Virgin

“Holy shit,” I breathed, my eyes dazzled and my spirit stunned. “It’s so-”

“Awesome?” my hiking companion offered, green eyes excitedly peering at me from a cocked head, gauging my reaction to the sight that greeted our long, steady hike.

My gaze doesn’t leave the vista of a pale orange sky, the burning bronze orb of a foreign star sinking low to a horizon of rolling mountains and an ocean of swaying trees, leaves that should have been green are now burning red from the light of the sunset and swirling in the lazy breeze, hypnotizing unwary travelers. And at the center of the masterpiece, a city, so unlike anything I had ever seen before, the towers, houses, parks, skyscrapers (cloudcutters they called them here) all thrown together in a crazy mishmash map of alien architecture. A wild place, inside and out.

“Yeah, something like that,” is all I can offer in reply, a smile of wonder on my lips.

“You look like you’ve never seen anything so beautiful in your life. You had to have something like this where you come from, right? On…Eerth?” That can’t be concern in her voice, can it? A plain, earnest worry painting her words, like my missing out on breathtaking sights was some kind of hazard to my wellbeing. Then again, if this is the kind of effect views like these back home could have, maybe I was missing out on more than I realized.

The attempted pronunciation just widens my smile, but my thoughts are already growing a little heavy. “Earth,” I correct gently. “And yes, Nahiel, we definitely do, though I never really saw any of them, at least not in person.” And wasn’t that a painful thing to admit. Struggling to make it was the rule of law by the time I slipped away accidently, some impossible thing yanking me from Earth and dropping me here, with a new planet, new people. Still all humans though, which confused me endlessly. Was it a separate reality? Such an odd thing to contemplate, falling through cracks in dimensions like I was some hapless jaywalker tumbling into an open manhole.

Confusion, quick and honest, paints her face, so easy to read it’s like an open book with pictures instead of words. “You never got to see your planet’s amazing places? How come?”

The grin on my face dims, the memory of a darker world than this one reaching out to me, shadows of cold, loathsome fingers tickling the edges of my consciousness. “It wasn’t quite the same on Earth, where most people fight to get by. Here, everything is…different. Easier, kinder.”

I’m already eager to divert this conversation elsewhere, because my lovely friend Nahiel was the one who had set this all up, asked me on this “friend-date,” all nerves and worry when she approached me about it, like a high-school boy asking his crush to prom, which gave me reason to doubt friendship was her only, permanent goal. It wouldn’t do to sour the pleasant evening by talking about the insurmountable gaps between my world and hers.

Now the darkness clouds her expression, and she hesitates, but she’s just so curious, and she wants to know more about my world, about me. “I know you said once that there’s a lot different about, uh, Earth. Like nobody’s born with blessings, no heroes like we have, but…I figured there had to be more to it. Does the “no powers” thing mean your people aren’t as nice?”

And now my smile is a sad one, mourning the grave of a Humanity that could never be, at least as far as my home was concerned. “Nahiel, I admire and appreciate your world in a way I don’t think anyone born on it will ever truly understand. And I envy those who inhabit it for the incredible community they share.”

Now she leans in, interest growing as she feels she’s going to learn something new, important. She’d be better off not knowing the truth of my world, but curiosity and cats, and all that. “What do you mean? It can’t be that much worse. Doesn’t everybody take care of each other? What about villains? You said you have no heroes like ours, but do you still have villains? People will still fight them, right?”

I have to turn away, the naivety is dripping off of her face, a coating of lovely, innocent paint that shouldn’t be marred, not here, where the powers that all humans develop changed the course of their evolution, aimed their technology at improving lives instead of enhancing ways to end them. What sort of horrible person would take that from her?

Someone from a world like mine.

“We don’t have villains in my world, Nahiel.” Words spoken softly, a powerful blow trying to pass itself off as a caress.

She actually sputtered, my statement so unexpected that her planned sentence failed, water splashing through the canvas of her words, running in streaks through the cracks of the gray-blue stone beneath us. “No villains!? Then how come you make it sound so much easier here?”

I don’t want to look at her face, the immaculate portrait of dark skin and wide, open, eager eyes. I don’t want to see it cast to the floor, glass splinters flying everywhere, the hurt I might cause, the pain of seeing a different world, tiny yet no less gorgeous, being broken, stained, with no way to reverse it. But she’s asking, and I don’t have a lie to offer her. I give her the answer, and I don’t know if it’s the right thing, taking such an innocent person, an innocent Humanity, and showing them just how ugly life can be.

“Your world is so amazing to me, Nahiel. There are wonders here that could reshape my world, and they come from things you find boring and mundane. But your world is like a spotless maiden in white, where everyone is looking out for everyone, where your heroes battle your villains, and loss of life is treated as the genuine tragedy it’s supposed to be, and it’s always so clean and simple. You don’t know how much worse it can get.

“We don’t have villains in my world, but we do have men with eyes like serpents, hungry and desperate to steal, and injure, and destroy. Men with hands like a beast’s jaws, always snapping and ripping and tearing, looking for a meal of innocence and pleasure taken from the agony of others. We have women who smile at you, say sweet things, then drive a spike into your back and take all that you have, laughter and mockery spilling from their oiled mouths even as you lie in the filth, bleeding out the remainder of your sad life.”

I lean towards my lone audience member, her face suggesting she wants a refund for this play that started happy and now ends in bitterness. “We don’t have villains in my world. We have monsters.”