RESIDENT_OF_THE_COLLAPSE

There were few who could tell stories of the world before it collapsed. Those who could were aged, and their memories fading, like the colour from their hair. In fact, everything before the current days were polluted with the single minded nature of people who simply wished to pass through the days. Shuffling through them with disinterest. They passed through the days with the exact same manner in which the chickens, and cows, and goats, and pigs wandered without curiosity across mass fields, until the day they would be taken to the slaughterhouse.

Due to this lack of curiosity, there tended to be a distinct lack of options only a few years after the collapse. For men, it would usually be to pick up farm work or their father’s trade. For women, it would be marriage and nothing else. Perhaps a seamstress, if her husband was truly in need of that sort of aid, but never a spinster. All the girls would be married off to anyone who would take them if they were at risk of becoming a spinster.

Spinster. It was such a dirty word among young girls, and even more so among women. The men couldn’t care less. A boy declaring his hatred for marriage was hailed with being a free man. Women bore questions like they bore children. In fact, Zahlia had been bombarded with the accusation she was one of those so hated spinsters. Every question the women around her could demand of her, they had. The endless assault on her ears never truly ceased. “What will you do when you’re old and have no children to keep you company?”

“Don’t you want to carry on your family’s legacy?”

“The world must be bigger than just having children!” Zahlia had cried in response.

“Travelling? Don’t you want to have a stable life?”

“No! The world would forget what came before if no one wrote about it!”

“Aren’t you too young to know what exactly you want?”

“I’m so certain!”

“Won’t it tear a gash in your mother’s heart when she is left with no grandchildren?”

Such was the fate of a girl more in love with the past that was slowly falling away than the boys of the village around her. No woman let up even when she heard of Zahlia’s mission to scavenge the world and record the history they were slowly losing.

“What makes you think that your recollections will be remembered? A man could take it and claim it as his own and the world would believe that more than they would ever believe that you created anything.” A question from her own mother, which had dug deepest into her. It was some sort of support. A plea that would go unanswered. There were many more questions like those that came in the years following.

Zahlia had never truly run them away. In fact, they had made her quite insecure. To go against what every other woman did would certainly leave the defiant one to question her own mind. And many nights, Zahlia would question if the choice she had insisted on making was right. She was only a girl then, and those worries tore at any mind. No girl wanted to make her loving mother cry.

It was a fine evening when Zahlia steeled her resolve. Breaching the barrier of eighteen, she burned the fine dress that would be her wedding gown, and allowed herself to wander into the endless expanse of the world beyond her little town.

First, she found herself at a seaport. There she sat at the feet of aged men and women, writing their stories of an older world, forgotten to the years since the collapse. The women draped themselves across special beds, too weak to hold their own weight in old age, but all too eager to tell the stories of their lives. “When I was young, they had massive buildings that cut through the sky. They aren’t there anymore, but they used to be here, made of concrete and glass,” she wheezed. “I would travel up them each day for work.”

“And then, Mistress?” Zahlia leaned forward, listening keenly to the woman’s soft, wandering voice.

“Well, I would work,” she said. She smiled. “When I was younger, most girls worked. Only in the villages and rich houses would they not.” A small laugh escaped her, but it petered out into a set of coughs. She frowned. “It was religious reasons, before. But we need more now,” she said.

“Do you have children, Mistress?”

“Not anymore,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I’ve outlived the daughter I had.”

“What was her name, Mistress?”

“I can’t remember anymore. Joanne, maybe Haniya. Or maybe it was Lito.” The old woman’s eyes misted again, and she gazed into the distance, as though it would take her to the past somehow. “She was beautiful. And she was happy,” the woman whispered. Her eyes fell closed. “But she left one day and never came back.”

“Why was that?”

“I lost her in the collapse.”

An older man interjected, “I lost my son in the collapse too.”

“How was that, Master?”

“Went off to fight and came back in a bag!” the man bellowed. He fell into a fit of coughs.

More of them spoke, mostly of their lost children. Their regrets. The pain of the collapse. Zahlia wrote down every word of their pasts. Their presents and their woes were of no concern to her. In fact, it was a pity. If only she could have simply have learned more of the world than of their personal woes. But such was the painful way of the path she’d chosen.

The senile men and women would of course tell their stories with error and sentiment that she couldn’t care less for. She played a smile on her lips as she moved to ask them more. Of the world and of their lives. Anything beyond their emotions and arbitrary commentary on their lost brood.

#

“A man could take it and claim it as his own and the world would believe that more than they would ever believe that you created anything.” Those words echoed in Zahlia’s head even as she polished her collection of records. Her mother had said more than just that. “What will you do if someone else goes and speaks to the people you’ve spoken to? Steals the stories you’re so in love with remembering for the world?”

