The Before

“The Before”, Doomsday Challenge, S.Hileman Iannazzo 6/26/2021

I had been sick most of the morning, nothing too out of the ordinary, fever, aches and vomiting. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t wake up feeling this way, hell I couldn’t remember “before” at all. I’d heard some stories, of when it was safe to play outside, safe to let snowflakes land on your tongue, when sitting in the sun wasn’t painful and didn’t sear a persons skin like a roasted chicken. Except for Tom, I never knew anyone who lived in the “before”, but then I didn’t see many people. Tom was my best friend, and we’d been living in this place as far back as I could remember. Tom was quiet for a lot of the time, but I relied on him, and he on I. Tom didn’t like to talk about the “before”, and he would never tell me about the angry scars that ran down both his arms. Yet though he rarely spoke of it, but still he and I would pretend we lived in the “before”, turning on all the lights in the basement that was our home, trying to give the illusion that we were playing in tall grass, barefoot and sticky with sweat from running through fields that we constructed in our minds. We’d pretend there were other kids there, but except for the odd (and often scorched cat), who had made its way inside to get warm, we were alone. Our room, buried deep in the ground, was functional, and sterile, but devoid of any creature comforts.

Everyday at lunchtime, we’d sit and eat food handed to us in brown paper bags by a silent woman who’s face was hidden by a tinted shield. Sometimes I would try and bait the lady, teasing and swearing, hoping she’d reply, even angrily, but she never did. She just gave us our sacks and left quietly through the same door she entered through. This was a door that lead to a place we had never been. Food here was scarce, so lunch was always a hard boiled egg, distilled water that tasted of copper, despite the purification efforts, and a very lightly buttered hunk of bread. Usually it was stale, but we ate quickly, eager to dull the hunger pains that plagued us almost constantly. Because we were sick most mornings, they never bothered to give us breakfast.

Sometimes, and never scheduled, an adult would visit, usually a doctor, but sometimes a teacher. The doctor would look at our teeth and take our temperatures, saying very little, and then with his chart, he would leave us just as he found us. The only thing the doc liked to talk about was how lucky Tom and I were. Save for those sporadic visits, adults were the voices we heard from the intercom and overhead speakers. Tom and I liked to imagine that all of this was just another game we’d made up to pass the long days of isolation. After plenty of coaching and lectures, pumped through the speakers in our refuge, we knew what our futures would bring and what those voices expected of us. I was barely thirteen, but I knew someday this would cease to be our home. Then maybe I’d burn up like one of those stray cats except I’d have nowhere to hide. I figured, when it was time, I’d just up and die.

I'd learned some about the “before” from old books, dog eared and creased, piled high on the shelves that hung on the wall. I devoured those stories, reading them over and over, escaping to places and times that I’d never see in my lifetime. When the doc would visit, I’d ask a thousand often ignored questions, but sometimes he’d tell us about families and schools that no longer existed. He and Jones would never tell us where the “before” had gone.

Jones was our teacher. He came to us a few days during the week and spoke of science and math. He was extraordinarily boring most of the time, but he did make sure that Tom and I learned to read. He spoke slowly and tried to avoid meeting our glances. Unlike Tom, and just as I did when the doc came, I would hammer away at Jones with question after question about outside and the before and eventually Jones would scowl and snap at me to hush. When we were adept at reading, Jones insisted we pray properly and often, we’d read out loud from the bibles he had given us and then he would quiz us. Jones said it was very important that we pray to “God” who, to me at least, seemed as real as Tom Sawyer and Peter Pan. Words in a book. Jones said to pray for salvation, pray for redemption, pray for survival. I prayed we’d get something besides a fucking hard boiled egg in those lunch sacks. I prayed I knew where my parents were, or who they were, or if I had them at all. I prayed a lot, and tried to have faith in my heavy bible that was swollen with age and water damage, and on the inside cover I had even penciled my name. Jones was big on having faith. Have faith kids, believe that God (and not Captain Hook?) would deliver us from these dark days. Second star to the right and straight on til morning. A book is a book after all. Besides, despite his long sermons about faith I don’t think Jones had to eat fucking hard boiled eggs everyday.

