Away From Tomorrow

Geraldine has started a Movie Musings prompt site where she posts a prompt once a month.

The prompt for June was   Sometimes The Runner Stumbles.

I wrote a screenplay about five years ago which I abandoned after two drafts because I thought it sounded too much like a cross between The Matrix and Bladerunner.

Anyhoo, as is my wont, I have decided to play around with it and see if I can turn it into a novel instead.

Geraldine’s prompt inspired me to give it another try.

Here’s one of the bits I’m fiddling with -

Image by fdolphin96 at Deviant Art

My name is Johnny Destructo. I am a hunter in the farthest reaches of the blue plateau. It is 2060AD and the earth has succumbed to environmental degradation. Our oceans are no longer life-sustaining. They are stagnant with polyurethane. Our population has been decimated by wave after wave of viral pandemic. Swine flu, avian flu, canine flu. The return of the bubonic plague.

Our remaining arable land is closely guarded. Our natural resources are controlled by the G2 – the two greatest superpowers in the world – Russchina, a merging of Russia and China and the United Kingdom of the States, a melding of what remains of the rest of the world.

Much of the world has been swallowed up by the sea or by what was our true enemy all along – our own garbage. A green haze covers the sun, methane gas rising from the tracts of land which used to be countries but are now garbage dumps.

As I said, our natural resources are controlled by the G2. So we have had to create our own sources of power. The Stewards of the States laughingly call it people power. They say what an honour it is to give yourself in service to your state. To become a wind runner.

I say it would have been better to have contracted the plague.

Our energy is sourced from the wind. It is the only technology we have left. Except that there is no wind. That’s where the runners come in. They are criminals, miscreants, the disenfranchised, the poor, thrown into laboratories and genetically modified so they can run and run and run.

They run in the relay tunnels. Thousands of them like rats turning wheels, powering our cities.

It is not a life. It is not even a death. It is nothing.

The Modifiers say the wind runners wish only to run. They crave it, but I have been down to the tunnels where their feet pound like a lament and I see their eyes pleading for peace.

As I said, I am a hunter. My official name is Venator which is Latin for hunter. The stewards like things to have a mythic connotation, but let me tell you, there is nothing mythic about hunting down a wind runner.

Sometimes they escape. They snap out of their catatonia and strive for freedom. They run. Blindly. Their pale limbs shuddering in the green heat. They hesitate, but they have been conditioned to run, it is all they know, so they keep on running. Always to the sea. Where all paths lead. But there is no respite there. The sea has spent a lifetime dying.

I do not chase them. I watch and wait in my RPV. My Reconnaissance and Pursuit Vehicle which has been powered by the very feet of the runners I am hunting. The irony is not lost on me.

My mission is to capture them, to return them to the Modifiers for re-programming, but sometimes they beg me for mercy. Let me run, they say. Let me run until the end.

My instructions are to obliterate under such circumstances, but I cannot. I have seen their eyes. So I let them run.

Sometimes the runner is swift. He runs to the sea, holding his arms aloft in victory before plunging in. He doesn’t realise he has been programmed to do this as punishment for his urge to escape.The acidic water rips him to the bone but there is joy in his face. He has died a free man.

Sometimes the runner pauses. He is afraid I will shoot him in the back or toy with him as some of the Venator do. I point those runners away from the sea towards the place where some of us believe the forests still grow. Don’t stop till you see the trees, I say.

Sometimes the runner stumbles. His humanity returns in a rush, striking him in the face. It is too much. That’s how I met the boy. That’s how I met all the others who now live in a warehouse at the edge of the city.

He was a boy. Running. For a brief moment – free. I should have done what I was meant to do which was to shoot him in the back, but I couldn’t. He was just a boy.

He couldn’t remember his own name. I took him to the warehouse where I have taken all the others. Over 2oo former wind runners along with butterflies, fish and songbirds.

I have never seen a bird, said the boy. He smiled awkwardly as if his face was being pulled by strings. The next day he could remember his name. It was Max.

Every morning and evening I come and sit with the runners. They touch me like I am their saviour. They do not know that if we are discovered we will all be obliterated.

It occurs to me as I look at their faces that hope is a simple miracle, that it is always there buried in the hearts of men. No matter what. Collectively, we are all running away from tomorrow. From the brutality of it. We dream of rebuilding all that has been lost.

We hold tiny fragments of what was in our hands and wait for them to reform. It is our vigil.

We link hands in the morning and at night. The warmth of our skin is our armour. The day begins and ends in our eyes. It is all we have but it is more than we expected.

I am Johnny Destructo. I am a hunter of men. One day I will see those men run free. The winds will return. Westerlies, easterlies, southerlies, northerlies, tradewinds, mistrals soft as feathers. The winds will come, turning the sun to gold. And we will begin again.

Riding Painted Ponies

Remember that Blood, Sweat & Tears song (well, some of you young ‘uns might not) Spinning Wheel?

What goes up must come down
spinning wheel got to go round
Talking about your troubles it’s a crying sin
Ride a painted pony
Let the spinning wheel spin

Sometimes my life is like a song and lately it has been Spinning Wheel. I have always loved this song. It has a killer arrangement, fabulous horn section and psychedelic lyrics. Pretty much ticks all the boxes for me.

But it’s the sentiment expressed in the lyrics that fit me at the moment.

Everything comes full circle. To experience real emotional pain is difficult to write about. You actually get tired of going on about it.

