Mo Remembers the Crash

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where yesterday (Mo Explains Half of Everything) left off.]

Saying out loud[1] that she had died to another human being triggered memories in Mo.  The first therapist that her mother had taken her to had assigned her a mantra to repeat: "I am alive."  Just that.  She was to repeat it to herself as often as she could, out loud if she was alone or with her mother.  Supposedly, this was from the fake-it-til-you-make-it school of psychiatric treatment.  A month later, she had told the therapist that she said the words, but they were not true.  She knew that she was dead and that this was not real.  When she was asked what was not real, she had replied "Everything."

She had been referred to another therapist who specialized in post traumatic stress.  Psychic breaks.  Mental schisms.  This one, a man where the first had been a woman, had spent time in the military dealing with soldiers who had survived when others in their squads had not.  He asked the usual questions:

How are you?  Dead.
When did you die?  In the crash.
If you are dead, how are we having this conversation?  This isn't real.
So what?

That last one had momentarily pulled Mo from her patterned responses.  She had looked up at the therapists from where she was, crouched on his couch.  He had brown hair cut close in a military flat top.  He wore black rimmed glasses.  He was not smiling reassuringly at her.

"So what?" she had asked back.

"Yes.  So what if you're dead.  So what if this conversation isn't real.  It's still happening in your imagination.  Your dead imagination.  You still have to deal with it, right?"

"No," she had said.  "I don't." And she had stopped talking.  To him.  To her mother.  To everyone.  That was when her mother had committed her to the Institute.

"They call that solipsism," Lisp said after she had told him about these early sessions.  "More traditionally, it is the supposition that there is no way to prove that the reality that we perceive is not all in our head.  Our sensations are being faked."

"Yeah," Mo replied.  "Trust me, I learned about solipsism.  That second doctor, the military one, he knew it and tried to jump ahead a few dozen steps.  That's what the 'So What?' was about.  It doesn't matter whether reality is 'real' or not, we all still have to deal with it as it presented to us.  Maybe that had worked on his soldiers with their sense of duty and pride of country or whatever.  It did not work on a early-teen suburban girl.  All it did was make me see that I was dealing with it by responding and that if I did not want to deal with reality, I needed to stop responding to it on all levels.  I stopped talking.  I stopped eating.  I stopped getting up to use the bathroom, I just went where ever I was.  As I said, I didn't give Mom a choice.  She had to put me somewhere where they could at least deal with me."

"Didn't you get bored?" Lisp asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Not doing anything.  Did you think about things?"

"Sort of.  Mostly, I thought about the crash."

And Mo was back in her memories.  Sort of.  Like most trauma, much of the specifics of the crash were lost to her.  Maybe it was her brain shutting things out, maybe she had been thirteen and not paying attention to where her father was driving.   Paying attention to something on her phone, probably.  She could not remember where they were coming from, but she knew that they were going home.  Maybe from one of those robotics competitions that Dad had signed her up for and that she had enjoyed but had not admitted because he had not asked her first.

Her memories of the moments immediately leading up to the crash were impressions: night, two-lane road, trees on one side, not trees on the other.  For the crash itself, she knows what she was told happened but cannot remember it clearly.  More snapshots: her phone leaving her hand, bright lights filling the interior, her body changing direction quickly like a roller coaster but not fun.  The feeling that something is terribly wrong and that she should have been paying attention to help prevent it.  Then nothing until she woke up in the hospital.

Her first question had been to ask after Dad.  It was late at night and she had to wait for a nurse to respond to the call button.  Which she had found once she worked out where she was.  For her, it was one second panicked in the car and then next lying in a dimly lit room with beeping machines.  When the nurse came in and Mo asked, the nurse told her not to worry about her father, the important thing was that she, Maureen, was doing better.  But the nurse's face, lined and worried and smiling that everything-is-all-right smile told Mo what she needed to know.  He had no made it.  From there, it did not take much mental effort (even with the pain killers making her woozy... maybe because of the pain killers making her woozy) to wonder if, perhaps, she had not made it either.

"But what actually happened?" asked Lisp.  "Why did the car crash?"

