APRIL: The Rise

4/22 - Bittersweet World

Today I’m not allowed to play out in the yard instead I’m stuck inside looking after Ilya while Ma and Pa go into town to fetch a doctor. I’m just inside stuck wondering how much longer I’ll have to stay sitting next to Ilya in the corner. It’s so boring when all you can do is watch him and do nothing! Whenever we play hide and go seek, he'll never go hide on me, he just stays right where he is in plain sight hoping I won’t find him there. I’m so mad! I left my big red ball outside yesterday; I could be playing with it instead of tossing my eyes around trying to catch Ilya's.

Today Ma’s belly got bigger and even rounder than my ball! She waddles around the kitchen most of the days cooking, back and forth between the box of potatoes and the burner. Sometimes she balances a few loose yams on the baby that is sticking out of her when she can’t handle them all with her own small hands.

Can’t tell how long they’ve been gone for. Half of today maybe… hard to tell time when you can’t see the sun and don’t really know where it is. The sun doesn't make us warm much, Ma says it's since we started living under a tint green sky, one that's nothing like the one my Pa explains to us in the stories he grew up on, he says he loved how the sky was blue back before I was born and how it made the pastures a sweet green and he can't understand this new world he doesn't love the green on top, the brown on the bottom. Its just always been like this way for me and for Ilya too but he's still too young to notice.

And I’ve never told Pa but I think it’s nice the way it is. The sky's speckled all the rainbow colors if you look hard enough. Today, there are pink dots over a grayish streak I can see through the window, it's stretching toward the city. Sometimes it almost looks clear, like you can see through the whole thing, except on the other side it’s nothing so you just keep on seeing through it. I like these days the best.

I’m writing down to myself what I won’t say out loud to my family or anyone else: that I am different than my Pa’s favorite color sky. If he ever found out I’m afraid he’d get drunk at me. He gets drunk at anyone who disagrees with him or ever does anything wrong and I don’t like it when he gets drunk!. I can never tell what makes him get drunk but one minute we’re all babbling on about the Americans and the rocks they live under with their silver teeth, golden teats and our kitchen table, the only piece of furniture we’ve got left to burn next winter, and suddenly it’s tipped over and Pa’s up and drunk again. You can tell by the way he carries on yelling, pointing his thick fingers up in the air to swearing to god and hitting Ma with dinner plates.

After dinner yesterday, he helped Ma pick up the plate pieces hugging and kissing her broken forehead and letting blood trickle down the side of her cheek and reminding us how we’re about to have a miracle. How we gotta keep praying and sending thoughts and praise to god and at bedtime he demanded us go to bed singing me, Ma and Ilya and we couldn't sing just anything either, we had to sing the song Pa'd wrote for us. Our hymn:

“Survive Hell on Earth! Survive Hell on Earth!”

Over and over and over I marched to the sound of my own voice echoing off the wall on the other side of the house and I crawled into bed before I got to waiting for Ilya to stop making choking sounds and hanging his tongue out of his mouth. He was still at the table looking up at the ceiling with his hands stretched straight up, clawing the air, scratching at it with his dirty nails. Pa yelled his name and Ilya didn’t flinch. Pa struck his temple with a broomstick and Ilya slept on the kitchen floor.




*author's note:

Any feedback for the roughest of drafts would be immensely appreciated as I am stabbing at complete and utter darkness in attempts to write this fiction!

I have found few facts to base my characters on, for those of you who are unfamiliar with them, they are based on the members a recently unearthed Russian doomsday cult, who have been trickling out of a rabbit hole after six months straight waiting for the apocalypse.

Since so little has been said about these disappointed Freds and Nancys, I began to make them up from scratch. For now, all persons who have been depicted in this narrative are above ground.