My World Alone

A behemoth rolled into the square. It caught sight of me, so I couldn’t escape into the locket. It made me dance and sing and tell jokes. I didn’t know any jokes, so I just spoke the first things that came into my head.

“What do you call a cuckoo without feathers? A bald bird! How often does the king shave? No one knows, his legs are always covered!” Etc.

I fooled the behemoth. It didn’t seem to know the difference between real jokes and made up jokes, and I doubted it knew all those words.

A juggernaut clanked in and smashed the behemoth into little pieces. Juggernauts, behemoths, and leviathans, war biomechs of three different, defunct corporations, hated each other. Now people used clubs for war, and the biomechs just did mayhem.

The juggernaut looked around when it was done, not seeming to notice me. I was happy, happy that it smashed the behemoth, and happy it didn’t notice me. Until it passed a big load of extremely foul gas. There were others there, and we all gagged and coughed. I walked home.

My grandmother gave me the locket, which she got in the last days before the end of Chocolate Coffee Beer Pizza Tacos. It was in the shape of a heart. She said it was ancient, but it was exquisitely made. Whenever I opened the Heart-Shaped Locket, the world stopped for me. In it, I had dry tea parties with anyone I wanted—ambassadors of funk music, flamboyant insurance adjusters, and fairy ironworkers who wore bikinis made of feathers. (Those are all real words.)

My gram taught me to read, and I have a “Dictionary” that explains all the old words. The book is old and ragged, but to me it is priceless. It is the only book I know of. My hut had no windows or door, only openings where the windows and door should be. But the roof was not as bad as some, and it kept the acid rain off me when I was indoors, which helped me preserve the Dictionary. Not that it rained much.

I had a typewriter, but no paper or ink. No. I didn’t really have a typewriter. You probably don’t even know what that is. I wanted to write about the world. There were people who would pay you for stories. I got some food telling stories to storytellers, who would go and repeat the stories in the big communities. Then people would pay them food. The most successful ones had houses.

My gram told me many stories of Chocolate Coffee Beer Pizza Tacos. Everyone was heavy, even the poor people. “Yachts.” Floating mansions for rich people. “National Basketball Association.” “National Football League.” That was where a bunch of rich men played sports. “Me-te-or-ol-o-gists.” They foretold the weather. “The Pill.” The people could have sex and not get pregnant. Most of the time. Sometimes they did get pregnant, and sometimes when they got pregnant they would “abort” the baby.

One time in my locket a goddess talked to me. She said she wanted me to “worship” her. I looked up worship. Intense love and devotion, reverence. I asked if she would worship me, too. I said it only seemed fair. She made a rainbow. She made flowers grow, and butterflies and bees drank from them! She said when I could do all that, she would worship me. I curtsied to her. Curtsy is where you dip your body a bit and bow. I asked her for food. But she just faded away. Alice in Wonderland! My gram used to say that a lot. She said it was a story about a girl who gets lost in a strange alternate reality.

I was talking to a Fidel’s bread matron one afternoon. She asked me why I was always alone. I wasn’t always alone, and I told her that, but I did not tell her about the locket. She was nice. Sometimes she would slip me an extra piece of bread. I was so emotional when she gave me extra. I had eaten only Fidel’s bread for almost a year, and I was so skinny you could cut cheese with me.

Some people did nice things when they could, but most people had nothing to give. My gram said a smile was worth more than money, which was sort of a joke because money was worthless then. I was shy about smiling because I was missing a front tooth. My mouth was pretty good except for that. I was lucky. Many people had sores all over their lips and inside their mouths and no teeth at all.

I came across Job in the Dictionary: a man who endured much suffering but did not lose his faith in God. I asked the minister about him. “We are all Job now,” she said. I wanted to tell the Minister about the goddess and the rainbow and flowers and insects. But I didn’t think she’d understand. Even if the minister was nice, the Heart-Shaped Locket was a secret.

The Minister called herself a Voodoo Jew Hindu Buddha Spirit. She knew a lot about all that religious stuff. I loved to listen to her talk to her group, usually on Friday nights. She said if you were good, you would be born on another planet, a planet where everyone had anything they wanted and you didn’t mind living to 100 years old! She said if you were bad, you went to Eagle-Boulder-Succulent Fruit and existed in misery. I looked in the Dictionary for Eagle-Boulder-Succulent Fruit but couldn’t figure it out. Can you?