"It is a little unclear.  We were on Route 6 above Golden.  There are tire tracks where Dad had turned sharply, then broke through the guard rail.  One theory is that someone driving up the road had their brights on, came around the corner, startled Dad and he swerved.  Another is that there was some animal in the road.  A deer or sheep or something.  All that they know is that he swerved sharply and we headed over a cliff.  Apparently, all of the safety mechanisms worked but were over matched by the impact.  I survived because I was smaller and lighter and had less momentum than Dad.  Despite that, I broke all four limbs and slipped a disk in my middle back.  I had a lot of time in the hospital to think.  Too much time as it turned out.  Hospital time is too much like Purgatory in the first place."

"Never had the pleasure."

"If you have the opportunity, don't.  I don't remember it as boring, but that may have been the pain killers.  I was immobilized, what with the casts on both legs and both arms.  And the back brace.  They fed me through an IV and removed my waste through a tube in my side.  There was a TV and they left it on.  To keep me company, they said.  But that was the era of rabid daytime talk shows[2].  Even at thirteen, I knew better.  As I said: Purgatory."

What Mo did not tell Lisp, what she had trouble admitting to herself, was that she had known that she was in Purgatory for a reason.  She had died and been put on trail for the death of her father.  Had his death been her fault? Not directly.  She knew that.  But was their an underlying cause?  Something that she had done (or not done) that angered a higher power and caused it to go all Old Testament on her?  That was a different question and its answer was what occupied her mind for the next five years of her life.

[1] Well, sub-voc'd.  Really admitting.  But then the cliche still has it as 'admitted out loud'.  Hey.  Get off my back.  I know it's not out loud.  I know it's a bit of a tired idiom.  Deal with it.

[2] The talk show as a medium for disseminating information about the latest fashions and the movies and such died with the advent of the video chat show.  Instead of a single camera on a set, these were conducted over networks like Google Hangouts or Skype.  Now everyone was in the in-studio audience, could provide feedback through votes and win prizes.  The audience was more involved, not cleaning house with this in the background.  It allowed for instant audience metrics and micro-targeted ad overlays.  The old model died to be replaced by something slightly more rabid.

"What did it feel like? Killing him?"

Prompt:  Write about a character who is recalling the first time they killed someone.

Jim looked at Billy and smiled his you-really-want-the-answer smile.  It was the first question most kids asked when they found out he had been in the Special Forces, "Have you killed anyone?" and Jim was used to answering it.

"A few," he said.  Billy did not ask anything more, merely kept his eyes glued to Jim's face, expectant.  "Very well, I'll tell you about the first one.

"It was in Iraq, before I volunteered for Special Forces, during the first Iraq War, Operation Desert Shield.  At the time, I was just another grunt on patrol.  I was the guy who manned the 50-cal on the top of the Humvee.  We'd go out scouting if the Apache's saw something suspicious in the dunes, looking for Republican Guard scouts and such.  We'd get a call from command telling us to go to such-and-such a map coordinate and check out a possible enemy sighting.  And off we'd go, racing along whatever road was available and then hoofing it into someplace where we could get a good look at the location without exposing ourselves.

"So, one afternoon we get one of these calls.  It's over 110 degrees out.  Hot.  Hot like you've not ever felt, young Billy.  We mount up and head out.  There's four of us: a sergeant, a corporal and two privates.  I was one of the privates at the time.  The drive is about three hours to get to where the road ends, then we need to hike another hour.  And for the hike, we need to carry about seventy pounds of gear and such.  Water.  Lots of water.  When we get close, we slow down, staying below the crest of each dune, inching up until we can see what's on the other side.

"Finally, the sergeant sticks his head up over a dune, just enough to get his field glasses over the top and scan around.  Almost immediately, he slides back down.  There's something on the other side.  He tells us that he saw what looked like a half-track, dug into the side of the opposite dune.  Buried and hard to see clearly from the air.  The sergeant can see tracks all over the dunes as whoever is down there scouts about.  We all unlimber our weapons, check them again to make sure they work, take a swig of water and get ready to fight.

