Pavement of Sapphire

The girl clutched at the warm, dry grass, as the tips of her fingernails sunk into the fragrant soil. Soon the rumbling filled not only her ears but also the entire earth around her. The aggressively loud drone of the engines trapped her in this reality. The only thing they had left was the grass and soil, which she pulled up into her fists and held up to her face as her head began to swim. The soil made the same smudges on her pale face as every other day, which came as an outrage to her. She wanted the earth to bleed and cry with them. This was the day that the majority of the world was left for dead.

                Our Father who art in heaven, hollowed by thy name.

                Thy kingdom come. Thy kingdom come…

She could not get past these words. And what if this is the will of God?, she thought. In revelations it said that the righteous would disappear. Well, a million people had just left the decay of earth forever. Maybe the population was correct, that whatever God there is could not live outside of any of us. But then how could they also be correct in the smudged words drawn with ashes on ragged remaining walls, saying “God is dead”? If we are our own God, we are anything but dead. We are determined to survive at any cost, and act as if laying down others for sacrifice is praiseworthy. It has been like this since the beginning of time, nations who became sur-human creatures killing each other in the name of survival.

“Deena?” her mother was screaming at the top of her lungs to be heard over the dreadful noise. “Honey, that’s enough.”

But it wasn’t. It would never be. Deena could see her mother had been crying, but now that emotion had passed over her crumpled face. The only thing that remained was an expression of annoyance with her daughter, whose actions had been deemed forever odd. Not unlike Deena herself.

Deena looked over her shoulder at her mother and their filthy ranch house, with gun powder lodged in the ridges of the siding and mud splattered on the side in a way not unlike art. Her mother had wanted a house with clean sides, and had sworn to the girl’s father that it would be so. But with bombs dropping from the sky like the burden of a hundred dreams and acid sprinkling from the always looming grey clouds, she was proved a wishful thinker. Deena let herself be coaxed inside, but stayed at the window to watch the passing pods. Make your lives worth the price the rest of us are paying. And maybe it will be heaven after all. She whispered this out loud, as if sending the thought into the air could make it reach the ears of the people in the pods, still visible yet a thousand miles away.

It was a good thing, she thought, for the United Relocation Committee to keep everyone in their homes. It would have been a fight to the death to push into the pods otherwise, and all the chosen survivors would be targets for slaughter. No one wanted to stay on the decadent earth, counting down for the next five to six years until the planet went down in fiery debris. Parents were desperate for longer lives for their children.

Everyone on earth could have settled on the new planet two solar systems over, the one they were calling Xintu. It was a little larger than earth, in fact, and had much more tillable soil and fresh water. But fifteen years ago the world had come out of a sixty year long nuclear war, and the URC must have thought that limiting the population to what Earth’s once was could take the world back to a time before borders were so concrete that no one could fathom life outside of their own. As if the chasms that alienated each person who came into this broken world could be bandaged. Of course, the official reason was that in only two hundred years Earth’s population had grown seven times its size, which was a realistic concern, but very few accepted this as the only reason to only choose only one billion of the remaining six billion people on earth to survive. If this were the only reason, the choosing would have been random. In some concerns it was, but anyone over fifty, or that had cancer or aids or was mentally challenged, or that had a criminal record or was homeless never had a chance. And because the western world had been defeated in the war, the preference was against Caucasians as well. Deena could understand this prejudice. The white people had been the most vicious and conniving people of history. Still, she thought that they had paid for it already. There were few people left with skin as pale as hers.