The Culling

Andrew’s nerves twisted in knots as he stood outside looking upward. In mere minutes, it would be time for the five-year culling. There was a legitimate reason to be nervous about the current death cycle.

Perhaps he’d been too young to worry about it before. Perhaps there hadn’t been a cause to be apprehensive back then. Then, like others, he’d even been apathetic about the loss of human life. Sorely regretting his former apathy, he now dreaded and feared the green light. That light was the signal for weeding out the population.

The poor health of his mother and father worried him. Gnawing hunger and a lack of medicine had taken a cumulative toll. Adding to the tenuous nature of their health status, they had reached the advanced age of fifty. That wasn’t a good age to be in a society that celebrated youth. Few wasted compassion on the aging.

The green light had been responsible for such indifference. Repetitive culling of people over fifty taught younger citizens disdain for the elderly. It wrongly taught them experience and knowledge wrought from the longevity of life held no value.

Anger flooded Andrew; rage at the injustice. Authorities had long since cut food rations to the point of non-existence for all but the young. It was like, by withholding proper nourishment, older people were being primed to die.

Only the parents of more compassionate children fared better. But, that compassion afforded them only a temporary reprieve. When the captains of the light found out younglings were sharing their portions—and they always found out—they slashed the children’s rations to a meager mouthful per meal.

Andrew felt shame he hadn’t shared his food with his mom and dad. His own mind had once been infected by the philosophy that the youth should rule the world and the old deserved to die. With only a minor twinge of guilt, he’d accepted it at face value; it would soon be time for his parents’ deaths.

Wisdom had finally come the previous year with his twenty-fifth birthday. It was only then he could visualize a life without the people responsible for his birth and upbringing. They were the only two beings on the planet who knew him and loved him and their absence would make for a miserable, empty existence. Besides, they deserved to live. And yet, their deaths would come much too soon.

When he was still a child—before statistics had been deleted from Old World history books—he’d read how people often lived into their seventies and eighties. Sometimes, they remained alive into their nineties and beyond. Now, in One World, fifty was fatal. Anyone who didn’t die from starvation or disease would succumb to the light.

The utter wrongness of such senseless genocide ripped a fissure in his heart.

Too little, too late, he grieved, he’d begun sharing his own food with his family. His severely malnourished parents initially resisted, well-aware of the penalty. Andrew had persevered, insisting and begging. He’d prayed to the gods of old to help him convince them to eat. Finally, he refused to eat if they wouldn’t. Near the final stages of starvation, they had eventually succumbed to their son’s threat and insistent temptation. Then he prayed the extra food would help his parents survive one more culling.

But, they’d been right. The breaking of rules had caught up with them and even Andrew’s rations were cut to less than elderly portions. Now, nearly as skeletal as his parents, his failing health had placed even him in danger. No doubt he’d be considered one of the weak when the green spotlight cast the die. First hovering over one household, then another and another, the dreaded light would extinguish the lives it had selected to eradicate.

Andrew didn’t care if it took him. He’d rather go when his parents left than live in a world where all you did was prepare to die a hungry, lonely death.

He went back inside to sit with his mother and father around the small kitchen table. They could see the eastern horizon through the window over the sink. Despite what it stood for; in spite of the horror it promised, he was compelled to watch. When the fluorescent glow came into view, Andrew took his parents’ hands in his own as they gripped each other’s. It didn’t take long for the light to spread. He began to weep in silence when it hovered above them.

“I love you,” he whispered. They didn’t have time to answer.

Going. He first felt the loss of his father’s hand.

Going. His mother’s keening was cut off mid-cry as her hand, too, slipped away.

Pause.

Confused, Andrew blinked. Would the light pass him by because of his youth? He didn’t want that! He began to pray.

Never would he learn whether the gods of old had answered his plea or if the response had come by way of the iridescent green. Not even a second passed before the light pulsed; its sudden radiance blinding. An eerie hollowness began in his limbs and spread inward toward the core of his emaciated body.

Gone.