"The corporal gets on the radio and calls in our position and sighting.  He is told that air support in on their way, put that we need to 'paint the target,' point a laser at it so that a bomb can steer in accurately.  I've got the laser designator, so I unstrap it from my backpack and start getting it ready.  The sergeant and the corporal creep back up to the dune crest and peek back over.  Almost immediately, the sergeant's head explodes.

"The corporal, he slides back down quickly.  He grabs the sergeant's body by his boot and pulls him back down.  He tells us to leave him for now; we need to move.  Go to one side or the other and pop up someplace else.  He sends me to the right with the other private and he goes left along the dune, hoping to pull the enemy fire his way.  That way, I can get the laser setup.  He tells us to go as far as we can in two minutes, then wait until we hear more shooting before pointing the laser.  The bomb run will start in four minutes.

"We move to the right our two minutes, getting maybe a hundred yards before stopping.  A few seconds later, we hear some shooting coming from over the dune.  We lunge to the top and shove the laser down on the top of the dune.  We see the half-track and three or four soldiers milling around.  I point the laser at the truck as quickly as I can, duck back and wait.  Three minutes later, the other side of the dune explodes.  We never even heard the jet.

We circle back to the sergeant's body and wait for the corporal.  When he doesn't show up after a few minutes, we continue on to the left looking for him.  He also made it about a hundred yards and is sitting there, just breathing.  When he sees us, he grimaces.  He's okay, just resting after being shot at.  We all drink some water, check our weapons and then the corporal motions us back up to the top of the dune.  He peeks over, then gestures for us to come up as well.

"The other side is a mess.  Where the half-track was is now a crater of blackened sand.  There's debris everywhere.  We know that we need to go down and see if anyone survived and to check for any intel.  We hoof it down the front of the dune and start kicking through the wreckage.  I see a pair of legs sticking out from under one of the truck doors and go to check it out.  I prod the legs with the tip of my rifle and they twitch a bit, so I call over the corporal.

"He motions me to stand guard while he and the other private flip the door off.  Underneath is an Iraqi soldier and he's clutching a gun.  I don't even think, just pull the trigger, putting three rounds into his chest.  And like that, he's dead.  That was the first man I killed."

Billy's eyes are still wide, but his smile is gone replaced by an open mouthed gape.  He asks the usual follow-up: "What did it feel like?  Killing him?"  Jim tells him what he tell everyone: his mother, Jim's sister; his buddies at the base; the army shrink.

"It didn't feel like anything.  He was a threat so I dealt with it.  There was a time, when we got back to base, where I tried to think if there was anything else I could have done, but I couldn't think of anything then and I can't think of anything now.  That's all.  He was a threat, so I removed the threat in the quickest way, but killing him."

Billy seems satisfied and thanks Jim for the story.  Jim nods and takes a swig from my beer.  He watch Billy go back to his friends, no doubt telling a nine-year old version to all of them.

Jim smiles again.  None of them will know, not Billy, not his mother, not the shrink is that he did feel something.  It was that death that has kept him in the army, re-upping, joining Special Forces and everything.  What Jim felt after he pulled that trigger was great.

Death's Doorstep

Prompt:  You're dying but, you're not very good at it.

The Wikipedia Galactica[1] entry on "Immortality" starts with the following:

"The trick to living forever is to not be around when Death starts looking for you.  Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to know when Death is looking for you, much less where.  As a result, very few people have managed it.  When it happens, it is usually as much a surprise to the individual as it is to Death.

"The other catch is that Death may not come for you only once."

It then goes on with a few of the better known methods for skipping your date with Death (being perpetually late, getting really lost, etc.) and a list of the few known successful attempts (so far).  Finally, it mentions that telling people about your immortality is usually considered a bad idea as this will more than likely make you famous and thereby alert Death to your whereabouts.

Gerald Farnsbury was not concerned about being famous.  There were only three or four people left on the Earth that even knew he was alive and they all thought he was in New Jersey[2].  He was not and he liked it that way.  He lived in a small cave in the side of a mountain far from anything remotely like a bodega.