At the time, Zahlia had insisted on the noble answer. “I’ll be glad to have a companion in the task!” Now, as she sat in the cold stillness of her own home, even she couldn’t deny the falseness of that response.

She glanced at the pages. Some were crinkled. Others stained. What would she do if her mother was correct in their assessment? What would Zahlia do if someone else wrote the stories she wanted to be remembered for retelling?

That had been what tore away Zahlia’s innocent desire for travel and study, and twisted it into something much darker. For yes, a man could tell the same stories. But no one would speak to the same generation. No one would ever be able to recall the past from anything but her books. She would assure that.

#

“I used to have a private library,” the old man recounted. “Most of the books were destroyed in a flood, but still, some them had to’ve survived.” His words slurred together, and others were simply forgotten, as his mouth failed him. He shifted in his hospital bed.

“What was in that library?”

“E’rythin’ you can dream’f,” he replied. “Stories’f adventure,” he said. “And stories comedy. Comedy, lots of comedy my friend. Have fun in life. Don’t keep tragedies around,” the man chided, suddenly. “Too much sadness if you just look out a window or read the news.”

Zahlia chuckled at the old man’s rant against tragedy. “What were the problems of the world before the collapse that you so hated discussion of?” she asked.

“Pol-tics, n’ crime. Those- those were always in the news.” He shook his head. “My daughter always talked about tragedy. I didn’t like it. You don’t spend all your time crying on the bad things, my friend. You try to make something more better than that.”

The man spoke further, speaking all too easily about the issues of his day. Of course, descriptions of those issues were interspersed with his loathing of them. When all was said and done, Zahlia lulled him to sleep. And then, she stuck a dagger through his eye.

Then, she continued on. Across the sea she went, so as to avoid the consequence of her crimes. An old couple gladly spoke to her. They told her of the hospitals before the collapse. Pristine white buildings where nearly any illness could be cured. Nothing like the repurposed houses where the ill came to die.

When they had told her their stories, Zahlia offered them sweets in exchange. She was there to allow the family some condolences as they grieved, and promises. “They’ll be remembered,” she assured, to the couple’s weeping daughter.

The daughter was older than her, and barely reassured by those words. Zahlia had left on her travels the next day. For a place far to the south. Then to the west. Blood followed every footstep, like a ghoulish breadcrumb trail, daring anyone to follow it. It was a demon, tempting anyone to follow it and find the corpses she had eagerly left in her wake, on her travels.

No man would steal the credit for her life’s work.

#

If there was one thing that Zahlia could never quite be sure around, it was her mother. The woman had a direct line to all of her daughter’s worst insecurities and yet she was also the woman that raised Zahlia. She sat herself on the cushions lining the floor, near a cloth, on which their food was laid. “How have you been, Mother?” she asked.

“I’ve been well.” Zahlia’s mother was a woman named Zoraida, and she was quite a ways up in age. Her hair was greying and her skin was wrinkled, leather hide. Her head, neatly wrapped in a scarf, hung low, she had her eyes only on the ground in front of her. Yet, at the same time, Zoraida had the quiet contemplation of a woman always thinking. Pulled in by the thoughts that Zahlia could never hope to understand.

“Your stories… Are you collecting them well?” Zoraida’s eyes slowly drifted from the ground, to her daughter’s face. Glazed over eyes dug into a tired expression like soldiers digging trenches. Zahlia shuddered.

“They’ve been collecting fine.” Zahlia’s voice wavered. She frowned. “Aren’t you going to ask it?”

“Ask what?”

“You... The things you always bug me over,” Zahlia insisted. “Marriage. Children. All those horrible things.”

Zoraida chuckled. “Horrible things? You’re still far too lapped up in your need for travel if you think those are horrible things.” Zoraida slowly reached for the nearest bowl of rice. She momentarily considered taking hold of a spoon, but thought better of it, and simply took the plain food into her hand.

“There’s more to life than writing down the lives of other people. How are you going to live without any joy of your own? No children or husband... Your father already died, and I won’t live forever,” she said.

“I could lose my children, like those old men and women did in the collapse.”

“How likely would that be, now that the world is so much quieter than it was before?”

“They didn’t think it was likely back then either.” Zahlia inhaled sharply. “And my words will be remembered. The old world will be preserved. I’m going to fulfil myself and accomplish more than any of the women who settle for a fat, balding man and children who squeal like pigs to the slaughter.”

“Don’t look down on those women. After all, they can be quite happy even without a vial of poison for the lips of everyone they speak with.”