Corpses of War.

A typical school day lasts from seven in the morning to one in the afternoon, giving us enough time to then spend the rest of our day doing as we wished, within reason of course. Often times I would find myself strolling by the old supermarket that was now utilized as an unofficial area where the homeless stayed, and I would wonder how such a large structure could fall to such a pitiful status in society. I remember when the shelves were lined with goods from all over the world; from Korea to France, China to Germany, and so forth. But now it was abandoned, save for the grungy humans that littered its isles, using compacted ash as beds instead of sleeping on the bare, laminate floor.

Turning away from the mess of rubble and broken windows, I continued down Penrith Road until it broke off into Herries Road, which I usually took in order to get home. Herries Road used to handle heavy traffic on a daily basis, especially when during the rush hours, but that changed seven years ago, as did a lot of the things that were considered normal back then. Dunes of ash now lined the street as if a snowplow had come through and pushed it all to the sides, which was actually very likely, but I had never seen one during any of the times that I walked this stretch of pavement.

It was typical for me to walk home alone, my sack-like backpack slung over one shoulder, however the weight of the books it contained generally caused it to sag and I would have to hike it back up every now and then. Considering the fact that every school in Sheffield was released at the same time, it was incredible that I had never run into anyone during my walks. Every once in a while my old friend and infrequent classmate (he was usually kept at home due to his allergies that acted up in the most extremes due to the ash) Lee Malia would travel down Herries Road with me, however he had to take Barrie Crescent to get home, which left me to finish the majority of my walk home myself. I didn’t mind walking alone, mostly because I had never seen another soul along the road before, and that in itself—oddly enough—didn’t bother me either.

There is a rotary right before I leave Herries Road for Shirecliffe Road, which used to be bustling with all kinds of automobiles, and there was beautiful greenery in the middle, but now it was overgrown with seven years worth of weeds and the pavement was terribly cracked. Beneath my shoes I could recognize what felt like every split, every dip, and every bump in the road, which only seemed to heighten the effect of the barren looking landscape around me. Abandoning the rotary just like many others had, I turned onto Shirecliffe Road.

This stretch of my walk is probably my favorite. It is here that I get to go along the street that takes you through Busk Park, or what’s left of it. Just like the rotary, it is now overgrown with weeds and gnarled looking trees, giving it quite an eerie feeling. Wild grasses have begun to sprout up through the cracks in the pavement like small fingers reaching up to grab at the leg of your pants, which only reminds me that I should already be home. Veering off onto Musgrave Road, I take this street for but a few moments before turning onto my home street.

Musgrave Place had been my home for as long as I could remember, even though it looked drastically different than it had when I was younger. It’s hard to imagine that I was nineteen when the Empire first came to be, and now look at me; I’m twenty-six and worse off than ever.

… Don’t tell anyone I said that.

The walk from the school to my front door took about twenty-five minutes on a good day; in the snow and bad weather it took quite a bit longer. My mother and I lived in what the Empire calls “community homes,” and their original names fail to come to mind. It was a quaint little brick building that was attached to a row of identical looking houses, with identical colored roofs, front porches, and walkways. On the inside, however, they were all vastly different. My mother loved to decorate, especially since the Empire gave her a Notice of Relief, which was really just a kind way of saying they were firing you from the job you had worked your entire life to keep and move up in. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but since she was a woman they found it fit to give her job to a man who could do it just as well as she had. I remember the day the letter came, too. I remember walking in the front door, shouting out a greeting to my mother (Tom had been missing for six months at this point), and in response I heard crying. She was weeping over the kitchen table, spotting the paper with tears that had strayed down her pale cheeks as she tried not to choke on her words and explain to me what had happened.

“First they take my baby, and now this,” she had cried, shaking her head in frustration as tears found their way down to her chin. She put her face in her hands and wept for another two hours.

But that was almost three years ago, and these days she greeted me with a smile and warm embrace.

Entering through the front door, I called out as I normally did, saying, “Hi, Mum, I’m home,” before sliding my backpack from my shoulder and placing it on a nearby wooden peg in the wall. There was a shuffle and the sound of something heavy hitting the ground before a soft eruption of laughter filled the foyer.

“Oh, Oliver, you gave me quite the scare,” my mother answered, peeking her head around the corner of the hallway that led to the kitchen, exposing her little white teeth in a generously sized smile. Ducking back into the room, she added, “I’m making your favorite for dinner: spaghetti.”

Removing my overcoat, I added it to the peg that had already taken on the weight of my backpack and the books I never bothered to take out and look over.

“You know me so well,” I replied through a smile of my own, sitting down on the ash ridden entry mat to begin taking off my shoes. In the nearby corner sat a small, metal wastebasket which I pulled over to me and dumped the ash from my shoes inside. “It’s like I’m your kid or something.”

