Memories

Their first memories are of the green. Dappled green, swishing back and forth; the wind, skimming through the trees. The rich, heady aroma of rot and sweat and blood. There is, too, a soundtrack to these memories, tickling at the base of their skulls: a constant gibbering. This is their first language.

Above, the green swings back and forth. They are moving, swaddled in slings made of a rough, thick material. Faces appear from time to time: their kin. More gibbering, shifting occasionally to a deeper register, lulling them to sleep. They drift for a while in this idyll, the world lurching by, safe in their bosoms. (Whose bosoms? They will never know for certain.) From time to time, they are fed half-masticated morsels, passed from mouth to mouth. Their teeth develop early, prompting much celebration. They learn to walk, then to hunt. After they carry off an entire caravan in one electric evening, the clan bestows upon them a name: “the-five-who-are-one”.

One day, the clan blunders into an unfamiliar clearing. This is when the shooting starts. A new language enters the fray. Harsh, staccato pronouncements. Foreign words. “Intruder.” “Exterminate.” These words appear but once or twice, and are quickly swallowed up by the mists of memory, but one word sticks around, simple and elegant: “Kill.” They fight fiercely, but they are not as experienced as their older, more hardened kin, and are felled easily.

They awaken in a single cold, hard container. The green fades away, replaced by grey. A single, clear aperture has been carved out of the wall. Faces pass by outside, noses scrunched. Conversations rage between the humans as they stalk from one corner of their makeshift enclosure to the other.

– can’t just kill them. We’re not killers.
It’s either them or us. We don’t have the resources to –
– killing is bad, she says, when those mutants were perfectly happy to slaughter us all and feast on –
– a better question: why are they still alive?
Tom’s boy insisted they be taken alive –
Beautiful? Seriously? You’d best watch your son, Tom. He’s one round short of a magazine –
– he’s a goddamn cannibal, Tom, and I won’t stand for it!

The gate to their enclosure opens. A pale, round boy shuffles forwards: a human, defenceless. There is another man watching them through the glass, eyes red-rimmed and hateful. Their necks prickle at the sensation. As the boy waddles towards them, they show their teeth, and he raises his hands above his head. He squeezes his eyes shut.

They make a split-second decision: they do not kill him.

Some time passes. The boy has his corner, and they have their corner. Slowly, slowly, little by little, they are being civilized. The process is interrupted by the sound of gunshots: a coup. The boy disappears from the enclosure and reappears in the window, the baby fat gone from his face – he has become a man. When he re-enters their enclosure, his arms are drenched in blood up to the elbow. They gather around him as he falls to his knees and lower their heads to lap at the blood.

The man laughs.

They are removed from the grey. There are bodies strewn across the floor, and they look down at them as the man pulls them out into the eternal twilight of the swamp. They count seven, eight, nine corpses before losing track of the exact number. Out here, surrounded by the rot, leaves crackling beneath them, is their new home.

They begin to split. It is a gradual process. The man insists on calling them by different names, even though they are the same. “Bliss.” “Kitty.” “Sprite.” “Doe.” “Glimmer.” Their egos form in slow-motion, a delicate progression, until one day Bliss wakes up with an empty head for the first time and realizes that the others are still fast asleep. PD-nim smiles at her from the door, one finger laid across his lips, and beckons.

That day, she learns a new word: “secret”.

They learn to fence off their egos from one another, to keep secrets of their own. PD-nim – that’s what he calls himself – encourages them to hunt. His right leg is a gnarled stump of twisted bone and flesh, and so he makes things, instead. He gives them staffs that can deliver lightning with the touch of a button. He gives them knives that never rust, and teaches them what rust is, too, although he does not know how to prevent it. He gives them crossbows – far superior to the bows that they’re used to – and demonstrates how to make arrows from wood and bone and tendon.

When a boar tears a hole in one of Sprite’s wings, PD-nim says nothing. He averts his eyes as they drag her back into the swamp and dump her in the water. It gets dark, then light, then dark again, endlessly. The flesh knits back together painfully slowly. Sprite pulls herself from the water, darts up the highest tree in the grove, and lands, light as a feather, in front of PD-nim. He’s dismembering a corpse.

“Hello, Sprite,” PD-nim says. “Pass the flensing knife.”

Apart from the swamp, they have two other homes. There is PD-nim’s house, a squat, lonesome cabin. It’s a big cabin, by most standards, but to them, it’s the only cabin they’ve ever seen, so they don’t know any better. PD-nim lives on the first floor. His room has a computer. They sit on the floor and watch as moving pictures dance across the screen. They don’t understand the language, and neither does PD-nim, but they can mimic the voices well enough. They begin to incorporate the sounds into their hunts. Whispers begin to spread about singing girls in the swamp.

They keep asking me who is he

Their second home (well, not quite a home; they don’t sleep there) is a sleek, smooth dome, half-buried by the moss. A hole has been torn in its side, and the interior is dank and dark. Kitty swipes at the cobwebs to reveal a mishmash of letters scribbled on the wall: S. S. SK SVREGN. PD-nim leads them, limping, into the depths of the structure, only to reveal an apparition built into the wall. There is a blank, gently convex rectangle where its face should be, and six arms hang, limp, from its torso. “This is the goddess,” PD-nim tells them, quieter than usual. He’s lost weight. “You’re old enough to know. This is the goddess.”

There are hidden treasures in the dome. They find dresses in half-open drawers to wear. Glimmer cuts a hole in the back for her tail. PD-nim gasps as they come out of the woods, resplendent in their new outfits, and asks them to dance for him. He can barely move. In private – they’ve learnt to keep secrets from him – Doe broaches the subject for the first time.

You got me looking for attention

“I want you to eat me,” PD-nim wheezes. When he coughs, blood comes out. He holds up a small, metallic cuboid, and rambles for a while about power-packs and lasers, two topics which they know nothing about. “It’s apt,” he rasps. “I’m the last. No more. Out of battery. Out of power.” He presses the cuboid to his temple, and the smell of burning flesh fills the room.

They eat him and mourn. Kitty restricts herself to the off-white, starchy EMAREEs that PD-nim serves used to serve them when they returned from their hunts with their hands empty. Doe retreats into PD-nim’s empty room and stares at his computer, her forlorn silhouette reflected in the impassive plastic. Sprite climbs higher than she’s ever been before and discovers a whole world above the canopy. Glimmer soaks in the swamp, face wet. Bliss ventures further afield and learns that there’s a settlement not too far from where they live. And that its name starts with a G.

Time passes.

A routine hunt goes wrong. At the last minute, salvation appears in the form of another mutant. This mutant looks even less human than they do. Their paths cross increasingly frequently, and then, one day, they invite him into the swamp. They dance for him, and he seems to enjoy it. They sing for him, and he enjoys that too. They show him the goddess, and they show him PD-nim’s computer, even though he can barely fit in the door.

One day they will show him everything.