gift, or at least not that I knew about. I normally would have gotten a confirmation service where I would be baptized in front of the church. There’d be witnesses and prayer and my vow that I would use my gift for good. That was something that was denied me with the Hellfire that rained down out of the sky, leaving the cities a charred ruin.
My mother had been of the old tradition. She didn't follow the structured pace of my dad's religion, she said. She was into the nature of things and believed that we ought to listen to our own truths. “Soli,” she would say. “Your gifts are already inside you. You don’t need a host of witnesses to validate who you are. There’s not a how-to, it’s more listening and believing.”
It was funny, because they all boiled it down to me in the same way. Believe and it shall happen.
Believe and my gifts will be revealed.
Believe and all my needs would be provided for.
Believe, believe, believe.
What my dad and ma didn't see? I did believe them. And I had faith in the ability to believe. The only difference was that I believed that no matter what I did, I would die out here.
One of my earliest memories was of my dad in his old walnut rocker in front of the fireplace, smoking on his pipe. He’d let me color in my own notebook as he read from his scriptures.
“In the beginning,” Dad had read from his leather-bound book, “God created the heavens and the earth.”
I had drawn green and blue circles on my paper, saving the yellow and orange to make the sunshine for later. "Daddy, how come He did that?"
