The Wall - A Short Story

     The Wall

     

     Zee kicked the wall watching it disintegrate and flake into red crumbs of dirt dribbling down the sides, a fat man’s gluttony. The flakes rejoined the terracotta earth of their birth. Dust to dust, earth to earth. It reminded her of the cake she made for Zinor Royze’s birthday extravaganza, the one she had forgotten to put the egg whites in. Without the bonding ingredient, it crumbled when cut into leaving fluffy yellow bits instead of cake.

     Her back still stung whenever she remembered. But the scars weren’t as deep and as many as they could have been. Gorge lightly flicked the whip against her henna-colored skin not wanting to expend his energy on a stupid girl.  Besides, if he marked her too much he couldn’t enjoy running his hands under her shirt later.

     But today, after she’d spilled the honey-colored mead on the white carpet, she’d run the five miles from her squalid red-bricked jail in Jurita before he could catch her.   

     Now, all her anger and bitterness for her stolen life welled up again in her small fist. Life was supposed to be better on Nororbis, free of the racism and hate left behind on the spent-up Earth her ancestors came from two-hundred years ago. This new world, Earth’s fraternal twin in the Queztal galaxy, had been a promise of a new beginning, a utopian paradise. Yet it had succumbed to Earth’s old viruses - power and greed faster than the lightspeed it took to reach this new world.

     Zee punched the wall this time, her red skin dusted by rusted-blood colored bricks falling to a earth all spent and used up and scarred and weak. But alive. Something trembled within the mortar. No, the earth itself. The red sand shifted and hiccupped at the base of the wall throwing her down and eating up what was rightly its own.

     Coughing up a thick wad of red dust and phlegm, Zee cleared the dirt from her lungs as she pushed her face and chest free from where the tremor had laid her prostrate and half-buried in the dirt. With knees shaking, mimicking the receding aftershock, her eyes received the largest surprise of all. Five kilometers of the twenty-foot wall had shrunk down by at least three feet.

     It hadn’t collapsed but sunk like the broken bedsprings of her dirty mattress in the basement, the material hollowed out in the center, a dip in the proper structure. The portions of the wall built on the rocky, gray terrain to the east and west of her stood fast, though its shoulders bent in a little from the weight of their fallen middle reminding her of fat Zinor Royce himself slouched down into his stumpy legs by a gut too full of sweet cake and booze.

     Pushing herself up on her own wiry legs, Zee walked carefully to the wall examining every footfall and shift of sand, afraid the terrain might swallow her too. But it held fast under her bare feet. Several of the bricks had crumbled entirely allowing sunlight to escape through shining yellow sprinkles on the terracotta sand. She let her hand play with them, watching the dappled light speckle her skin, ornamenting it with warmth. She examined it wondering if sunlight from Terrangle was still better than sunlight from Aztish. It must be. That’s why their King had built the wall to keep her people out and away from their shiny houses and cars and pure sunlight.

     But his wall was crumbling. Except for the Solval, the world’s strongest adhesive, the thin white strips still held fast. They’d been specifically designed to keep the Aztish peope from breaking apart the bricks and crossing the border back to Terrangle.

     Curiously, Solval had been manufactured in Aztish itself like most synthetic goods produced in the black-belching factories of Xijura to the west. Even now she could see the cloud of soot looming on the western horizon, ever growing like a cancerous tumor metastasizing across the sky converting sunlight and clean air into toxic vapors and a shortened life span for her people.

     She kicked the wall again. This time for her brother, Zejo, who was sold off at fourteen to the Terrangle owner of Bynbulk Factory, the largest producer of Solval. At least, it paid better than working in the jungles to the south harvesting the addictive, hallucinogenic D’light root for the factory owners and corpulent Zinor’s.

     Her second kick only set off a smaller chain reaction, sucked up a half foot of wall, and rained down a light powder of dust on her already dirty black hair. She brushed it away, raising her hand to her head just in time to deflect the rock meant for her scalp.  It bit into her skin. Brownish-red blood spackled her small work-hardened hand. Ignoring the pain, she rounded her hand into a fist. This time, without his father to intervene and his step-mother to scold, she wasn’t going down without inflicting some scars of her own.

     She waited till she could feel his sticky, sour breath on the back of her neck and his smooth fingers slipping under the hem of her rough spun brown shirt. Just as his hand circled around to cup the blossoming changes of her gender, she kicked the middle of his shin with her calloused heel and rounded on him, meeting her fist with his noise just the way her brother, Zejo had taught her.

     Unfortunately, Gorge was not alone. His rough gang of teenage thugs threw her to the ground. Fat Pentro crushed her chest with his meaty thighs while the evil twins, Jaro and Taro, held her arms down leaving her to flop and flail like the caught fish she was.

     “Cunta,” Gorge spat the word.

     Some of the blood from his broken nose fell into her mouth making her choke on copper. His face hovered just above her own so that his blood also fell on her cheeks tickling them. Zee spit back wishing he’d just get it over with and beat her unconscious so she wouldn’t have to watch what else he did.