What he was concerned about was his date with Death.  Gerald had been dying for the last eighteen years[3].  He had a variety of ailments, most self-diagnosed[4], including, but not limited to:

• Bowel Obstruction
• Heart Arrhythmia
• Tongue Boils
• Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (confined to his male member)
• Aquagenic urticaria
• Kuru Disease

Any one of these could potentially kill Gerald Farnsbury.  Melded together, he felt that it was a given that he should be dead.  Stubbornly, his body refused to 'give up the ghost' and remained pumping blood, pulling in oxygen, pushing out waste products and all of the other things that bodies do when they are alive.

Gerald had tried more aggressive methods of forcing the issue.  He had survived for two years with out food or water before giving up and eating because not eating was boring.  He had fashioned a stake from a local tree and fallen on it, but the stake had broken.  He'd then tried stouter and stouter stakes only to start bouncing off of them.  A cliff jump had ended with a freak updraft saving his life.  Twenty-three times.

Finally, at age sixty-one, Gerald decided to try getting Death's attention more directly.  He left his cave and walked to Orlando, Florida[5].  There, he parked himself outside the house of one Winnie Weinburger, whom was reported to be on Death's Door by all of her neighbors and other members of the Golden Acres Retirement Community and Mobility Scooter Emporium Association[6].  Gerald figured that, if he stood on Death's Door long enough, Death was bound to come home sooner or later.

Unfortunately for Gerald, when Death did come for Winnie, it was through the patio door as it was a shorter route from Dan Bouther's, Death's previous call.  As a result, it was not until Death left Winnie's that he stumbled upon Gerald as Gerald had stretched himself across the front door.  Stumbling, Death fell the two steps face first and broke Death's neck, dying.

On the subject of Death's death, the Wikipedia Galactica claims that when Death dies, the nearest sentient being will immediately take Death's place as Death.  And so, Gerald found himself wearing a black cowl, holding a scythe and with an urgent need to find one Henry A. Carver, Jr.

[1] Hands off.  This idea is mine.  Just as soon as I can find an interstellar publishing house. - Author

[2] New Jersey and you may be perfect together, but it was decidedly not perfect for Gerald Farnsbury.  Not after the Buffalo Mozzarella Incident of 1992.

[3] Gerald had been dying since the day he was born in 1954, but had been getting more serious about it for the last eighteen.

[4] Using the more Earthly Wikipedia.

[5] A trek of some length as there are no (natural) mountains, much less mountains with caves, in the state of Florida.

[6] Free scooter with each new lease.

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Mare Orientale

Prompt:  Many years from now, you find an old, abandoned GoPro. Tell me the story of the owner's last moments.

The casing is blackened and warped, the lens cracked.  Despite that, it still appears mostly in tact.  I had kicked it thinking it a rock, something to get out of the middle of the trail, but the heft was wrong, the sound as it skittered along the ground.  Now, picking it up, I see that it is a GoPro, somehow sitting in the middle of the Mare Orientale on the far side of the Moon.

It has been decades since I have last seen one of these.  For a while they were the strap-on camera for every adventurer and adrenaline head that wanted to show everyone else just how crazy they were.  Then direct optic recording became available, and the company when belly up.  That happened maybe five years before the lunar colony was established.  When I was about twelve.

I take it back to my LRV and scrounge an old USB connection.  When I plug it in, none of the lights on it come on, but my interface hub recognizes it and can still read the data files.  I sort by date, newest to oldest.  The last recording is three hundred and twenty-two minutes long.  I start it up and feed it to my eyes.

The quality is moderate at best.  The resolution is there, but you notice compression artifacts more when they are fed directly to your eyes.  Also, decades of solar radiation have corrupted some of the memory.  The hub does its best to interpolate, but there is still some visual discrepancies.

The first image is of a green suburban lawn; something that hasn't been seen in almost as long as the camera.  The camera angle is low.  It is strapped to something sitting on the lawn.  A figure steps into the frame.  It is wearing a weird suit, something environmental or deep sea.  There is a tank on the back.  The figure turns around so that it is facing away from the camera and then sits on top of whatever the camera is strapped to.  A minute or two later, the frame starts to move, jerky at first, as the camera (and presumably the figure) rise into the air.  There is a brief glimpse of the ground as the angle pitches forward and a shadow can be seen before the weight is adjusted back.  The shadow shows a large, semi-round blob above a smaller frame.  There are what might be tubes strapped to the back of the frame and the figure sitting in it.