We didn't celebrate holidays or birthdays, I didn’t even know when mine was anyway. But one day, after dry heaving and before playing hide and seek in our basement playground, a voice on the intercom announced my name. I stopped, startled into reality. I looked at Tom, who met my glance with fear in his eyes. I had never been summoned before. Tom had never been called either, but then he was a boy so his path was different. We knew, according to the gospel they gagged us with our whole lives, that this day would come. I felt stuck, frozen in time, my heart began to race, my bowels loosened, and I was covered in a thin layer of terrified sweat. “Today?” I asked out loud, there was no one to answer of course, so I grabbed my sweater and walked slowly to the stairwell. With each step the dread in my guts worsened. 18 steep steps, an ordinary door and a deep breath while I mustered the courage to pass through it.

I stood alone in the barren room. Except for my pounding heart pounding frantically, there was only silence. Consciously, I looked down at the palm of my left hand. A small, but perfect heart shaped scar I could not remember getting, glistened a little bit. I traced it with my finger, something I had done all my life, wondering its origin, and never really knowing what it meant. Neither the doc nor Jones would tell me how I got the scar. Tom didn’t seem to know either.

In the center of the room, an enormous glass basin shimmered in the artificial light. I walked towards it. I peered into it. Hundreds or maybe thousands of gold lockets filled the urn. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, I knew what I had to do. On tip toe I leaned over, and reached into the container. I thought I might have to fish around to find just the right one, but within seconds of plucking at a locket, I knew this one was mine. Cradling it gently in my hand, It fit perfectly into the scar I had wondered about my entire life. I held it, and then closed my fingers around it. I turned to find the door, the one that led back to the safety and familiarity of my underground home. The door stood open, and I could hear that Tom had begun to play records downstairs, old records, records from “before”. I half ran to the stairs, and shuffled down them two at a time, all the while my fist tightly gripping my locket.

Tom looked relieved to see me, like he wasn’t sure if we had played our last game of hide and seek together. With great relief, I walked towards my friend, without a word, and I opened my palm, revealing the locket that fit perfectly into my scar. Tom reached forward and with sudden unexpected force, he turned my wrist, he placed his right hand on my left hand. He sighed loudly, seemingly satisfied with his discovery. His hand, opposite mine, also bore the strange scar, only his needn’t a locket, because his lined up against mine with absolute symmetry. I felt safe somehow, although it nagged at me that I had never noticed his scar before this very day. He held onto me a bit longer, before letting go, and I slipped the locket into the pocket of my sweater. “Now we know” was all he said. “Yep, now we know”.

Desperate for distraction from the thoughts of my already sealed future, I took two steps back, looked Tom right in the eye and said “You’re it!” I took off skipping, trying to forget my duty for a little while longer, and relished the freedom that was a trick our minds had mastered. There was no freedom, but we were too ignorant to know it. With my locket tucked into my pocket, I suddenly forgot how much I hated hard boiled eggs, how I despised the hours spent pouring over our bibles, because for Tom and I and our “before” now seemed pretty ideal. With the unknown looming before me like the shadow of an unknown enemy, I forgot the hunger, the fear, the fevers and the puking, I forgot the uncertainty that left my stomach in a tangle of knots day in and day out.

Now our time here was borrowed. Soon these days be our new “before”. I wished them all back. I wished I’d never climbed those stairs, I wished the heart shaped locket meant just for me would disappear. I wished for more days of pretending with Tom, and for more time to read out loud about Scout and Jem and old Boo Radley. I wished and I wished, and then I prayed. We prayed for everything else, why not this? I Prayed to whoever had left the damning scar in the delicate surface of the skin of the palm of my right hand. I continued to pray while we played for hours, with abandon and relish. We played, and we danced, and we sang along with our old records because we knew time was not on our side.

We played and we played until we heard the door in the corner of the room open. Tom reached for my hand, I trembled and clasped his tightly. No more albums, or books, or pretend. No more prayers. No more doc. Goodbye Jones. No more fucking hard boiled eggs. And then, we stood on the threshold, and without hesitation, Tom and I stepped into the very real sunshine.

Fin