Morion

We can never go home.

Morion is what they call it now. It looks beautiful from here below, though we are far from the sparkling city. In the wastelands, as they call it. Like, literally. We live side-by-side with trash. We work with trash. We are treated like one too.

If you are to enter my house, you would need to open a hatch to a ladder leading down. That’s the door. And the windows? Instead of those open holes that made us feel a tad too vulnerable, we made do with some humble adjustments. They are made of glass panes of the olden days that we soldered onto the metal ceiling to let some sunlight in and bear some semblance to what we used to know. A home.

It was dawn.

I slathered some grass-mint leaf paste onto my tooth brush and brushed my teeth with it, albeit too aggressively. My thin tree branch broke, hanging by a sole fibrous thread. I groaned. My eyes anxiously flickered up to our door.

True enough, the harsh stomp came right on time. A vase shook precariously at the edge of my dining table. I glared at the hatch and rubbed my ears as I felt the air pressure come and go. I will never get used to it. Nor will I ever try to normalize it in my life.

As I opened the hatch, I could just barely smell the fresh air with a hint of olive and mint in the air, when a boot kicked my jaw.

“You’re late!” the boot yelled.

I squared my jaw and stared at him unflinchingly, hoping my eyes would be able to burn his smirk off his face as his eyes trailed the path my blood took down my neck. I could feel the rough sand and soil sticking to the warm wetness that was now pooling at my collar. I wondered what on earth he was taught when he was young.

“Sir, do not kick human beings. Do to others as how you would wish for your own mother and sister.”

Unsure of how to react, the soldier loosened his grip on the gun with a rare expression on his face, past his full metal and plastic helmet that shields his face from full view. Hm, something new. Expression, helmet and all. No one from the wastelands had talked to a guard directly without fear before.

Fear. It is something that has long left me that fateful day.

Broken glass. That’s what I saw as I approached my house’s hatch one night. I had just returned from my aunt’s house, after delivering some grains, flour and a few bottles of potable water. All illegally obtained of course, in our territories. They half-expected us to starve to death here after a few years, but we managed to hold on for a decade. Long after ‘The Calamity’.

One of our windows had become a hole yet again, but this time I could see it was because someone forced through it violently. The perpetrators were long gone, but the unbearable marks of someone being tortured and violently yanked through our window-hole were all that’s left. Bloodied prints, shattered glass and some other details that I will forever block from my mind.

“Ma...? Pa??”

I whispered to the silence, scared at what I would find. Or not find at all. My eyes widened in terror at the sheer silence and for all the bloodstains I saw.

My house was empty. Devoid of my sister’s chatter and of my dad’s ardent prayer chants. Mom’s cooking was still bubbling away, blissfully ignorant of the fact that its owner may be gone.

As I ventured deeper and deeper into the house, my heart dropped deeper and deeper into an abyss. Blood rushed to my head to start forming the tears in my eyes, but even my eyes could not seem to cry. They were painfully in shock from what I was beginning to realize.

As the harsh desert wind whistled in my ears, a horrifying whisper; its chill added to my gnawing sense of desperation. My family was gone. At 10 years old, I became an orphan.

My heart and body shook at the memory of my parents and older sister, at the way they were most likely treated before they died. The soldier smirked, tightened back his grip on his gun and I could tell he thought I was trembling in fear and raised his height as I struggled to regain my mental state after the vivid memory.

“You people are all weak, dirty dogs. We belong to this place. We are The Chosen. Chosen by The Order. Pure and biologically superior. Your people are all liars and evil. You stole our ancestors homes and now they are rightfully ours!” he spat out.

“Nobody would hear you scream if we tortured you. Nobody would care. You are the son of a scumbag and his wife. They deserved to scream and die as we-”

Something inside me snapped. My parents’ faces flashed before my eyes and a streak of red blinded me for a second.

I had reversed our positions in that very moment.

My hands were now on the gun, my foot on his neck. He was screaming in pain now too. I felt a flash of insane power. So this is what it felt like being in control.

So he was the murderer. Or one of them.

Quickly glancing around for signs of other guards approaching, I hastily gestured for him to go down my hatch.

I could do it now. I could finally get the revenge I had always envisioned in my mind, mixed up in the pain of my loss.

But as my eyes bore into his eyes, my arms felt numb. I felt like I was losing my family all over again at this very moment.

At the other end of the gun, it made me think of how my own family had probably cried out for their own lives as well. I could almost taste yesterday’s dinner of boiled roots and grains again, coming up from the pit of my stomach.

Something gnawed at me though, as I slackened my grip on the gun. The very same position that the soldier was in, reminded me that I had thought I recognized a sense of humanity from within him.

It was in that split second of his confused state that he seemed to have recognized to The Ancients’ values of humanity and the sanctity of a human life. It was something I had never seen before, not in all my years of defying guards and receiving their immediate retribution which would have left me half-dead before I recuperated thereafter.

I looked closer at the creature in front of me; and immediately yelped in surprise- He seemed to have changed in that very instant.

His hair was growing longer, inch by inch, by the second, and features shifted in the soft pastelly glow of the rising sun.

Winded, I dropped my gun immediately and barely noticed I was on the ground, slack-jawed.

It became my sister.

She dropped to the ground in haste and started scribbling on the soft soil. I glanced at it briefly while still rooted to my spot.

"Sorry I had to do all that. I had to be sure you were you. They are listening. No time to waste. Rebellion in the city."

Looking at me meaningfully, she pointed to the last line.

"I have come to take us home."