     Though she still remembered a time not that long ago, when the only thing he used to beat her at was football, his long legs having the clear advantage over her short ones back when they were friends. Back when they lived on the other side of the wall, back before the wall existed, and Gorge’s mother, his real mother, Glowrena, baked them sweet cake to eat after school on the clean, white-bricked front stoop.

     Zee cried almost as much as Gorge had when his mother died building the wall. Her round, motherly hips and kind smile buried along with the others whose bodies collapsed in service to this crumbling edifice, the punishment for Aztish’s inability to pay the eight trillion unit price tag of the wall.  Their friendship and his good nature lay buried six-feet under with his mother’s bones somewhere in the deep red earth.

     She thought of her own parents, too and how changed they’d become. New creatures in a new world. Her mother, Zenna, altered into a single-parent after her coward father ran off to the jungles. She had been forced to work twelve-hour days at gunpoint, her body burning under the cruel midday sun only to shiver and freeze in the bitter desert nights. The Terrangle overseers broke her mother’s spirit and her back. Her crippled frame, bent in on itself like a melting child’s toy was now only capable of cleaning Zinor Royze’s toilets and shoes. All this waste and death so the Terrangle king could prove he was a man of his word and would rid the country of its Aztish scourge before Mid-Winter’s Day.

    King Segar wore his bad-temper like a mask. A child’s nightmare monster with a large scarlet mouth slashed open and sore across his iridescent face, always moving, always spewing hate in small, textable sound bites stirring the crowds into raucous cheers and chants of anger against anyone and everyone but themselves. He had promised he’d make Terrangle great again with his twenty-foot wall.  The wall that was sinking behind them right now.

     Gorge saw it. It distracted his next blow as he looked across her head to the sagging red barrier.

    “What in the name of Sanquetzal happened?” He even forgot his bleeding nose. Standing up, flanked by his equally baffled hench-boys, they shuffled slowly to the shortened wall.

     “I hit it.” Zee said weakly pushing off the sand and drawing a full breath now that Pentro no longer weighed her down.

     He had to weigh at least fifty cairns, and she wanted to know where he stole the food from. Her people had once been quite heavy sliding into obesity from too much oily foods, but that was before the wall and the rations. Now you were lucky to have a light layer of flesh to insulate themselves against the cold winter nights, unless you were a Zinor.

     “I stopped listening to your fairy stories years ago, Cunta.” Gorge spit into the base of the wall to emphasize his dislike for her. “What really happened?”

     “I’m telling you, dumb goat. I hit the wall like this.”

     She stood next to him stealing up her short frame so her shadow didn’t look so insignificant against the pockmarked bricks. Pressing her full lips together in a scowl of concentration meant to make her look tougher than she felt, she drew back her foot and summoned up all her anger about the life she left behind on the other side. She drew on her bitter regret at leaving her small neat house with the yellow door crammed with noisy jostling siblings and love; her Terrangle friends, Karo and Suzen with their pretty white braids who shared their dolls with her at recess now brainwashed to hate her for her red skin and last name; but mostly she drew upon her lost freedom to choose, letting it strengthen her body and her anger.

     Prior to the wall, she’d been learning math and science and languages at her old school in Aztish, her nimble brain keen on astronomy. Now the stars were just something she glimpsed through heavy lids as she trod back to her dirty sunken bed in the shed after a long day of bad-breaking labor.

     Again, the wall trembled and quaked resonating with her anger. The tremor knocked them all off their feet, forcing them to scramble backwards like topsy-turvy crabs away from the sinking sand as the wall lost another half foot to the hungry land.

     Jaro, a tall boy of eighteen with eyes as fathomless and frightening as a black hole, laughed a deep rumbling sound echoing the quaking earth.

    “And the wall came crumbling down, hurrah, hurrah. The Iries wall came tumbling down, hurrah, hurrah.” He sang the tune to an old nursery rhyme from the old world, the used-up Earth world millions of lightyears away. “What a bunch of dumb goats! That’s what you get for not listening to the geologists.” He threw a handful of crumbled wall into the air like confetti.

      “The geologists predicted that an ugly little cunta would kick down the wall?” Taro looked at his twin like he was sun-drunk.

     “No, Bendo.” He punched his brother’s shoulder before helping him up. “Don’t you remember anything from before?”

     Taro punched him back to even the score before shaking his head, a veiled look shading his eyes. “I try not to.”

     But she did. Zee remembered watching Taro’s hands trim bushes into perfect squares and coax the Nazza flowers to bloom larger and more fragrant than anyone else’s. She inhaled the ghost of their fragrance, zingy and sweet with a hint of spice. Jaro had the brains of the pair, but Taro had magic hands in another life. Now he took lives instead of nurturing them, armed with a gun and a grudge as he guarded Zinor Royce’s shipments of D’light root from the other Zinor’s armed henchmen.

     “Ok, let me educate you little brother.” Jaro was only fifteen minutes older. “Back when Segar was first elected Preeminent of Terrangle before he overthrew the council and made himself king, he announced he would build a wall dividing Aztish from Terrangle throwing us all back to the hell we scrambled out of and making his economy strong again.”

     “Stop parroting what we already know.” Gorge alternated between staring at the wall and at her, but spared a quick glare for Jaro reminding him who was boss.

