• Rising Flats


    I was thrown from the Rising Flats the day Naradin brought a jar of Oxygen to Idle Period.

    Rumors had whispered through the Rising before, rumors saying Naradin had Oxygen, but I never really believed until I saw it. It was hard to imagine Naradin having enough courage to get to the place where it was sold.

    I didn’t really understand why everyone was going so mad over oxygen. Everyone knew it was healthier than secondary air, but why anyone would risk being arrested (or worse) was beyond me. They say it makes your head spin, makes you feel like your flying, but we’re already far enough up in the air.

    And the price would take up countless life-savings.

    But I should have realized Naradin was that stupid; spend whatever money, risk whatever reputation and future, for adolescent strangers to gasp at the small bottle he held in his hands. As if he didn’t already have enough; being a Golden Hair. Always having everything- and wanting more!

    Most donors are rich, Naradin’s especially, but I never knew mine. Giving their charity time, donors’ only real duty is to look beautiful; whether they are sitting on windowsills at the Rising or benches in the Picture Garden. I rarely see them working, though that is what they’re meant to do by Law.
    Sipping crystal vyge, lovely faces dribbled with struggling, multicolored rays.
    I often sit in the picture garden and watch them come and go, noting their strange glances at me.

    Still, I enjoy the picture garden most because it is like a dream I had, where strange things grew out of the ground, and the sky was blue. Blue and white, instead of brown and green.

    But we don’t see the sky much; the domes are big, rarely made of glass because pollution seeps so easily through it. The Corp learned this when they tried to build a Market Dome of glass. The workers were sent to the Healing Halls, but not much was done for them since they were only Burn Heads.

    I hate to think how they would have tried to help me.

    But that morning, the morning when I had no sense of what was coming, I had left the dormitories early to sit in the Picture Garden.

    “Hey, Job,” Reielle had smiled at me that morning.

    She was a Burn Head, but I thought she was beautiful. Madame Yeri would have smacked me for that. Reielle had blue eyes, though her hair was flaming and not softly golden. The park was empty, the dark colors of the sky mixing with the artificial light, making mud. A nasty kind of color and air, it seemed to slop down the portraits and make sticky puddles on the floor. Pulling at my clothes and heating my cheeks. The paintings of plants and blue skies were strangely surreal as the mud twisted with it. The Picture Garden was for escaping, but the light and morning air were forcing me to a middle ground, between the Picture Garden and the Rising Flats.

    “Reielle...What are you doing at the Rising?” I stopped stupidly, in the middle of the turning of the portraits, too preoccupied with the thought that my clothes were shabby; the sleeves too long for my arms and the pants hiding my shoes except for their tips.

    The edges of the vast canvases bumped me backwards, and slammed me forwards as they twirled around to their alternate painting. Reielle would have giggled but I had made her angry.

    “I can come to parks!” She stated heatedly, brushing her long hair over her shoulder. “The Rising’s gardens are open to the public, Blark!”

    “Don’t say that!” I shouted, my cheeks burning. “Did I call you a Burn Head?!” Absentmindedly my hand went to my hair, as if I could hide my deformity. Then I remembered last night’s project, and swooped a hood over my head.

    The way she had smiled…it was almost as if she had forgotten. Or it wasn’t there.

    “…What is that?” Reielle asked, standing beside me now and fiddling with the hood.

    “It’s called a hood,” I said, shrugging away her touch. “Blarks need it to hide their hair.”

    “Oh, Job!” Reielle snorted impatiently. “Get over yourself. Besides, it’s just a name. And you know you’re the only Blark.” She laughed, rubbing my arm where the portraits had hit me.

    “Only a name? Only my locked future, you idiot,” I frowned, pushing her away again.

    ”Mine too, Blark,” She said, suddenly serious. “And everyone else…whether its for better or worse. At least they let you go to the Rising. My parents make me live in the Hollows and take care of the family.”

    “Donators,” I corrected, craning my neck to see if a Riser or Volunteer were nearby to hear her profanity. A heat was growing in my chest and spreading to my cheeks. An uncomfortable heat, heavy and sickening.