You also get tired of constantly employing all the little strategies that help you deal with it. The long walks, the yoga, the vitamin supplements, the positive headspeak, the taking things day by day, the letting things go. The waiting. The endless waiting.

Keeping a breakdown at bay is a full time job. You teeter on the brink of a cliff with barely a foothold. The black sea below looks incredibly inviting.

You feel like taking an axe to people with their constant positive affirmations and assurances that things can only get better. Tell that to my fragile psyche, you feel like shouting. This is a daily battle for me that’s been going on for years and I’m tired of it. I just want some peace from constantly trying to stop myself from descending into full metal jacket insanity.

When you’re deep within the swirling vortex of mental agony that has a half-life longer than plutonium you do not believe you will ever make it back up to the sunlight. But you do. Because the wheel turns whether you want it to or not. For good or for bad things just cannot stay the same.

So when the sun is out but you can’t see it no matter how hard you try – don’t give up. For the wheel is turning as you look. Do what you have to do to get through the day. Hold on. Ride that painted pony and let the spinning wheel fly….

STAINED GLASS LIGHT

Welcome to Fridays With Tex.

Texasblu is a blogger and gifted writer I met through many of the writing blogs out there. She used to contribute regularly to my now defunct blog Search Engine Stories and I believe she will make it someday soon as a writer.

Texasblu primarily writes young adult fiction which she is very good at. I think her major strengths are plot and voice which can be very hard to master, but she just gets them.

When I told Texasblu I was ending Search Engine Stories due to time constraints, she was upset. She liked the challenge of writing to a prompt every week and said she would miss hanging out with all the other writers we had in the group.

So I suggested we continue to write to prompts once a week and post our stories every Friday. One week I will suggest a prompt, the next week she will. The challenge is that we must come up with something. Every week.

Now I don’t want to offend any of the other writers who used to join me on SES so if you would like to participate, please email me. Just remember, you must post a story every week, regardless of the prompt.

So without further ado, my prompt this week is – stained glass light.

Here is my story ——-

For the longest time I have felt like one of the damned. All those whom I called beloved in time past have gone from me. I am alone. I talk to the shadows on the walls at night. Shadows of my own making.

I believe that those who are alone must be damned because no one would choose such a state if they really knew what it meant. No one would choose such a state unless they wanted to fall. From grace. From the light. From whatever.

You would think that by finding myself in this state that I would engage in crazy, wild, self-destructive behaviour; that I would try and regenerate hopefulness by sucking on the soul of a man foolhardy enough to want to take me home.

That isn’t the case. No men. No sex. No drugs. No gin at 2AM.

I paint. On sepulchral canvases. Every loose strand of my life. Gradations of black and gray. Forming lines. Acquiring volume. Disharmonious composition that follows no rules but my own.

Birth, death, trees stripped bare, birds that cannot fly, people worn down to the bone. It’s not art, it’s anguish.

Lately, it’s been angels. Thrown to earth. Fully attentive until the weight of the world crushes them.

I am obsessed by the holy. By men with sanctity shining in their faces. By luminous crosses shining on altars. By sinners and saints. By the holy mother freaking lamb of God. I am obsessed with it, but I don’t believe in it. For I am one of the damned.

I saw the boy standing under the streetlight. He was about 16 or so. He looked fragile as he shuffled in the frail yellow glow.

The other boys came like wolves. Kicking and spitting, knocking him down. From across the wide road I could smell his blood. The purity and the fear in it.

I had no weapon to speak of, just a paintbrush I had bought earlier – horsehair, top of the range; but I didn’t hesitate, holding my paintbrush aloft and running across the road with a terrible cry as if I imagined I was some kind of ancient warrior.

The wolves ran off. I could smell their fists on the boy. Their intent. He lay on the sidewalk moaning. His eyes were dull. He was bleeding from a deep gash on his head. One of his teeth had been knocked out.

I tried to call for an ambulance but could get no signal on my phone. I screamed for help in the middle of a bleak, deserted city street. My voice rose, echoed, then disappeared.

Blood began to gurgle in the boy’s throat.

Don’t you die on me, I said. Hold on. Please hold on.

I ran to a door. Then another. Then another. Calling for help. Empty houses, empty shops. Even the church lay dark and quiet. I heard the gurgle again in the boy’s throat, the horrible sound of life running down the drain.

I ran back to the boy. A figure stood over him, looking at the boy, looking at me with a face I knew. With a face I had created.

His wings were blackened by his descent through the clouds. He spread them like a prayer before wrapping them around himself and the boy tighter and tighter and tighter until the two beings appeared as one. The angel and the boy shimmered, drawn like a pupa by the enormous wings, which unfolded with a flourish, making the boy stagger into the street.

He was alive. He wasn’t bleeding. The boy looked at the angel. He looked at me. He ran off.

Wait, I said. Shouldn’t you wait so we can call someone?

The boy was gone. I saw the angel move like breathing into the church. I was afraid. I was in shock. I was in love with an angel I had painted from dreaming.

The angel was gone. Candles burned in rows under the stained glass windows, touching everything with meaning, creating an alchemy that rose to the sky.

Every night since that day I have returned to the church. Lighting candles in rows that capture the colours in the glass.

I wait for him. My angel. The air glitters, arching into the eternal. I sit in the stained glass light and wonder if I believe.

*Here is Texasblu’s story. I know she would love it if you paid her a visit.