The Last Storyteller

Disclaimer: This story involves animal cruelty and psychological abuse.

The room had filled with children so fast. Hope watched as a space that was usually cold and unfriendly became alive and a small smile stretched her wrinkled face. There was very little that caused her happiness in her old age, but a room filled with excited, happy children would always give her joy. They just seemed to make everything brighter, even if the only colors they carried with them were that of their eyes and hair, their little grey jumpsuits blending together against the monochrome colors in the Colony.

The children were all laughing, asking each other whether they remembered some or other story which she had told in the past. It had become a weekly habit for the children of the Colony to come to her Pod to hear her tell stories of her childhood. About a time before the Colony and drab jumpsuits, when things like Breathers and UV-filters were products of fertile imaginations and not necessities for survival. A world that was more than metal, glass and lingering fear.

It had started with only her grandchildren. They had listened to her stories of what life had been like before, when they came to visit her each week. Then they started bringing their friends from school and the children they met in the Middle Section. Soon, children from all the different Sectors were becoming friends and rushed to meet each other in the Middle Section, the only place people from different Sections really mixed, after school, before they came to her Pod at the end of each week, crowding every available surface for a seat.

Hope had lived more than half of her long life in the Colony and it still broke her heart that the past would always be more colorful than these children’s futures.

A small cough at the back of the room drew her out of her sombre thoughts. A friend of her grandson’s, Neo, stood in the corner trying his best to suppress the sound. The boy was small for his age and the Breather he wore had seen better days. But that was the way things were if you had been born in the Back-Sections. Substandard life-sustaining necessities for some, so that limited resources weren’t wasted. The system sucked. If Neo didn’t get a new Breather soon, he might never need one again.

Perhaps today was the day. Perhaps someday, these children would remember what she taught them today and it would make a difference.

“Right!” Hope clapped her hands together, and immediately she was pinned by the eager gazes of the children in front of her.

“When I was still a little girl,” Hope started, her voice thin and scratchy, “There were very few animals left on earth. Most had died out many years before. But I had a book with pictures of -” A little girl who hadn’t been there before raised her hand.

“Yes, my dear?” Hope smiled warmly.

“What’s a book?” she squeaked out, her eyes huge and earnest. Before Hope could even ask, Aurora, her granddaughter, darted from the room. She was a quick one. “If you wait a moment, Aurora will show you.” A ripple of excited whispers spread across the room as it always did when she brought out something from before. Aurora came back with a glass box held against her slight body and inside the box, rested Hope’s greatest treasure. The book lay open to page that showed giraffes eating from a thorn tree. The little girl who had asked stared at the book with a strange expression on her face.

“But... What does it do?” Her little nose scrunched up and some of the children who had seen it before snickered at her confusion. Hope aimed a reprimanding stare at them. “I don’t remember you knowing what it was when you came here, either, Junno,” Neo breathed from the back of the class and the snickering died down, replaced by a healthy dose of embarrassed grumbles. The little girl sent Neo the sweetest smile Hope had seen in a long time, and Neo blushed profusely. A little knight, that one.

“A book, my dear, used to tell us things we didn’t know. Much like our Screens do today. Except you couldn’t make the book search for something for you, and not all books had all information.” A few frowns did the rounds and Hope felt an indulgent smile tug at the corners of her mouth.

“By the time I was a child, books were already very rare. I found this one by accident and hid it under my bed. I didn’t want to share it. My father would probably have sold it if he ever found it.” The looks of utter disgust on the little ones’ faces and the cries of complete outrage at her statement made her chuckle.

“What’s the book about? What’s the picture of?” Another little boy with bright red hair called out above the din. He had been there before, but he had obviously not yet seen the book.

The chatter died down and the children re-focused on Hope, even those who had heard this particular bit of story before.

“This is a book about animals.” Hope gestured at Aurora to take the book around the room so everyone could have a closer look. “Now, mind you, by the time I had found this book, most of these animals had died out. There were only a few types of animals left around and I had only seen one by the time I was nine.” And as sad as that was, what broke Hope’s heart even more was that none of these children had ever, or would ever, see an animal in anything other than a picture. “And in the picture,” she forced herself to continue past the sudden lump of sorrow that lodged itself in her throat, “Are giraffes.” Low murmurs filled the room again as the children repeated the word, looking at their friend and giggled at the strange sound.

