Plutonian Fecundity

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Hued flora strut with the wind against a canvas of lime locks. Lemon leafed trees compliment the purple cotton in the sky, enchanting the hills they dwell upon. The crimson sky, however, emerges with no encouragement from the sun, giving this midnight air a cloak of the uncanny.

“Jahnathan! What are you doing!?” roared mother.

Scrambling to hide the leather encased parchment, he yells back, “Finishing up my assignments, mother! You know we have the skill showing this weekend!”

“Open up this door, NOW!”

With little hesitation, the bedroom door slides down revealing a room as tidy as a government office. Jahnathan steps aside, his hands folded limp across his lap as he allows his mother to invade his cubicle. Like a bird looking for its next meal, mother takes a penetrating look into the crevices of his room, scanning for any suspicious dislocations.

As she begins walking towards a drawer left slightly ajar, Jahnathan interrupts his mothers plunder with a question, “Am I disappointing you, Mother?”.

Her piercing eyes stab through his pupils, “The spiders are telling me you're talking in riddles. I never spoke to you in the ways you speak to yourself. What are you hiding from me?”.

Jahnathan, with tremble in his voice, “Nothing mother nothing! I swear on father, I swear on Omnipater! I have worked too hard to throw it all away, mother, please believe me!”.

Completing her investigation, she walks towards the dresser and yanks it open. In the drawer she finds underwear, socks, and t-shirts. Jahnathan is watching her with wide eyes as she pulls the drawer out of its crevice and dumps its contents on the ground. At this point, his brothers had left their cubicles and began crowding around the door-frame, peering in and silently judging their paralyzed neighbor. Without looking through the pile of clothing on the ground, mother sticks her hand through the dresser's orifice and sweeps the backboard until she hits the soft leather contraband.

When she reaches deeper into the dresser, Jahnathan perceives her slight pause as the notice of his fate. In a final feat of freedom, Jahnathan bolts towards the open door like a bird from its cage. Aware that his escape is an admission of guilt, the brothers wall into the door-frame and bar his liberation. Before Jahnathan can register this obstruction, a jerk in the collar spins him around and propels his face into the path of a swinging leather book. Dropping to the ground like fallen nails, he looks up to mother clasping his pride between her clammy hands. Another strike slams Jahnathan’s head back into the ground, he didn't realize paper could be so heavy. The next blow knocks his senses away, curling him up into a ball as tears flow down his blemished cheeks. With his eyes pressed shut, he tries to drown out the sound of his mother’s screaming as she rips clumps of pages out from the leather book. In the time it takes to boil water, life could never be the same.

Throwing the book on the bed, Mother barks at the boys at the door, “If this book moves an inch, the entire floor is to be punished. Disperse yourselves immediately.”.

Jahnathan can hear footsteps and shutting doors, his closed eyes creep darker and darker. Mother, a needle between her fingers, stands over the cowering body and injects his neck with a fluorescent purple syrup. She grabs him by the hair and begins her descent down the tower. The surrendering body slides limply away from the textile floor it was accustomed to, and out onto the cold, oppressive, iron floor that had only been used for stepping.

Moving down the coiled edifice and through the luminous halls, doors open as impassive eyes gawk at the rag-doll they had once called brother. Time had passed and Jahnathan was jadedly unconscious. The sound of static light was accompanied by a distant hum that amplified with each passing floor.

Reaching the fiftieth floor, Mother drops Jahnathan on the ground and strolls alongside the translucent walls.

“I’ve always loved coming to this floor”, she mutters to herself, “fresh light must be good for the eyes”.

She briefly glances back in the direction of Jahnathan, before turning her gaze into the bright white tunnel that connects complex 47 to the rest of the world. She motions over to the mother standing guard, and together they walk towards Jahnathan’s body. In unison, the body is carried towards a flat, silicone drum on wheels. The drum consists of cellulose padding, fitted in oak panels, filled nearly two-thirds full with ice water and lidocaine.

*plunk*

The drum is closed and Jahnathan’s body is achingly invigorated with sensation. Like the howl of a wolf, or the death rattle of a man who had just been impaled, Jahnathan screams back to life,

“WAGHHRE YOU DOING TO ME, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME, WHAT- ARAH- AH-”, his shrieks disregarded by the mothers.

“That book was absolutely hideous Jahnathan, wretchedly hideous. I hope those words were worth your freedom.”

Jahnathan squeals, “My FREEDOM?! WHAT freedom!? I am surrounded in GRAY, I wake up to GRAY, I am a SLAVE to the routines. I sleep CHOKING on dust, I rest ONLY to the MERCY of the BUGS. TAKE ME BACK to SLEEP.”

The mothers move on apathetically, as only a rattling gurgle can be heard through the kennel of their censured boy. Coming to a stop, Jahnathan sees Father stepping up to look into his tomb. For a second, the shock overpowered the pain.

My only memories of Father were my vague angles from childhood. Father was always the center of attention, always a voice that people would respond to in an instant. He would always speak to me like he knew me, but he never bent down to get close enough for me to see him. He was now speaking to me again. For the first time, I could really hear him.

For the first time, I could really see him. I couldn't sense an inch of pity behind those dark eyes, and I never noticed the spiders on his face. He was speaking to me, and I was appearing to listen, but nothing was pulling me back into reality. My eyes were open, barely clinging to the open air, but they were acting like they were closed. I see him again, but with the clouds. He used to bring me out every midnight just to look at the clouds. They were a color I could never describe. Soft, like the water, but fierce like the sun. I could never describe the place we used to go. For the first time, I couldn't tell if it was even real. Why am I here?

That book I had been reading was a copied manuscript, brought to me mysteriously with nothing but a note. Its contents had originated from thin air, an oasis of reality from what the author's fertile mind would dub, the imagination. This concept is alien to me, borderline supernatural. Books that were anything other than annotations of speeches, or notes on the natural and social world, were long forgotten relics - and strictly forbidden hedonism. My book was passed to me in secret from a long line of descendants, disguised as notes written about Earth, smuggled between old dictionaries and encyclopedias. They wanted me to have it, maybe they needed me to have it. I can't stop thinking about what made these books so special, and why I was chosen. I'm not sure if the book was based in fact, or how long ago it was written, but I do know everything was risked to keep its pages flowing through the minds of generations. I was its final owner, and its worst guardian. By this point, Father had stopped talking and was looking into me disparagingly. I was well aware that he understood I didn't attend a single idea during his incursion of words. He bends down to look at me better, or maybe for me to hear him better.

“You are to be sent with the rest of the fathers,” he now looks at mother, “I'll have the flies keep an eye to make sure he won't get worse.”

Glaring into the core of Jahnathan’s decrypt body, he whispers with fervor, “You have disappointed the family”.