Lasting Damage

After a week your body was yours again. I told you about the city. About the war happening all around us. I spoke to you of the barriers that protected our world from the outside. You stared out the window wondering when it was that we would go outside. I was afraid that the world would be a terrifying place for you. A world full of dark colors, rotted skylines, and dust. I was wrong to be frightened on your behalf. I could not protect you from the nightmares that surrounded us.

Behind our window I watched the universe shift focus. Scratches against reality unfolded around as dark shapes taped the glass. A storm had appeared on the horizon. Everyone was beginning to gather. I felt your fingertips on my own. I gripped your hand firmly in turn. I was fearful you would pull away from me but you slipped in closer. The sky was screaming. The monsters had broken through the barrier, they had finally come for us.

Aircraft fill the sky. Some our own maneuver with weapons that fill the sky like lightning blazing and burning the clouds like hands beating against the snare of a drum kit. Fire descended upon the ground below the gray knit clouds turning a house in the distance upside down to dust. One of the aircraft falls forward its coils bursting as it falls below the roofs and into the street. We can't make out the explosion. It sounds no different from the rest. We retreat to the basement. The next time we come up we will be greeted by a clear blue sky.

That morning was the first time I had heard you sing. Your voice clear as day, soft, sweet, beautiful. You reminded me of a canary. Something I believed I could remember having a vivid dream of once. I asked you were you had heard such a song. It was unfamiliar to me. You couldn't answer. It was as if the world had simply passed it along to you. A stream of consciousness that lingered in the air. Perhaps it was the last verse written by a poet, musician, now a withered ghost. The other part of me wondered if perhaps you were beginning to remember something. A part of you that no longer existed. A part of you that now would be a dream.

I had been careful. I was always careful. Sometimes far too much for my own good. I thought about the different ways I could approach the subject of memories with you without digging in a way as to have to explain exactly what you are. I decided it best to avoid the subject matter altogether, honestly I was far too afraid I would lose you.

Weeds grew up through cracks in the gravel roads as we began to move away from what had been left of our home. We had nowhere else to go and no choice now but to escape into the area beyond the city walls. The monsters were already beginning their march on the west side of town and it wouldn't be long before they found us. In the shallows of the mud we crawled beneath barb wire and over empty missile shells. By the time we reached the river and managed to clean ourselves off my hands were calayst and bleeding. The city rubble grew faint the farther we went but yet it still seemed we had barely moved at all.

Where did they come from? Why did it seem as if we had been damned? The whole world was fighting and hear we were running for our lives. Asking questions that should not be asked. How many times did the people of this world as for the fighting to stop? How many times did we ask the wrong questions look to the wrong leaders? What good was this war for mankind?

I crouched against the inner wall of a building holding an M2 carbine tight against my chest. I looked at you and your hair disheveled, your forehead sweating. Your arms were bare and dirty. Every inch of us was covered in some kind of grime. A tight beam of light pierced the darkness we were hiding. The monsters were getting closer. You sniffed the air softly to clear the dust that had settled in your nose. I lifted my carbine higher into the air. There were at least five soldiers near us. Another fifty would come running should even one of them fall. Every event from the moment we ran felt like a waking nightmare. Still I had control. We would not be pulled from the war and put into the spotlight.

Narrowly we escape capture again and again. The enemy more real and closer then I ever imagined. I'll do whatever it takes to keep them from discovering father's secrets. My secrets. The secrets I will one day pass on to you.

Radar. Telescopes. Cameras. The eye. There are so many ways to be seen. So few to stay hidden. There were millions who witnessed my birth but so few are now left to tell it. The stories would diverge, the mind has a way of filling in the blanks. Filling in the unknown. The monsters thought I was the monster. The creature creeping through the darkness. A dragon that spit fire in the night. Slowly we burned their camps to the ground like the fist of God striking a planet out of orbit.

Fathers secrets would stay safe. I burned the house. I burned the village. I burned the monsters that came to tear us apart. For what is Frankenstein without his monster and who is the monster without his bride. Without you I would be dust. Without you I would have given to hate. You were there with me when I began. The first and only human to show kindness to me. You were my first and when you died I felt the ice around me break. You were everything that was beautiful in this world.

Together we ran north into the cold.

It was there that I lost myself in your eyes never to be found again.