“Are you sure those were real? My daddy said that animals are just stories old people tell to make people feel bad for everything they did wrong to cause the Great Burn.” Hope had to work very hard to keep a friendly look on her face. And if she failed a little, she hoped she at least didn’t look like she had swallowed a lemon. Even if the girl, her attitude and her upbringing was what was wrong with their society.

“Yes, dear, I’m quite sure,” Hope replied as calmly as she possibly could. Patience had never been a virtue of hers and she had never bothered to learn it but she would make an exception for a child.

“What happened to them?” The enthusiastic red-headed boy called out again.

“To whom, dear?”

“The guyfrafs!” Strangely, none of the other children laughed at his mispronunciation. And, again, Hope found herself smiling. She never smiled as much as when these children visited her.

“Most of the animals died-”

“Yes, we know, but why?” the boy interrupted, seeming quite upset about the matter, his cheeks spotted with red and his eyes flaming.

Hope took a deep breath.

“They died because they had nothing to eat, or they had no water, or because the air where they lived became too poisonous to breathe.” A heavy silence settled over the room and from the corner of her eye she saw Neo’s hand lift to his breather. Every child was taught how humans had destroyed earth. That even after all the food was gone, and the air became poisonous and the rain deadly, every livable surface had been burned in what was now known as the Great Burn.

But humans had always been resourceful. They synthesize nutrition when food ran out, effectively clean and reuse water over and over again, designed air purifiers when the air became too toxic to breathe. They found a solution for every problem. When the wild fires started without any way to control or stop them, they built the first Colony with plans build more. The first Colony had been nearly full when the Great Burn came. Other Colonies were never needed.

It was unearthly for a room filled with children to be so quiet. It was as if they truly understood what had been lost every time they spent the afternoon with Hope.

“It wasn’t always that bad, was it Gran?” The quiet voice drifted from the back of the room. Gale stood next to Neo, a silent plea in his eyes. Please, his eyes seemed to say. Please make it better. Neo was unusually pale, his breathing labored.

“No. No, it wasn’t. Get comfortable, my lovelies, this will be a long one.”

“I used to have a friend. At least, he was the only other child living anywhere near us. Some of you have already heard the stories of the scrapes we managed to get ourselves into.” A few enthusiastic nods and chuckles spread through her little audience.

“Well, now, I was just shy of my ninth birthday when Rune, my friend, started strangely. Every day, he would sneak into the little cluster of trees not far from our homes and not come back until sunset . Rune suddenly had very little time for me and, needless to say, I wasn’t very pleased.

“One day, after I got tired of rude brush-offs and his very obvious efforts to avoid me, I’d had enough. I’d always been a bit of a curious creature, so I decided to follow him. It had sounded like a wonderful idea at the time, but the terrain was rough, I was weak and the air quality was already far worse than we had known at the time. It was pure stubbornness that pushed me to follow Rune all the way to his destination.

“He finally, after what felt like hours of my trudging after him, stopped at a tiny wooden structure that looked like it would fall over at any moment. He looked over his shoulder, as if trying to make sure no one had followed him, before he ducked inside. I waited a moment longer before his shaggy head popped back out and he looked right at me, where I thought I had expertly hidden myself, before he called: ‘You comin’, or what?’” The giggles that broke the tense expressions that had been plastered on the children’s faces made Hope cackle. Until she heard Neo’s chuckling turn into another round of coughs, and the worry started to eat at her again. He waved a hand at her, his eyes begging her to continue, not to single him out.

Hope was starting to tire from the emotional whiplash she had been enduring through the afternoon, but nodded slightly.

“I ran toward the flimsy shack and ducked in after Rune and the sight that met me was one I will never forget until the day I die.” She paused for effect, the children back to being tensely engaged.

“There, in the tiny wooden house, lay a dog.” Gasps rang out from her audience, whether of wonder or disbelief, she didn’t know. “That had been the first, and last time I had ever seen an animal. Rune had been gone so much because he had been building the dog a house. I remember thinking that if Rune had been the one to build the shelter, I could understand why it looked so flimsy. Then he started taking the dog some of his food everyday. And food had already become pretty scarce back then.

“From that day on, Rune and I would meet up as soon as we finished out chores every day and go out to spend time with our new dog friend. We would both hide as much of our food rations so we could and take it with us and feed the dog. Neither of us minded the hunger pangs so much if we knew our four-legged friend would eat. We spent hours arguing over a name for the dog, but he never reacted to anything. He just wagged his tail every time we looked at him.”