For the next one hundred and thirteen minutes, the camera ascends at a steady rate.  Clouds move from above to below.  The sky gets gradually darker, moving from light blue to indigo.  The horizon takes on more curve.   Then the speed of ascent seems to level out.  It is hard to tell because there are no longer any close points of reference.  There is a brief jerk, the camera pitches forward again and the sunlit earth can be seen below.  It appears to be somewhere over Minnesota or Wisconsin given all of the lakes and ponds reflecting light, but that is only a guess.

Suddenly, the camera jerks again, this time much more violently.  It is still pitched forward, looking down on the earth, but not as much.  The limb of the earth is in the upper part of the frame.  It starts to race over the ground at an increasing rate.  The lakes streak past below to be replaced by one of the great lakes.  Michigan, I think.  Earth geography is no longer a strong point for me.

The speed continues to increase for the next ten minutes and the altitude, judged by the horizon, increases as well.  At the end of the time, the ground below is racing at a fantastic rate.  Then there is another jerk and two long, silver tubes briefly enter the bottom of the frame, tumbling towards the ground.  The camera continues to climb for another twenty or so minutes.  It passes over a coast line and then through the terminator in to the night side.  At that point, it starts to descend, still travelling horizontally very quickly.  But it does not descend all of the way.  Instead, after another thirty minutes, it misses the Earth.

It rises and rises, ascending until the Earth is no longer a flat plane with a curved upper edge.  Now it is a semi-circle filling the bottom of the frame.  The camera continues to pull back and back and back.  Now the Earth just a circle in the frame and it is still receding.  This continues for the rest of the video before it finally cuts out, the earth a small marble against the black of space.

I unplug and suit up again to back outside.  I retrace my steps to where I found the camera, but there is nothing there except the hiking trail and the scuff marks from where I had kicked the GoPro.  No chair, no weirdly suited person.  The camera is all that is left.

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Thus Spake Pol Pot

Prompt: The Grim Reaper is the head of a bureaucracy called the Earth Death Service (EDS) and has just been brought to a spiritual congressional board because they spent millions of souls on a really bad training video.

[Author's note: After re-reading this and remembering that everything on the internet lives forever, I feel compelled to remind you, gentle reader, that this is a work of fiction spurned on by the prompt.  Personally, I do not condone genocide for any reason.  If you are offended by this on religious grounds, I apologize as that was not my intent.]

From Zazzle

Jegudiel sat in the center seat behind the bar with the other members of his sub choir arrayed on either side.  They perched on stools, giving their wings room behind them.  Jegudiel's stool was slightly higher than the others.  He folded his hands in front of him and waited patiently for the opening rituals to end and the actual proceedings to start.

"Hallelujah, hallelujah," the proctoring angel said.  "Please be seated for the ten thousandth, sixty-fifth session of the Ethics sub-choir of the Judicial choir of the Celestial Sphere.  His honorable Jegudiel presiding.  Amen."  Jegudiel nodded at the spectating celestial entities and gestured for the proctor to continue.  "This choir calls on the Archangel, Azrael, responsible for the collection and storage of human souls upon death, to present himself before this body."

The doors on the opposite side of the chamber from the presiding bar opened themselves and Azrael entered.  Unlike the togas worn by the members of the sub-choir or ribbons (and often less) worn by the spectators, Azrael was attired in a nicely tailored silk Armani suit, white shirt with french cuffs and a red power tie.  Behind him was one of the employees of the Earth Death Service in the black golf shirt and khaki shorts worn by all of it's members pushing an old TV cart.  One of the wheels squeaked.

Azrael seated himself at the low table, several feet below the stools of the sub-choir.  He placed his briefcase on the table, opened it and pulled a few folders out.  He looked at his stool for a second, frowned and waived at it.  The stool turned into a Herman Miller Aeron chair and Azrael smiled.  He glanced at the spectators and smiled, waving at one or two.  Finally, he turned his attention to the arrayed members of the sub-choir.

