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by ~SkyshroudHitokiri

I left home in 1984.  Don't ask why; I really never had a good reason.  I was 14, dumb, and convinced of my own superiority.  I'd read Orwell and decided, having little actual memory of the text's content, it was a fitting year to leave.  I packed a traveler's lunch or cereal, a granola bar, water, and now-cool biscuits.  An old hunting knife got tied to a boot and off I went.

I traveled for days without contact with home, to my mother's greatest distress.  She'd certainly found the note I'd left for her, father not being of concern for a young man leaving home, but it also certainly was of little comfort.  The weather was fair, after three days, for the time of year and the walk was easy.  At first I saw town, people I recognized and who recognized me, but in my heart i knew they were part of it all and had to be left behind.  Even lovely Jeanette, long trusses of red hanging about her face, had to be forgotten.  

Before that first day was over they'd been left behind, and field and old road replaced home.
It was five days out I reached the next hamlet over.  Berlin an ancient sign announced alongside population, mostly inaccurate, and that the lions club met there.  I kept my eyes out for das SS, but wasn't caught.  The town, I decided shortly, was nothing like the Germans' Berlin from movies.  It was easier than expected to sneak on the train.

I rode all through the night, next day, and on into a rainy night.  I jumped at the bridge and stayed under it alongside a family of cats who disliked the rain more than me.  And I slept.

I awoke, wet and alone, but to sunlight through early fall clouds.  My food was spent, but the civilized thing was right there.  After several hours of trying to stab a fish with a stick I wandered the waterside hungrier and with a splinter.

Fortune knew I had to keep away.  It brought me a small farm with vegetables and a fishing pole.  I walked back to my bridge munching radishes and cabbage.  I dug some worms and started fishing again, this time successfully.  I gathered field rocks and dry grass from the field, in far less supply due to the rain.  I searched my pockets until I found the lighter Jeremy had given me at school with he Salem FF100.  I lit my fire and used a bit of metal refuse from near the tracks to start cooking my fish.
eating well now, and drinking from the waterside with a cabbage leaf, I sat happily in my camp.  I hung the rod under the bridge in case of thieves.  I looked from side to side.  Down the stream in either way was nothing, but horizon.  I climbed up on the bridge and looked about.  The tracks ran off in two directions to their own horizons, like a gravel and iron and wood stream of civilization, amidst endless seas of grain and grass, now muddy and wet, though normally free and warm.  The farm was far enough away to not be an issue and close enough to be of aid if need be.  The train would be noisy, but not problematic.  there were fish.  There was some shelter.  I would live here.

It was roughly a month after moving to "Wetbridge" that I had a new home.  I'd made a nice mat bed from the grass, using my knife.  The cats still used their space from time to time, and I left it to them.  I had, however, liberated a few excess necessities from the farmhouse, namely a cup, fork, bucket, blanket, and chicken, the last of which was quarrelsome for quite a time until it was given a box which fell from a train for a coop.  It was also this month later that I saw another human being for the first time since I'd arrived.

It was near to midday and the sun was high, but with a cool breeze.  I was wandering near to the farmhouse and thinking of what I might do for a pillow.  It was by chance that I heard it, music.  It drifted on the air from near the farmhouse, dum dum dum doo de dum.  Silent as a hunter I crouched and stalked through the grass, looking for its source.  I peeked into the yard of the farmhouse.  The old truck that rarely left the drive was gone.  I crept around quietly, close to the yard, knowing that the old dog and the truck went nowhere without each other.

There in the backyard I saw her.  She was lying out in the sun on a folding lawn chair like you see by pools.  She was naked.  She wore sunglasses, but I could tell she was asleep.  The cassette played in the boombox quietly, “there’s a feeling I get when I look to the west and…”

Her skin was the reddish-brown color of the girls who soaked up all that was left of the summer so that their tan would last well into Autumn, but not burned, really.  I noticed all this, but I avoided her nipples sitting high in the air.  I was so very lonely, I remembered.  I didn’t want to think about whether that tanning skin was soft or not.  I didn’t want to think about her dyed red hair.  I didn’t want to think about being naked with her, but I did.  I thought about it all and more.  I thought vaguely of Jeanette, but she wasn’t anything more than a woman anymore.  It’s funny how strong the desire for any other is when you’re alone for so long.

I woke her with a kiss.  She looked at me a long while, a strange boy kneeling by her, looking at her with desire, and certainly thought about screaming.  She looked into my eyes, pulling of her glasses and spitting out overly chewed gum.  Then she looked towards the house and, upon seeing no parents, she pulled me into another kiss, sliding my shirt off.

I will go no further about this, though it is in my memory as it is in my heart, vivid, full, and unforgotten.  Needless to say I made love to her.  It was incredible and to this day is the best I’ve ever had.  She loved rock, she told me afterwards, and had never been with a boy because she wanted to be with a guitar player.  She asked me if I was one.  I said no.  She asked me what I was.  I told her I was a man.  She said her name was Steph, short for Stephanie.  I told her she should walk down the stream to the bridge to find me and never to tell a soul of me.

A week later there was a teddy bear and pillow in my home.  She often came to “Wetbridge” with food and her body and conversation.  More and more often she stayed until she never left.  Names fell away.  If she spoke, I knew she spoke to me.  If I spoke, she knew it to be to her.  And I loved her.

The fields grew wild.  The truck left one day and never came back.  We found two graves at the house.  One small with a food bowl above it.  The other was larger, and she cried in my arms.  She never said anything about Daddy again.  I didn’t ask her to.

I lost track of time.  Trains stopped coming.  I foraged from the farmhouse, but she never went back.  I fished and gardened, now near to “Wetbridge.”  I learned to make things that we needed.  We needed more when she had the baby.  I built more to “Wetbridge.”  The real world faded, and we lived.

Survival is a strange thing.  I took her to me because I was alone and could not just survive anymore.  Together we survived and lived.  Our child was the life.  She kept us human.  She was only two when a rather cold winter took my companion, my love.  For twelve years I raised my daughter alone, my love buried near the garden.  We lived easily enough.  I found an old guitar in Steph’s room at the farmhouse.  I learned to play and taught my daughter when she grew.  She called me Daddy.  I’d cry.  We grew together.

It was when my daughter was as old as I had been those many years ago, that we left “Wetbridge.”  I would tell you of the long years between, where we learned many things together and I spent nights talking to my love below the Earth.  I was alone again.  I had my daughter, and I was human for her, but I lived no more.  We left when great trucks came, golden and biting and cruel, and devoured the fields.  They were building a mall, or so the hairy man who found us with spears ready to defend our home told us.  We were taken by people who sounded important and asked why we were out there.  I did not answer them.  They asked me who I was, I told them I was a man, and that my daughter was herself.  I do not think he understood.  They called us interesting, among other things, when we were taken to the hospital and later to the university.  I never told a soul why I left, though I learned that my parents were alive.  They met their granddaughter and asked her name.  

I told them she was life.