Land of Our Mothers

A sequel of sorts to my original short story, "MW-PB-03". This time, Ezekiel and his father, Thomas, board the ship and head toward MW-PB-03.

Land of Our Mothers

Justin Guidroz

            Ezekiel was flying through the cosmos four times the speed of light, approximately 1,200,000,000 meters per second. The IFS (Intergalactic Ferry Ship) was packed to the brim with former citizens of Ywanksa, Ezekiel’s home planet. Soft music that seeped through the speakers on the ship failed to drown out the pings and pangs of tiny rocks hitting the titanium shell of the ship. Ezekiel was squished between his sleeping father, Thomas, and the tiny window separating him from the infinite universe. The entire ship held around four hundred people, all who gave off a collected body heat that made the conditions aboard miserable and made the air almost unbreathable. The ship was modeled after an invention of his people hundreds of years before, called the aerodynamic flying machine in all of the history books he had back home, which have probably all perished by now. Ezekiel looked out the window into the dark space, and watched another three-hundred ships, identical to the one he was riding, oval in shape with a rounded tip and gigantic rockets on the end, heading toward a place Ezekiel thought only existed in books. Ezekiel began to drift off, his head full of the images of beauty he had seen in books of this place. A place of never-ending beauty, of green luscious lands and deep blue waters, of wild flowers and white snow, things that all had been fading from existence on Ywanksa. This place, this planet, was were his people came from so many years ago, so long ago that many people forgot its name, and just refer to it by its scientific name: MW-PB-03.

            Ezekiel had been dreading this day for three years, since his father told them they had to evacuate. Evacuate from the home he had grown up in, where he, his father, and his mother played with small spaceship trinkets and bunny rabbits, where all of his books about astrology and geology where stacked in tall piles around his untidy bed, where him and his friends would run around the yellow and pink hills running from aliens invading from the mythological MW-PB-03.

            Now Ezekiel knew that that planet, where people rode an animal named a horse across green fields of grass and swam in clear blue lakes borrowing its color from spotless sky, was far from mythological, and was now a land of nightmares rather then the land of Eden he would escape to when he would have a bad day, laying in his bed and wishing he was far away on this perfect planet. But now he knew of the planet’s true history, of how his mother had been killed on that very same planet, brutally killed by people of her own kind. He spent three years alone, contemplating how he could live in world where such inhuman beings once roamed and killed each other, and had even ate each other. He often found himself standing in the kitchen, blade in hand, its sharp edge resting on the soft skin of his wrists, looking at himself in the reflection of the microwave oven, tears running from his vacant hazel eyes down his face. He also started to wonder outside, often not returning home until the late hours of the night, tip-toeing past his father, who would fall asleep in the lounge chair in the den, the lamp illuminating his sad, worried face. Ezekiel would go to the outskirts of the town, up to the hills where he once played with his friends. A few straggly trees were perched on top of one hill, orange blossoms excreting a luring sweet scent, intoxicating Ezekiel as he lay under the tree, picking up blades of brown grass and pulling them apart, the crease in the middle giving away and making two separate, smaller blades. He watched the sky, the stars twinkle, the different moons make smiley and frowning faces at him. He would lay for hours and wonder how he would handle the trip and life on the planet where his family was destroyed. Hours would pass, and his gaze would start to haze and lose focus. Whenever that happened, he would begin his trek home, picking a blossom and placing on the top of his ear between his head as he started downhill.

***

The day of the evacuation was one of tears and disbelief. No one wanted to fully believe that they would never be able to return to Ywanksa ever again, that this peaceful abode would soon be so violently destroyed and cease to exist. Government officials, easy to spot amongst the frantic populous, wearing strict black outfits, shouted out instructions for boarding, “Last name A through D, ship 395!” and so on, barely audible over the hysterical cries and shouts of farewells thousands were trying to made heard. Some officials, often the bigger ones, were carrying the youngest and oldest residents toward their ship, one set all the way at the end of the strip. The entire airstrip, a five mile stretch of smooth gray heat-resistant concrete, was covered with people, all huddled around fifty-three ships, all lined up in a straight line, laying on their titanium stomachs, crammed next to one another.

Ezekiel looked up, wondering how they would take off without destroying each other, but was then distracted by a suffocating bind that almost threw him onto the ground. A dash of auburn hair covered his eyes, and he smelled the same peach-kiwi-marmalade shampoo that he has suffered through for the last year. Eileen’s death grip loosened as she looked up at Ezekiel’s face, her makeup hastily applied and smeared with hot moister. “We are going on a trip, why did you need to put on makeup?” Ezekiel joked. She hit him playfully, still wiping her eyes and sniffing, and she choked out a smile. “You could always make me smile, no matter the dilemma.”