Jegudiel smiled and said, "This sub-choir would like to start by thanking our brother Azrael for taking the time out of his busy schedule to join us here this day."

"You are welcome," Azrael smiled back, perfect teeth glinting.  "Though, if I may presume to ask this body to keep this as short as possible.  There are over six thousand humans dying every hour and the bodies do stack up."

"Of course, of course.  With that in mind, we'll jump right in.  I assume that you are aware of why you have been summoned?"

"I've been told that it has something to do with our latest training video."

"Correct.  The one titled 'Thus Spake Pol Pot: Genocide and Strategic Celestial Goals.'"

"Yes.  We just finished it and are getting it out to our field teams.  We're quite proud of it.  We pulled Kubrick out of storage to direct it.  Spared no expense."

Jegudiel pursed his lips.  "This choir is quite aware of the expense.  The current tally is twelve million, three hundred thousand and fifty-four souls.  More than has ever been spent on a Heavenly production, much less a mere training video.  On top of that, the subject matter seems to be counter to the current directives from on high: love they neighbor and all of that.  How do you justify this?"

"Do you want me to justify the expense or the content first?"

"I'll leave that up to you."

Azrael picked up one of the folders and opened it without glancing at it.  "Then I'll start with the expense.  We see this video as a net profit project.  Its stated goal, which was authorized by the budget choir, is to increase the rate of reaping by a factor of three.  With that in mind, we expect to pay off the initial cost in just over forty days.  From then on, it will start turning a profit.  The budget choir thought that was, and I quote, 'just nifty.'"

"I'm sure that they did.  However, in their wisdom, I'm not sure that they looked into the replacement rate of these souls.  With only three hundred and fifty thousand being born every day, your goal would create a net deficit of about one hundred thousand souls a day.  In seven thousand days, around twenty years, you would depopulate the earth."

Azrael flipped a page in his folder, still looking up at Jegudiel.  "I don't have birth numbers in front of my, so I don't feel confident commenting on them.  What I can say is that we were asked to increase our reaping.  Training must always be a part of any increase in production."

"And who asked you to increase your production?"

"The highest authority."

"The Highest authority?"

"The Highest Authority."  Azrael glanced at the ceiling.

"We'll need to check in to that, so we'll put the expense issue aside for the time being.  Let's move on to the methodology you chose to increase your reaping."

"I assume by that that you mean Genocide."

"That's exactly what I mean.  How can any member of the Celestial Host ever condone Genocide?"

"It goes back to our new goals.  The only way that we can increase our production rates that much is to use humanity against itself.  You've seen what they can do with a little prodding."

"I have, and it is un-Godly."

"True.  Fortunately, our research shows that those most prone to ethnic cleansing are non-christian.  So by increasing their success rate, we're also increasing the global percentage of Christians.  The Muslims have been catching up recently."

"The Muslims are not the point.  The point is this exuberance of death that you are calling forth.  That is the point.  In fact, to highlight this, I'd like you to view a clip with us.  Please have your helper there queue up to the beginning of Part 2."

The EDS employee fumbled for a minute and then looked at Jegudiel.  "Umm, I need a power outlet."  Jegudiel rolled his eyes and motioned for the proctor to do something.  The proctor went over to the TV cart and picked up the power cord, closed his eyes and the TV came on.  The EDS employee looked surprised, "We can do that?  Huhn."

The screen showed a forest surrounding a small village.  The people of the village are happily going about their day working, talking and such.

A voice over started: "This does not look a likely place for the start of a genocide.  The people are happy, they have enough to get by and there are no immediate threats to their safety.  But it is in just such places that the seeds to increased soul reaping can be planted.  Watch."

On screen, one of the females runs out of the trees screaming.  The people of the village run to her.  The audio does not allow for the room to hear what was being said, but she was seen gesturing back the way she came and is now crying.  The rest of the village showed signs of increased anger with many of them rushing for weapons before heading into the trees.