“You are my kid.” She laughed again, and even though I couldn’t see it, I knew she was shaking her head.

“Imagine that.” Setting my shoes under where my other items hung, I pushed the wastebasket back into the corner before getting to my feet and brushing myself off. My socks had been what seemed to be permanently dyed gray from the amount of ash they encountered daily because of the numerous holes in my shoes, but that didn’t prevent me from using them to slide across the wooden floor of the foyer and down the short hallway that led to the kitchen. Stopping across the counter from my mother, my smile returned, and I wriggled my toes (despite the fact that there was a hole in my left sock where my big toe was) at the wonderful smell of her work.

“Delicious as always, Mum,” I commented, resting my arms on the counter top as I tried to lean over to get a better whiff. She waved her wooden spoon at me then, shooing me back across the counter like a hunter fending off a hungry bear.

“Now then, don’t you go spoiling your appetite over just the smell of it!” she warned me in a teasing manner, still wagging the spoon in my direction. “We wouldn’t want to waste this week’s spaghetti because you got your little stomach full off of just its aroma alone.”

Retreating back to my side, I rolled my eyes, smile widening as I settled onto the one functioning barstool of the two. My mother always teased me about my apparent inability to eat as much as a boy my age is supposed to, and often times she blamed it on my choice of being a vegan. “You know your brother could eat a whole cow if he wanted to. He’d probably eat the damn thing whole if he could,” my mother always said, generally at some point during a conversation such as this. These conversations usually happened once a week on our spaghetti day.

“You know,” she began, glancing up at me from the pot of boiling water she had been watching intently, “Your brother could eat a whole cow if he wanted to. He’d—”

“Yes, Mum, I know. He’d probably eat the cow whole,” I interrupted, finishing her sentence and thought process. She blinked at me from across the counter, a confused look about her face as if I had just read her mind and spit the words right back at her.

“Quite,” she murmured, letting her smile slip to a slight frown before returning her eyes to the pot. “Always a hungry one, he was.”

I hated how she talked about Tom. She always made it sound like he was dead, not missing, and that really got under my skin. Sliding from the barstool, I looked back towards the hallway before to my mother. Why did she always have to bring him up at the most wonderful times of the day? Just the mention of his name caused my stomach to twist into knots, and I couldn’t help but scream his name in my head, as if in the hope that he would hear me and come running home. But he wasn’t coming home, and that was what worried me.

That was what scared me.

Drawing my attention from my mother, I slid towards the foyer, calling back to her, saying, “I’m going to my room to read for a bit. Call me down when it’s ready,” before hurrying up the stairs to the second floor. Lucky for me, my mother was a neat freak and if there was anything dirty in the house then she would clean it right away, which meant no ash as well. Most of the population had quite a bit of ash in their houses, generally because it became too difficult to clean if left to sit for more than a few days at a time, and by that point you probably had a decent sized dune of it in your living room.

The second story was small, having only enough room for a bathroom and two small bedrooms; one for me, and one for Tom. The best part of my day was coming home from school, and it was typically followed by the worst: walking past Tom’s closed bedroom door. I hadn’t been inside his room in three years, and my mother only went in to clean in order to keep prevent the ash from settling too heavily. And now I found myself stopped in front of it, my focus glued to the black letters of “T-O-M” painted across the door at eye-level. We never did learn why they came and took him, not even when they broke in and stole him from the dinner table, not even when my mother had latched onto one of the men as she sobbed and begged for them to let her baby boy go. They didn’t even send a bloody letter of explanation.

One of those letters would be pretty damn nice right about now, especially after three years.

Three fucking years, for Christ’s sake.

And we’ve gotten nothing.

Nothing.

For all we know they could have killed him, chopped off his head and fed his intestines to the Wolf’s pigs like some people claim his men do.

Fuck, there’s no way he’s dead. He had to be alive. Tom had to be—

… I hope he’s alright, wherever he is.

Pulling my eyes away from the door, I dragged myself into my own room, flopping onto the dark blankets about my bed as I tried to keep myself from reenacting the scene my mother had preformed all those years ago.

Tom’s okay. He’s alright, I thought to myself, hugging the worn, stuffed Doberman Pinscher he had given me for my birthday just months before his disappearance. The sun was streaming through the slits in my blinds that I had forgotten to open this morning, casting thin bars of light across the room. As I lay there, I couldn’t help but let my mind wander, trying to think about anything besides Tom, as cruel as that sounded.

Eyelids feeling heavy, I soon found myself drifting off into a light sleep, allowing the words of, “Tom is out there… He hasn’t abandoned us,” rattle around in my skull for a moment before slipping into a sleep-induced state of unconsciousness.