The Green Yonder

The Village

Everyone is free to leave the domes, but no one ever does. At least that’s what they would say. They said that people lived inside of them, that they were entire cities, worlds even. I had never actually been inside one so I couldn’t know for sure. Unlike whatever strange men who might choose to live in the domes, my people lived outside, in the open.

Our lands were lush and green, as a simple matter of fact. I was used to rolling hills and great trees. Massive open lands with wild horses and beasts of many kinds; these were the play-grounds of my youth. I used to love to sit on this one particular great hill. It looked down on the valley that our village was in. From the top of it, you could see everything. The simple houses we lived in, smoke rising from the hole in the center of their roofs if they were cooking, the children playing out in the open with each other, the teenagers making dares and riding horses, the old women gossiping. I could sit and watch life unfold for everyone.

I took many things for granted, since I had known no other world than this. I took long lazy walks by the softly running stream that ran alongside our village when I felt like thinking. I would drag a small stick through its waters, walking steadily against the current. I would look and watch as the stick split the water as it passed over it, feeling the gentle tug of the stream trying to pull it from my hand.

I spent much of my time thinking and being. I thought on many things, everything. I took long horseback rides into the open plains to clear my mind when uncovering new truths. There was a tribe of wild horses that lived in harmony with our village. We would feed and groom them and in turn they would let capable riders ride them. One of the horses and I were good friends. He was the youngest in the tribe, just like me. He had much rustling in his heart, just like me. He was black except for a white lining that covered his entire underside and that ran down his legs, almost like a white stream within his dark body. It looked like lightning, the stuff that comes from the sky. I called him by the noise that stuff makes. He understood what I meant.

My name was like that too. Sin: it meant how much of what you did is not what you wanted to do. It meant that there was a great rustling in my heart. Sometimes the elders talked about it; how they were very glad I had been born here, to them. They said I had a chance to be happy this way. “You do want to be happy, don’t you Sin?” They asked me things like that. What did they even mean saying things like that? Of course I wanted to be happy. How could someone not want happiness?

The trees were somewhat overpowering in their presence, but we lived in a clearing so that we could receive the sun uninterrupted. We picked fruit from the many trees in the forest, and children were played among them, but our homestead was the interspersed hills and valleys. From what I had heard, most other villages lived this way, built among the hills in a clearing from the trees. A lot of people said that was all there was on the planet, domes and trees, and the occasional field or plain. I knew more than them.

I had taken thunder out on great rides, longer than any rides I’d heard of. On my longest ride I saw things I couldn’t imagine. Great strange hollow rocks, totally unlike the rocks we had. They had a shape, a form to them that was intentioned. They had been made. But how?

I had no idea how they were meant to look, but I could tell it was not like this. I could tell they were largely broken or incomplete. The same way you can look at a broken cup and tell it isn’t whole, I knew these things were a shadow of whatever they had been. I asked the elders what they were and what it meant and they told me not to worry. “Everything in time Sin.” If I pressed the issue at all, they’d ask me “Don’t you want to be happy Sin? Forget about them, if they serve a purpose it will be revealed to you.” After a while I stopped talking about them and I stopped thinking about them, but I never forgot them.