     “If you let me finish, Bendo,” Jaro continued not cowed at all.

      Gorge spit and went back to studying the wall, probably thinking about his mother’s bones buried on the other side making her pity him, if only for a second.

     However, Zee and Taro leaned in for the lesson, while Pentro dug out a sweet cake from the folds of his black tunic and stomach and took a bite before leaning in too.

     "Anyway, as I was saying, the geologists sent to survey the border warned Segar that a wall would not be structurally sound. For one, there were too many hills and rivers. But it would be especially weak here in the Crimson Desert, the ground too soft and malleable to make a solid foundation.”

     “But of course, old blowhole was too busy talking to hear them, right?” Zee laughed and then waited remembering her position in society and this gang of boys.

     To her surprise, they laughed back and spat at the ground in a show of solidarity against a common enemy.

     “The Solval still held together though, so I guess he got one thing right.” Jaro threw a stone at the thin white adhesive strung out in the empty sockets of fallen brick, like so many empty eyes wasted away from over-working or they mind-numbing smoke of D’Light root.

     “That’s because it's Aztish made. Those Iries don’t know how to make anything. I bet they don’t know how to wipe their butts without Aztish servants to do the work for them. That’s why they still build their factories down here.” Gorge drew his hand back to let out his own anger.

     Dramatically, he paused his fist parallel to the bricks, the light of a plan shining in his black button eyes. “Let’s see their beautiful, shiny new world free of the stain of red skin and red workers.”

    He tried to get a footing in the disintegrating mortar but his weight and thick, black boots set off another tremor and several pairs of feet flew backwards from its epicenter.

     But Zee knew Gorge never gave up once he set his mind to anything or anyone. He picked himself up dusting off a fifth of the sand now blending with his terracotta skin and smiled at her. The same smile he gave her when he cornered her in the washing room and pinned her back to the cold washtub, the sour smell of dirty clothes and his desire filling her nose till she choked on it.

     “Zee, pretty little flower, aren’t you curious to see the life we left behind?” he cooed, a smile pushed into his cruelly, handsome face.

     She took a step back wondering if she could finally outrun him, but her fear of his wrath combined with a growing curiosity kept her in place.

     “You can’t send her. She’s just a girl, completely useless.” Pentro swallowed the last of his cake spitting crumbs as he talked.

     Zee tossed her black curls over her dirty shoulders and marched to the wall like the proud girl she once was. Before girls on both sides of the wall were silenced into second class citizens and slaves. Her palms searched the seams of the bricks, lightly gripping the Solval as she drew herself up, being grateful for once for her thin, bird-like body.

        In fact, she felt very bird-like as she climbed higher and higher, her feet finding purchase in the large missing chunks near the top. She only paused for a minute, a foot away from the summit remembering the spiral of barbed iron swirling atop the wall full of enough joules of energy to fry her crispy black like the chicka bird she’d accidentally burned last week.

     At least, it would be a faster way to go than this slow progression to death, she thought in the deep silence between the boys shouting at her below. Silence. She listened again, her ears straining to hear the low hum of electricity. Nothing filled them but the sound of the wind which tickled her hair against her cheek and cooled the sweat on her back.

     “Are you as lazy as they think we are?” Gorge taunted from below looking so small and insignificant it filled her with glee.

      Her hands ached, her feet bled, and her muscles trembled with the effort of climbing but her heart lightened as she pulled herself up the last two feet to the summit, careful to straddle her skinny legs over the u-bend of the spiral wire.

     She gathered her breath, steeling herself to look at her old home in the sprawling desert metropolis of Sundenne, hoping not to be caught by the guards on the other side who would be pointing hostile eyes and bullets at her.  But the smell hit her before her eyes could comprehend what she saw. The air reeked of sour rot and excrement, a decomposing odor watering her eyes and making her wish she’d broken her own nose instead of Gorge’s.

     The once bustling streets paved with yellow asphalt lay hidden beneath piles of garbage and broken plumbing. Jet-cars rotted into sun-rusted skeletons. While the cookie-cutter houses laid out in master-planned grids stared gap-doored and sightless through dirt-crusted windows or broken panes. Big-box shops sat silent and brooding over parking lots empty of people but full of their waste piled in putrefying heaps of unidentifiable refuse decayed into brown and black ooze trickling down in slow rivulets across the cracked asphalt by the double sun’s unforgiving rays.

     The only movement came from the fat rats and the dingy white grocery bags ghosting on the wind. The Riva Bridge, a new construction project her Uncle Zirk had worked on, lay unfinished; its half-built roadway dipping its long neck towards the river like a bent old man. The gardens, oh Taro would weep like a little girl if he saw the fried brown stubbly lawns and skeletal bushes of the once luscious spaces, previously a small oasis of green in an asphalt and dry-walled world, they now lay in ruins.

     She felt a tear trickle past her nose, muddying the red dust on her face. The world she saw was as wasted and empty as the future she had been locked into with the final bricks of this wall. King Segar’s great new land was as empty, desolate, and destructive as his promises had been. He’d shoved her out of the promised land, laying waste to two worlds separated by a thin layer of Solval and a thick-stratum of fear and hate.