[NOVERMBER 2076]
I lived in a small town called Whittleton. It was on the coast of new Virginia and it was what city folk would probably call a pitiful or cheap attempt at hicks havin’ religion. What we had, though, wash’t anything like faith. Here, we relied on mama nature for what we needed instead of the artificial and manufactured. It wasn’t ideal, but our mama’s and pop’s mamas and pops made their choices, sowed their seeds and now we’re dirt poor and stuck in our ways. I can’t say I love it here one hundred percent, but I think even if I’d been born when the choices were being made, I’d’ve went with mama nature.
A few hours out of Whittleton, there was a city: Helix. Big daggers of buildings raked into the skies and people swarmed like bees in a hive, running through them streets on enhancement-chips and nano-tech like some sort of messed up clockwork. It sent shivers down my spine just thinking about them brainwashed creatures. I’d say poor souls if I didn’t already damn them to hell. My momma taught me not to contradict. Yet, in November, 2076, something unusual happened in our small town.
Two city kids moved in. Packed up from home, had enough I suppose, got in their horrible fume-ridden carriage and landed here, right on Hayte street, at the corner of Clerk. They didn’t belong here, you could tell from the bone white linen on their backs, pressed flat with sharp creases and not a speck of grime or grease, walking around with high-held chins as if the rest of us smelled like chow shit. The joke was on them, though. We didn’t have cows in Whittleton - far from it. This town was plant based. Where other retrolands raised their animals, killed, gave thanks, and ate, here we simply reaped what we managed to sow. Two different forms of a naturalism whose differences usually held no meaning for those raised outside of it all.
I decided, early on, that these two strangers were not worth my own time. No sir, I was too busy to stick my nose in the affairs of outsiders. Call me closed-minded, but I didn’t know much better. They left mama nature, I thought. Then crawled back when gadgets and novelties didn’t satisfy. It didn’t make sense - or at least, it didn’t at the time.
Usually, on my way back from a grocery run for Old Ms. Criv, I’d see the little Hayte boy scuffin’ his way home through the dirt and mud after runnin’ round the way kids liked to outside while I hauled sacks of flour and sugar. He’d have a grin stuck on his pale little face. The kid couldn’t be more’n eleven - little Nilly Hertkorn’s age. Sometimes he’d catch me starin’ and that stupid grin would flash on over my way. Sometimes, I’d notice myself smiling meekly back, embarrassed, almost, of my bare feet and near nakedness.
Even covered in mud, he still dressed like the kids they show you on screens. The kids that belonged to the nuclear families plastered to peeling billboards and faded advertisements that lingered from the past. He was clean and I was not. All I wore were jeans. In the heat of Virginia, even in winter, shirts and shoes were just sometimes too much. Maybe in cities people don’t have this heat tanks to their carefully maintained temperatures - but out here sweat was real and it was a nuisance.
That little boy bothers me. I don’t have no good feelings for city people in general but everything about him just twisted my arm into smiling back. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, though. Especially not anyone here. People in retrolands, all of us, we scoff at their sensitivity. I see that little boy sweat but he never takes off that one hundred percent polyester heat trap. Good thing too, pale skin like that’d burn right off. The thought was almost funny.
The laugh wore off, when, one day I found myself mullin’ over that poor little squirt having no good choice. Take of the shirt: burn like toast; leave it on: cook like a roast. The rhyme was stupid, i scoffed at it, but it still made me feel a little sorry. That lil’ kid, just wantin’ to run around outside with all those other littles - it just didn’t seem right to me. Another part of my hick brain thought he should just burn a few times and be over with it. That’s what I did when I was a little. Its what we all did out here. Then again, I looked at my own brown arm and knew it was irrational for me to expect years of ground in color to set in after only a few burns. Still, I told my self, don’t matter cause he was just a little city mite. He and his haughty brother wouldn’t last long out here, burnt or not.
I huffed out my breath a lot on those days, trying to get my mind off Whittleton’s two strangers. I wondered why they’d pack up and leave their strange home. What did we have to offer? Dirt? Mud? A lot of Rain? A chicken here or there that nobody ever ate since none of us was sure whose it was? I figured, even with my stupid brain that there must’ve been some sort of reason. Something big, it had to be, since as much as I wouldn’t wanna move into the city, I figured city folk wouldn’t wanna move here. Hours would passed. My shadow ended up going all around in a semicircle and by the time it was flying’ out right toward east, I’d picked almost the whole of the Liddle’s tomato field.
The Liddle’s were my neighbors way down the road. Neighbor was a word we used loosely in Whittleton. He didn’t live next door, but he lived way down on the same street, so to me he was still just another neighbor. They had a daughter though, Taylor. She had eyes like a Rose of Sharon and sometimes she’d come out and help me with the picking. After, I take her home. Beth Halloway always said Me n’ Taylor Liddle were gonna get hitched and have ten kids and then move to Exley. I didn’t want ten kids, though, and I didn’t want Taylor Liddle, but the pickings in a small retroland were next to nothing so I resigned my self to kissin’ that girl in the fields and getting fresh now and again. It was hardly love, but it was something.
On my way home, sometimes I’d pass the Hayte house. Sometimes Taylor would be with me, other times not. Usually though, that little Hayte boy would be there, on the porch playing some game or another, watching like a curious animal as I’d pass. His cheeks were stained pink from the sun and I laughed every time I saw him.
In the mornings, I got up at four, went into my own field, and picked my plants: cone flower for coughs, rosemary for Criv’s batty mind, borate and clover - all of it was mine to pick and I did, just the way my momma used to. Bethy Halloway called me Whittleton’s Witch Doctor and sometimes it seemed true. I’d sell her my mixes for the pharmacy and she’d give me cash - fair enough.
When I wasn’t stealin’ honey, mashin’ flowers, picking fields or chasing chickens, I went to school. An hour away by bike, there was a small college and that’s where I’d go every Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday. All whittle ton kids went to school, but I was the only one to go to college. Most of them don’t bother, but not me. I go and I study and I stuff as much into my hick brain as possible. The older Hayte boy went there too, but i usually didn’t see him. Maybe, since it was close to december, he’d be gone by the next semester and I would never have to, I thought.
That’s how my fall and my winter went buy in November, 2076. Me walking bare foot and bare chested to the store and hauling back flour and all sorts for Mrs Criv, sweating in the field and hunting for flowers like some grade school girl and all the while being squinted at by that little one on the Hayte house's porch.
