Something Like Rage

As a child I was very sensitive. I remember with disdain hearing the phrase, “over-sensitive” used to describe my delicate nature. I was a lover, an artist. I was made for the pen and the brush, not the sword and the shield. Over time that changed. I grew, I matured, I learned about my world, and with that knowledge came a shift. It was slow and studied. It happened with the subtle grace of a rolling wave miles from its breaking point, and with the patience of a melting glacier. Through the experiences, skills, lessons, heartbreaks, and tribulations life sent my way I came to the realization that I was shedding a layer. I knew that there was a sensitivity that I was stepping out of. Beyond. Not shunning it, but calmly stepping away. I knew that I needed to be a man, to be strong, to be tough if I was to make anything of myself. So I put my sensitivity in a shoebox and left it in my closet. As I grew, changed and lived my life I could always sense that child’s sensitivity. I could feel its pull at times and imagine myself collapsing back into tears and tantrums over life’s smallest obstacles. In a way it was inviting, the idea of just abandoning the simulacrum of strength that I had been cultivating and just be in raw emotion like a child. To just live in it.

Of course, I never chose to do that. For with truly childlike sensitivity inherently comes the inability to care for one’s self. I would become re-dependent on others strength to make up for the loss of my own, my regression. I never chose to regress. Why would any discerning adult choose to regress? The simple answer is that we would not. But simple, this tale is not. And sometimes the glorious blessing of choice is overrun, overruled and overshadowed by something stronger, darker and more violent. Something lacking the patience of the glacier or the grace of the wave. Something like rage.

…

I will share the details of the events leading up to now only in so much as is necessary for you to understand what life has been like these past twenty something months. Our once great nation has crumbled. After the world saw a year of large scale terrorist attacks and multiple record breaking natural disasters, financial markets collapsed and never recovered. The Great Depression was left in the dust by the speed and ferocity of this life altering, global event. Economic disparity became like the gaping wound left to fester without care and before long cities were burning, and governments overthrown. The US was in ruins, the capital reduced to rubble by domestic terror groups. For a while life became a constant fight for survival.

When the most dramatic days of the crash were underway I had moved in with my mother to keep her safe, or to make her feel safe if nothing else. I was strong and bold enough to look out for the people I cared for. We were doing alright, getting by, staying alive and adjusting, as humans have done throughout mankind’s bloodiest histories.

Mom tended her garden which yielded a year round supply of various foods. We would walk the abandoned aisles of the local library around the corner and pick out a stack of books that we could take turns reading to one another. I started making bootleg liquor in the shed behind the house and mom had begun her own little pharmacy of homeopathic medicines to trade with our small community of neighbors. Every night before bed she would ask me to pray with her for just a moment, thanking God, whoever or whatever that was, for the blessings we had and the fact that we still had our lives and each other, which was so much more than most. She would always end her prayer with the words “And thank you for my Stephen and all the years we shared,” pulling from under her shirt the heart-shaped locket that my dad had given her on their second date some 47 years earlier, and kissing it. She would then tuck it back safely beneath her clothing and with the glint of a tear in her eye squeeze my hand and pull me in for a hug.

I started hunting in a tract of forest not far from us and once a month or so. I would take the bicycle a few miles from our little community and hunt for anything I could find. On my second hunt I got a deer. It took me all night and three trips to clean it and get it back to our home, but it fed our little cul de sac of survivors well for the next month. Since then I had made it a bi-monthly ritual. It served to keep me doing, even if the hunts were often unsuccessful.

Things had settled down, and although the world was now a version of the old Wild West, it was not without its tranquility. It was quiet, there were no more smart phones or social media. No more screen addiction, no more competing with the proverbial Jones’. Yes we had weapons and yes we would occasionally be forced to use them, but all in all, it was a simple and quiet existence that we were slowly becoming adjusted to. We were finding peace in the smoldering wreckage of our collective past.

