And then

May 27, 2010 at 11:58 am · Filed under Prose and tagged: a bit of sci fi still in me

I was not born into my mothers world. The world I was born into was not a world she could conceive of, but the product of the bleak tracts of time that give no indication of their final assault.
When I was born, she was blind and so she covered my face with her hand. While most of us have memories that are dotted with holes, somehow I, unlike many, remember clearly the feeling of her rough palm on my newborn skin.
She didn’t mean to hurt me but I remember her touch was crude. She hadn’t expected a child and when the pregnancy she came she regularly felt her stomach, surprised by its growing weight.
I never had a father. There was already crime in the world which mine superseded. The genesis of my birth was a rough act rather than a kind one, a brief connection of two bodies which doesn’t bear thinking of, and in my lifetime was never spoken about.
When my mother died I was six years old and I was taken to a morgue in the centre of the business district. The morgue was the size of an ordinary hospital, but there, no healing took place. The size of the structure indicated not the rising mortality rates, but the increase in population which was loud it was deafening.
I had learnt nothing about religion and so, it seemed, had the government. They let me look at my mother’s gray body on a metal tray then they slid her away into a sealed space in a wall of such sealed spaces. I felt a distant warmth which I didn’t know then, yet know now, was the undeground incinerator where the bodies were dropped to burn.
After that I was raised by a government orphanage. I was young but I wasn’t pretty and so, despite the many wealth patricians who came through looking for new children to adopt, I wasn’t taken and I grew old there, not really learning my lesson, but absorbing nevertheless elemental and time old truths about survival.
All children are turned out at sixteen, as was I. I took my first job in a call centre on an indistinct streets among a pattern of indistinct streets on the outskirts of the city. Highrises towered here, bow legged, newer than the ones in the city and yet in a worse state. When I walked home to my single room apartment paint from the facades dripped off from up high and fell on my face, mostly wet and sometime scattered with the faintest remains of moss or spider web.
The municipal park was where I spent most of my time. I worked six days a week but I did not work on Saturdays and so on Saturdays I say beside the green, bilge water pool at the centre of the park watching the mechanical fished, placed there when the real ones died, swim about in perfect figure eights.
I saw endeavours, I saw efforts, of the attempt to resurrect the soul in the eyes and the slow careful movements of practitioners of tai chi and the people who read their books, like hymnals. But inside myself it was all dead, and not the faintest glimmer of aspiration flared up inside of me, aspiring me to be anything else but a number in what was a vast, absorbing and outrageous machine.

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