Eileen was the one friend he kept in touch with during his seclusion after his father told him his mother’s story, and she often joined him on his late nights on the hill. She would lay next to him, sometimes hand in hand, depending on Ezekiel’s mood, and sometimes completely separate, but there to support him regardless. He loved Eileen, she was the closest thing he had to a sister or, as strange as it may sound, a mother figure that he had ever had. He wasn’t thinking about them being separated until she almost tackled him on the airstrip, and then he started to tear up as well, and they stood there as people rushed by, bumping into them and assaulting them with their bags of photos, toys, and heirlooms. Through the crowd, Ezekiel saw her father, Kevin (he believed that was his name), spot her and rush towards her. He reached them after plowing through a stampede of moving bodies and gingerly grabbed her arm. “Baby, we have to go,” he said, nodding to Ezekiel, whom he had gotten along with fairly well. Eileen squeezed Ezekiel one more time, and then got on her tiptoes and kissed him, then rushed off with her father. Ezekiel stood there in meditation, along with a feeling of shock, as her kiss lingered on his lips. A steel toe boot connected with his shin and his trace was broken with a yelp. He spun around, but finding the culprit was impossible in these conditions, so he gave up, and ran down the strip to ship 398, where letters M-N were boarding.

As he ran, he saw some custom officials tell evacuees that they most leave some possessions behind, despite the avid protest of the owners, who had their possessions striped out of their hands and thrown into the hands of massive personnel who a sane person would quickly accept the loss of a lamp over being crushed by these behemoths’ hands. Unfortunately, most of these citizens were far from the reach of sanity, and relentlessly tried to recover their belongings, and were quickly subdued by the guards with the pinch of the neck, and the once lively people crumpled to the ground, unconscious. He kept running, finally reaching his ship, and looked for his father, Thomas, amongst the throng of passengers. He soon found out that it was not easy to find a balding middle-aged man amongst four hundred or so other people, where there were many balding middle-aged men. He laughed her to himself as he remembered what his father told him when Ezekiel made a joke about his bald spot, “We can travel the galaxy but we can’t keep the hair on our heads.” Ezekiel easily slipped through the customs officials, having no possessions, and ran to the first man he saw in the boarding line. He was lucky, for Thomas was the man Ezekiel squeezed the shoulders of and joined in line. Thomas smiled s sad, weary smile, “Ready to go?” Ezekiel nodded silently, his thoughts thousands of miles away.

***

The ship ride was far from pleasant. Crammed between his father and a woman whom he had never met before and bore an uncanny resemblance to a toad in his old animal books his father’s ancestors preserved and passed on to him. Smells worse then one probably did though, Ezekiel thought cringing, for she was sleeping with his arms over her head, and her armpits were right next to his ear, and were also hairier then his. The unbearable heat and poor circulation of air did not help, as more and more sweating people, exhausted from running around and packing last minute, toppled on another trying to find a spot to sit. Ezekiel heard loud booms from outside over the din of the ship’s crowd, the other ship’s departing, heading toward Hell. After the second boom, the ship’s doors were sealed and the pilot announced that all passengers should fasten their safety straps, which was met by a collective snort, as if they were to be able to reach a small strip of cloth underneath all of these people they are forced next to. One person cried out, “If we run into anything, we’re so packed together we won’t be goin’ anywhere.” This was met with a small laughter followed by shriek from the crew as the ship slowly lifted upwards, and their seats moved from being flat to straight, as the ship became vertical. Ezekiel looked over the toad woman’s gut out the window and saw the ground moving. They were set down with a bone-shaking thud after a minute of moving to the main launch pad. The pilot’s voice rang out again, “We will be departing momentarily. Please make sure you are fastened in, and we should be arriving in under an hour.”

A click of the speaker system cutting off was not heard over the deafening boom as the rockets flared up beneath them and they were all pushed back into their seats as they were hoisted into space at neck-breaking speed, the g-forces pushing all of Ezekiel’s facial attributes into his skull. Another loud boom was heard ten seconds later as they broke through the atmosphere and then a silence followed, the low hum of engines could be heard. The speakers cracked, and a soft jazz music eased out of them. He looked out the window again and saw an entire fleet of identical ships, heading toward the new world. Tiny rocks were beating on the siding of the ship, scraping the small window Ezekiel stared out of. He turned his head to the left, and saw that his father had fallen asleep next to him. He studied Thomas’s face; sadness etched into his aging wrinkles, but beyond that Ezekiel could see the kind, loving face that raised him alone since he was three years old.

Suddenly, anxiety gripped Ezekiel’s heart. In a few minutes, he would set place on the planet where his mother breathed her last. He had feared that moment for years, since the night his father told him of his mother’s death. His mother was part of a military expedition to the planet MW-PB-03, to see if it was inhabitable for human beings. While on the ground, her group was imprisoned by a tribe of barbarians, who killed his mother and ate her. The other members tried to escape, and only one returned, and he told his story to the government. In response, they sent down a mass amount of armed solders that killed off all barbarians, and deemed the land once again inhabitable. They needed this land because; unknown to the citizens of Ywanksa, the sun in their galaxy was about to supernova, swallowing their entire solar system, and they needed somewhere to escape to. And the only other inhabitable planet was, ironically, the one they left almost eight hundred years ago, when it was deemed unfit for inhabitance. Ezekiel looked at his father again, wondered how many more wrinkles would be etched into that face he loved so much, and uneasily fell asleep.