Despite all the horrors of the collapse and its endless fallout, what came next we were tragically unprepared for. I would later learn that it had been a massive organized strike. A politician who had survived the Battle of DC and gone into hiding had been recruiting, paying and brainwashing an army of “resurrectionists” as they came to be called. Their plan was to feed the poor and dying communities of North America to the flames of war so that they could, “without more blood shed,” reboot and resurrect a new nation from the ashes of the hell-scape it had become. How tragically ironic and hypocritical was their scheme. Their plan to end the fighting was to destroy those who would fight. To prevent the shedding of blood, they would spill the blood of untold thousands of innocents, if anyone could be called innocent anymore. The rich rose up to defeat the poor and the poor had no chance.

…

This night, like so many others, mom and I repeated our evening ritual and then I set out for my hunting grounds. I looked forward to these nights of rare solitude. I rode the few miles out into the dark night of a world without electricity, guided by the silver bath of moonlight from above. I parked my bike and had been stalking silently through the forest for half an hour when I saw her. Standing in an area of tall grass devoid of trees up ahead was a doe. The meadow was ill-lit by the moon which had ducked behind clouds and it was her shadowed outline against the darker trees beyond her that allowed me to sense as much as see her. She was silent, and as being in the presence of something so innocent and untainted often does to me, I felt a sort of peace and oneness with nature. I squinted to see her better and silently raised my rifle to take aim, and as I looked on she began to glow, lit by a warm light. The light grew brighter and brighter, I felt it on my shoulders, and then it winked out. It was pitch black and dead silent again for a split second before the world exploded with sound as the noise and shock waves from the bombs going off back within the city limits reached me where I stood. The air pulsed warm and more flashes of light came then, faster and brighter, more explosions, more noise, more terror. I turned back and the deer was gone, vanished into the silence between explosions which ripped the night into pieces.

I turned and ran back to my bike. By the time I was within a mile of our town the explosions had ceased only to be replaced by the distant pop pop popping of rifle fire. I rode past charred remnants of homes I had known since childhood. There were bodies in the street, there was smoke in the air mixed with the horribly sweet scent of charred flesh. I could hear screams, but they never lasted long, silenced by more gunfire. About a block from my mom’s house I ditched the bicycle behind a collapsed and burning building that I didn’t recognize as the library. As I approached our home on foot the gunfire was receding farther into the center of our old town.

Our home was half standing which was more than could be said for the majority of the homes on the block. The smoking remains of half of the house had tumbled into the yard and lay where our garden and shed once stood. I abandoned all caution and sprinted into the ruined corpse of our home.

“Mom!” I yelled over and over again, pulling up sections of wallboard that had twisted free of their fastenings so that I could step between splintered beams into my mothers bedroom. The blast and fire that had claimed half of the house had claimed her as well. The room was charred and filled with smoke. Her body which had grown more and more frail in her older age was now unrecognizable, curled into the horrible and twisted shape of agony only burnt corpses know. Blackened. Gone. Something in me broke. I was walking in a dream now, the terror and anger all mingling with the horrid scents of death and destruction, poisoning me like some vile drug induced fever dream, pushing me onward in a state of delirium. I approached her bed, kneeling in the hot embers that were once her bedcovers and I prayed. But this was not the kind of prayer that the two of us had spoken together so many times by candle light in the last year. This was a different type of prayer. I didn’t speak words or even think recognizable thoughts. I just became. I transformed and whether good or bad God watched me, helpless from on high. This prayer was a prayer only in name because no God could have turned away or averted their eyes from what was happening. It was a prayer because they bore witness. They had to. I was a train wreck of agony and I was becoming death itself. I stared into my hand and realized I was staring at the black heart which once hung, golden, around my mother’s neck. I had removed it from her body and held it in my hand. It was still hot and burned the flesh of my palm, and as I held it in the silence of the tomb in which I knelt, the shoebox I had hidden my childhood sensitivity in burst open. I felt my emotions regress to that of a five year old fraught with dismay and unable to not express it. I heard horrible sobs and realized that I was crying. I was wretching, and screaming and clenching every muscle in my body. I was pure and uncontrolled emotion. I was something like rage. Death incarnate. Someone in my head told me to get up. I did. I stopped crying, put the locket in my pocket and went outside to find my rifle. It was laying near the front door. I picked it up and turned toward the sound of a gunshot to the East. My face was a mask of calm. My hands were steady. My face was black with soot and smoke. I levered a round into the chamber of my gun and began running toward the sound of the gunfire.