The Council of Adolescents passed a decree that everyone would have to be happy. They were what people who lived during Chocolate Coffee Beer Tacos Pizza used to call optimistic.

That day of the decree, I opened my locket, which I kept in a hidey-hole in my hut. I never knew what to expect when I opened it. Nothing happened that day. No goddesses, no ironworkers, no butterflies. No strange shamans in animal skins bringing rain down from the sky. No mermaids milking nectar from Nandi’s wife. No naiads in springs being visited by friendly satyrs. In a word, it was a crisis.

I cried, but I stifled my sobs because I knew with the new decree about happiness I could get in trouble. Everyone must be happy. No one ever dared to cross the Council. Even the Minister, who was old, respected and obeyed them. I did not think I could survive without my locket, my whole world. (Obviously I did survive. I am telling you this story.)

It had been two years since The Silence. That is what I called it when the locket stopped working. I decided to tell the Minister about the magical Heart-Shaped Locket a few days after The Silence began. She listened to my whole story. She said she would train me to be a Minister, and that would open new worlds to me. She said she had all of her religious knowledge in her head, and she would pass it on to me. I told her about my Dictionary. She was in awe and asked to see it.

“That’s where I found out about Job,” I told her.

“ ‘The Righteous Sufferer,’ they called him,” she said.

She handled the book with reverence and looked up Prometheus: “Gr. Myth. a Titan who steals fire from heaven for the benefit of mankind: in punishment, Zeus chains him to a rock where a vulture (or eagle) comes each day to eat his liver, which grows back each night.”

“Zeus has chained us to the Earth,” she said. “I want my liver back!” She cackled when she said that last part. “But what was our transgression?”

I looked at transgression in the Dictionary.

“We did not take care of nature,” I replied. “We made it stop raining.”

“A fitting epitaph for this world: We made it stop raining,” she said.

I looked up epitaph.

After I learned enough to start ministering, after about a year, I petitioned the Council of Adolescents to exempt me from being happy. I smiled during the meeting and spoke in a friendly tone of voice, pretending to be happy. I hoped being exempt from being happy would restore my magical adventures in the locket. Those adventures were the only thing that had ever brought me happiness.

The chairman asked why I wanted to be unhappy. I explained that I had been very happy before the decree, but as soon as they made the decree I became less happy. I said I did not want to be unhappy, just that I wanted the freedom to be so if the mood took me. I had gained clout and respect since the Minister took me under her wing. The Council exempted me. They followed it up with another decree that freedom was the ultimate boon. The people applauded.

I waited till the end of the meeting and nearly ran home. When I got there, I retrieved the locket and opened it. A family of many thousands of years ago sat around a fire at night, singing and laughing. The scene changed, and an elf gave me instructions in Norse religion! I would have to tell the Minister. The scene changed again, and a dwarf forged a ring from a metal so precious that it did not have a name. If you wore the ring, you knew the truth and had the power to tell it.

My locket was magical again! I bubbled with joy. I felt like I could minister much better now. My next sermon was on the tenets of the Norse religion. I told the people about magic, poetry, honor, courage, offerings to gods and ancestors. We offered our hearts to Odin and intoned: “Honor. Courage. Duty. Justice.”

A leviathan came into the town toward the end of my sermon, right near where we were gathered. These biomechs were manufactured living things with mechanical parts grafted onto their bodies to make them lethal. They were cunning and physically very powerful. I once saw a juggernaut throw a rusted car chassis a good distance. Most of them had no more ammunition to fire, but they could still wreak havoc. I invited it over to us and welcomed it with friendly words. It seemed puzzled, touched almost. Its face worked. A little child said hi to it. Other people chimed in with greetings and well wishes. It left without hurting anyone.

That day we learned how to deal with biomechs. Almost all of them gentled when you greeted them with a friendly, open attitude. People were less fearful from then on. We still had marauders, bandits, and highwaymen to deal with, but at least you stood a chance with them. Not so with angry biomechs.

I opened my locket that night. A singer on another planet was singing a sweet, soothing lullaby for her whole world. All the children slept. I remember the song well all these years later.