The narrator started up again: "It is that easy.  A threat was introduced.  Maybe even a real one.  All that these people really know is that one of them claims to have been hurt or threatened by someone else.  Someone outside of their group.  The Other.

"In this case, the Other is presumed to be from a different village or tribe, but can also a member of the group who is different in almost any way: eye color, skin color, clothing choice, eating habits, defecation habits.  It does not matter as long as they can be blamed for hurting the group in a significant way.

"To recap, the steps to starting a genocide are first, identify the core group.  Second, identify a likely Other.  Third, help the core group to see the Other as an existential threat."

Jegudiel waved for the tape to stop.  The proctor opened his eyes and the TV shut down.  "Step by step instructions on starting a genocide go way beyond increasing production, wouldn't you say?"

Azrael nodded his understanding.  "Under normal circumstances I would agree with you.  Heck, after the whole Crusades fiasco last millennium, it would be hard not to see all of this as a bad idea."

"Then why did you create this?"

"From direction on High.  I can't speak to the Will, but we were told to be the Way.  EDS serves at the pleasure of the All Mighty.  I have the paperwork to back that."

"And you trust that mere paperwork will protect your from inciting humans to genocide?"

"I'm trusting in the Lord and Justitia."

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Prompt: A trip to the attic

Dust

Joyce goes up alone.  Maya and Bruce had made excuses, as usual.  Joyce did not mind, not much.  She was the oldest.  She was supposed to be the most responsible.  It was who she was.  Mother would have expected it of her.

The spring loaded stairs creak their creak as they unfold from the ceiling.  The pull string for the light is the only thing visible in the dark rectangle.  She climbs the steep risers just far enough to pull it.  The light bulb comes on, expanding her view from a rectangle to a room.  Joyce uses her hands to help pull her up into the attic.

It should feel more inviting.  The colors are all warm wood tones and golden light.  Dust motes dancing.  The rafters and joists unfinished, the old furniture and toys.  The brown cardboard boxes.  There is very little metal: a few bent nails and tarnished handles on dressers.  All covered in dust.  Even the musty smell of old clothes and stale air should be comforting.  But not to Joyce.  Not now.  Now it is merely old.

She stands at the top of the stairs, directly under the peak of the roof.  It is twice her height to the joists, here in the center, but slopes steeply to the sides where most of the stored items have been pushed.  That is where she will need to go.  Already her knees ache.  There are two high, four frame windows, one on either end of the space, but it is night time and they bring in no light.  Joyce walks towards one, thinking to open it and let in fresh air, then stops remembering.  They have no screens and the light will attract the bugs.  She nods to herself and turns to the side.

The first box she opens is not labelled.  None of them are.  Inside, she finds a stack of cheap plastic dinner ware, blue.  Many of the pieces are broken or cracked.  She sets it aside.  The next is old photos: blurred rejects or extra copies of the ones in the albums downstairs in the secretary.  Most are stuck to each other and unrecoverable.  In the third are clothes.  Old clothes.  Most appear in tact, and are the childhood clothes of some relative.  They are hopelessly out of style and she thinks may fall apart if stuffed into the high-powered appliances of today.  Joyce folds the sides back into the box and sets it aside.

She sighs and looks around.  There are many, many boxes and they are all full of the things that her mother could not quite stand to throw out.  The furniture and stacks of books and old LPs and broken toys were all being saved for... something.  All things that had meaning once, even if they were no longer useful.  Meaning to Mother.  Mother is gone.

Finally, Joyce stops looking and starts sweeping everything toward the top of the stairs.  To the rectangle that leads down.  Pushing and shoving, she lets box after chair after stack drop down the hole.  Each bounces under the light, makes the stair's springs groan and lands in the middle of the upstairs hall.

It goes on for a while, but there is no one home to be disturbed.  Joyce should be tired.  Yesterday had been the memorial and then she and her siblings had spent all of this day arguing about what to do with all of the 'real' stuff cluttering the lived in rooms of the house.  But this felt good.  She was doing something.  Not waiting and watching and being told that there was nothing that anyone could do.  She could do this.  She could sweep the dust of her mother's life away.

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