***

Ezekiel was jolted awake by a numbing shake of the ship landing. Apparently he was not the only one, for when he looked around frantically, others where as well, making sure they and love ones were still alive. Thomas woke up as well, and his hands gripped Ezekiel’s arms tightly, relaxing when he noticed he was still alive. He looked weary and old to Ezekiel, and he smiled reassuringly at his father, whose eyes started to get watery, and tears streaked down his face. Their seats were horizontal again, and people were beginning to stand and stumble around the cabin, but not getting far. The doors had opened, and people were literally falling out of the ship, and into the mysterious land. Ezekiel turned to look out the window but the toad woman was sleeping on the window, baring it from view. The cabin emptied quickly to Ezekiel’s surprise, and he stood up and helped his father out of his seat. He was light, lighter then he was before he learned that we had to return to that forsaken place where Lily was murdered. His father stood up testily, unsure of if he could hold his weight. Ezekiel placed his father’s arm around his shoulder and his under Thomas’s arms, and carried him toward the door.

Thomas looked at his son and was filled with pride at the strength his son had, more strength then he had. He hated to appear weak, but he did not have the strength to walk out onto that blooded land. But his son, the spitting image of his mother, had the strength to face that demon mere meters away. He stopped Ezekiel, and his son looked at him with concern in his eyes. He smiled, “I can walk from here son.” Ezekiel looked at him, judging if he thought he was ready to walk, and then unwrapped his arm from his father. Thomas took the first step, then another, and then was sure enough that he could make it, as long as his son was by his side.

The line quickly moved out the door, and as the father and son reached the door leading out to the planet, Ezekiel grabbed his father’s hand, and together, they walked out into the sun.

The land was nothing like Ezekiel’s books and dreams described it as. The luscious green fields and flowing clear streams were nowhere to be seen; all that could be seen was red, dry, cracking soil. Barren. The air was hot, dusty, and hard to breath, and the sad notes of the wind whipped the back of the refugees, heading toward a large glass dome one hundred meters away. Mindlessly, people dredged further on toward the lit-up dome. Ezekiel dragged his father along, who shuffled his feet next to him, his eyes streaming tears onto the dead ground.

They reached the dome and Ezekiel found two chairs near the back, and he eased his father into one, and he stood next to him, his hand still clasping his father’s weak one. At the other end of the dome, a large stage was sitting there, empty. A large wooden podium stood in the center, with a thin black microphone attached to the top. The din of the crowd echoed in the circular room, making any chance of deciphering one precise conversation impossible. A loud whining screech made the crowd recoil as a man stepped up to the podium. The conversations all died down and all attention was asserted to the man. He stood there momentarily and cleared his throat, then addressed the crowd, “My fellow citizens of the Union of Ywanksa, welcome to MW-PB-03, or as it was called by our people a millennium ago, Earth.” His booming voice settled as he fell silent again, letting his words sink in. “Soon, recolonization of the planet will begin. He have small modeled homes available to every family, all stocked with a week’s worth of food and utilities. We will all have to work together to make this place the blossoming place it once was. Remember; even though we are thousands of miles from home, we must stay together and united. And, besides,” he stretched out his arm, “this is our new home!”

Thomas let out a pitiful wail and collapsed on the ground, his eyes exploding into waterfalls of anguish and pain. Ezekiel dropped next to him, his face contorted with fear and panic. Thomas’s breathes became ragged and deep and his chest seized up and began to tighten. A crowd began to accumulate around him as his eyes closed. His arm gripped his chest as Ezekiel grabbed it and shouted, but Thomas couldn’t make out what he was saying. He looked up, and saw Lily, her brown hair flowing toward him, her arms stretched out, welcoming him back into her arms, a place he had longed to return to for fifteen years. She adored her wedding dress and looked as beautiful as she had that day. He felt himself lift up as he drifted skyward, toward her arms. He stretched out his arms, and glided toward her, a light radiating behind her as he drew nearer. His arms reached her, and he drew her into an embrace. They kissed, his last breath tinged with her sweet breath, and then all was gone.

***

Ezekiel laid next to his father, huddled over his father’s body, his head resting on his now-still chest. He heaved and let out another stream of tears and two pair of strong hands lifted him up. He jerked around violently, his legs kicking his father’s still body and the two guards behind him. “Let me go! I can’t lose him! Let me go!” he screamed, his vocal chords stretching to their limitations, cracking as he screamed louder. Suddenly, an enormous pressure was added to his lower neck, his legs buckled, and his body hit the ground, unable to move. His eyes fell upon his father, who’s face had returned to the peaceful state he could remember faintly when his mother was still alive. Now he was here, all alone, on this planet where he had lost his entire family, and all he could do is close his eyes, and hope for the best.

Reviews

[deeps]

Wow! Jam packed with action and deep emotion.
I liked what you wrote. Made me ponder.
I like this and felt raw enegry displayed.
Very well written. Everything held together well.