Hope faltered. She felt the memories and expectations of the children weighing on her, and she knew that she would disappoint them. This was not a story they would want to hear. But they needed to hear it. She closed her eyes and drew a shaky breath when a small hand fell on her knee. The little girl who had asked about the book squeezed Hope’s knee, affection and comfort in her young eyes and it was all Hope could do to not burst into tears.

She steeled herself and continued.

“The night before my ninth birthday, I heard my parents talking. They thought I had gone to sleep already. My mother was worried about how thin I had gotten. I hadn’t noticed. Daddy hadn’t either. But my mother went on and on about things I didn’t quite understand. Later, I would realize she was begging my father to come live in the Colony.

“The next day, during breakfast, my father watched me like a hawk. Trying to hide away some of my breakfast rations had been almost impossible. I managed to slip a few bits and pieces, but not nearly as much as I would have liked. I still had the rations from the previous night’s dinner, so that helped. I finished my chores as fast as I could and rushed to find Rune waiting for me at the trees.

“We didn’t look over our shoulders much any more. I wish we had that day.” Hope looked at each of the children crammed into her Pod, their faces suddenly less eager and far more wary.

“You see, my father followed us that day and he brought along his grandfather’s old hunting knife.” A true horror washed over the faces of the children who understood what she was about to tell them.

“He... he killed our dog. Made us watch while he did it. Said we were wasting good food by keeping an animal as a pet.” Hope had never told this story to any one before. She had never wanted to. But she knew that no one would ever tell these children how bad things had been and they would never move forward, never overcome the past, if they didn’t know what it was that they had to overcome.

A few of the children were crying, a few looked like they were going to be sick.

“He tried to force me to eat the meat. For days after that. And he forbade me from ever speaking to Rune again. I didn’t eat anything for more than a week, terrified that my father would trick me. It was almost a year before I spoke to my father again. And Rune...” Her voice broke. Silence seemed to stretch across the room for what felt like forever.

“The first wild fire hit our area. We were evacuated to the Colony because my father helped to make the first Breathers. Rune and his family didn’t make it.” For the first time in decades, Hope felt tears escape her eyes. Somewhere in the room a sob ripped from a little girls throat. Hope met each child’s gaze.

“Be better,” she whispered, the sound only reaching their ears because of the intense silence. And the silence held, weighing them down.

Until Neo collapsed.

Some of the children screamed, others ran from the Pod and others huddled together in frightened groups.

“Gran! Gran, he’s not breathing!” Gale cried frantically, trying to restart the broken Breather. Hope felt fear for the boy flood through her. She couldn’t reach the boys at the back of the Pod in her wheelchair while the children were in the way.

She glanced around her frantically and at her feet, still clinging to her knee, sat the little book-girl. Hope knew she had to act fast.

“Take this Breather to them. Tell them I had an extra one tucked away.” Hope pushed the device into the girls hands who still stared at her with wide, fearful eyes, not moving. Hope could barely breathe. “Go now.” She did her best to smile reassuringly. The girl gave her one last hesitant look before barrelling through the wall of bodies in front of her. Hope sat back, hoping to see what would happen. Hoping to see the beginning of a new future.

When the girl finally reached them, she shoved the Breather at Gale. “Your Gran said she had extra.” Gale wrenched the Breather from her hands before disconnecting Neo’s malfunctioning Breather and replacing it with the new one. Gale wanted to tear his hair out as he waited for the Breather to activate, every second feeling like an eternity, and then suddenly Neo gasped and started to cough violently.

Gale did his best to sooth his friend while the little girl stood staring, pale faced and trembling. When Neo’s breathing and heart-rate finally started evening out, Gale let out a wild cry and threw his arms around his friend.

“You did it, Gran! You saved him!” A wild cheer swept through the room, children hugging each other and clapping Gale on the back. A thought niggled at the back of his mind, an uneasiness growing in the pit of his stomach. “Where did you get the extra Breather, though, Gran?” Gale asked when the commotion died down a bit. The horrible feeling spread out from his gut, making him feel ill. One by one, the children fixed their eyes one the last storyteller of the Colony. “Gran? You hear me?” When she didn’t answer him, he finally turned to look at her.

“Gran?”

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