ghost. They’re probably trying to use our old superstitions to pull us back to the way all of us where before the aliens tried invading. That caretaker was only a trick of light, Bev.”
“Just like the rest of the holograms?”
Jayce nodded. “Just like the rest of the holograms.”
Beverly stared over that flat landscape. “Do you think the ground will ever recover? Do you think the green and the gold will ever return to these fields?”
“Of course it will,” Jayce smiled. “We know better now thanks to the Starwatch. It’ll just take some time to recover from what the aliens did to us. We might not live to see color return to the fields, but our children will.”
Beverly smiled. “Three girls and a boy?”
Jayce grinned. “Three girls and a boy.”
* * * * *
Humanity’s children didn’t fall into extinction in the generations that followed the aliens’ arrival, though the birth of any boy or girl became difficult and rare. Sadly, defects and deformities increasingly afflicted each new generation – hands that held too many fingers, eyes that grew blind, heads that swelled out of shape from tumors and knots, shunted arms and legs that forced many a human to move upon hands and feet like the animals of old. Yet miracles remained, and enough children survived long enough to procreate with a mate so that humankind didn’t vanish from the barren soil.
The children always hungered. Their stomachs grumbled and made each girl and boy a wild creature, their bodies naked and barefoot as they scavenged for morsels to soothe their appetites so that they could push on a day, a month or a year longer. With each generation, the sense of smell grew stronger to compensate for the weakening sense of sight, so that scent directed hungry and young stomachs to the best locations to dig at the earth until fingernails bled for buried food.
Humanity survived, and the rains finally returned. A boy grunted and cursed as the rain battered his back as he followed his nose to a hill topped with chiseled stones. The boy scampered about those rows of headstones, and he hissed and hid from the ghosts he summoned as his curious fingers pressed at the buttons installed into each marker. The shimmering ghosts terrified the child as they spoke to him in a language the wild boy couldn’t understand. Yet that boy did not flee, for a strange scent filled his nostrils, making his stomach rumble for the possibility of a morning meal.
The rain had collected into a stream, and that stream’s currents had eaten at the ground until a coffin, sized to hold a child, tumbled out of a collapsed segment of the hillside. The wild boy scratched at that small box. His fingers turned raw, but the boy didn’t stop until he removed the boards to look upon what had been buried for generations.
The alien’s corpse hadn’t decayed at all. The earth couldn’t absorb the remains of a creature that originated on another world. The alien’s large, black eyes still pleaded for mercy. Its long fingers still curled in pain.
And the alien still wailed within that hungry, wild child’s mind, until that boy himself sobbed for the pitiful crying that invaded his thoughts before fleeing from that carrion no matter how badly his stomach hungered.
* * * * *
About the Writer
Brian S. Wheeler calls Hillsboro, Illinois home, a town of roughly 6,000 in the middle of the flatland. He grew up in Carlyle, Illinois, a community less than an hour away from Hillsboro, where he spent a good amount of his childhood playing wiffle ball and tinkering on his computer. The rural Midwest inspires much of Brian's work, and he hopes any connections readers might make between his fiction and the places and people he has had the pleasure to know are positive.
Brian earned a degree in English from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. He has taught high school English and courses in composition and creative writing. Imagination has been one of Brian's steadfast companions since childhood, and he dreams of creating worlds filled with inspiration and characters touched by magic.
When not writing, Brian does his best to keep organized, to get a little exercise, or to try to train good German Shepherd dogs. He remains an avid reader. More information regarding Brian S. Wheeler, his novels, and his short stories can be found by visiting his website at www.flatlandfiction.com.
Heritage and Shimmer Page 7