    Reielle was going on about her personal lifestyle again. Only the Burn Heads would make families and live together. Ignorant and unsophisticated, still holding to a “Higher Meaning,” the GH Leader said that the society had grown out of. I tried to ignore Reielle’s humiliating traditions and culture, because I felt that I loved her anyway. I thought she was still beautiful. Even if she was born into a family, lived with a family, and was not being educated; as well as being naïve enough to speak of it.

    But I knew better than to hope she’d see me that way, to love me despite certain things. I was no class, no caste. Not a Burn Head, as she was, not a Night or Golden Hair. I was a strange and ugly shade, that had been lost after the Suffocation.

    “‘Parents,’” Reielle snapped, mocking me. “‘Family, children, parents.’”

    “Reielle!” I grumbled, watching as a Riser gasped and covered a young Night Hair’s ears, both of them hurrying out of the Picture Garden.

    “What do you expect from Burn Heads?” A volunteer had sighed to another, shaking her head as one would to a faltering infant. “No different from the Kyrians…”

    Reielle had begun to cry; her hands shaking as they shielded her pretty eyes. The volunteer’s words had even seemed sharp to me, scratching and scraping my ears like a harsh music note.

    “…Reielle…” I flushed as I brushed my hand against her cheek; an accident. I meant to sweep a long strand of hair from her lips. I shouldn’t have touched her at all. I had forgotten again. I had forgotten that the smile she gave me that morning was not the way it could ever be.

    “Blark!” She barked, slapping me hard across the face. “Don’t touch me! You can’t…you have to remember I’m still above you!!”

    -- --

    The mud light, the mud atmosphere stuck to my shirt, clung me to the portrait I had shrunk against after Reielle ran away. I don’t remember where she went, or what she said. The world was blank and silent, rippling like water. I was staring absentmindedly at the large fiber portrayed on the painting opposite me. That is why I liked the Picture Garden…the portraits of the fiber which once grew out of the ground. It was the color of my hair. Not light, but not dark.

    I learned in Ancient History class that this fiber was topped with green glucose, sprouting high and tall. In the old times, the people had found them beautiful, cut them down and used them for furniture.

    I think I loved Reielle.

    Her “Higher Meaning” beliefs seemed close.

    But as I sat on my bed at night in the dormitory, nothing but short breaths surrounding me, even the “Higher Meaning” did not seem large enough. There was something incomprehensible and vast my mind could not grasp. The more ancient documents I read, the more it seemed to burn true in my mind.

    The most important writings were lost during the Adaptation. Scattered, forgotten. And some forbidden by the Leaders, at least to the young ones like I was.

    I was missing something.

    We all were.

    I was usually missing something, whether it was a sport with my age group that I was not allowed to participate in because of my deformity, or a social celebration that I was allowed to attend if I stayed in a certain area while the Risers drank Vyge and the youth ate sweets.

    I was missing a place as well.

    I wonder who my donors were.

    I understand if they did not wish to reveal themselves. But they do not even volunteer at the Rising; that’s breaking an important law. In the Records Hall, I looked up my creation date, and found no new volunteers had signed the contract that day.

    Maybe they are dead.

    Or live in the Hollows.

    It shouldn’t have been important, not the way I was raised, but I wanted someone to call me son.

    Embarrassing and childish.

    Ignorant and unsophisticated.

    But if I let my mind float out of society, out of what I knew, a family seemed nice. Living with others who looked similar.

    Two people staying together for eternity.

    -- --


    I was punished for being tardy to First Class. Advisors don’t like me much; no one at the Rising is relieved when I live through another night. I think strange things, like a couple staying together forever, and always searching the ancient authors’ works. I question what I’m taught. Advisors don’t have patience.

    I get a fair share of beatings and lectures by the time Idle Period drags itself on the schedule. The day Naradin brought Oxygen was a day when Heat Waves were ravaging outside, roaring and ramming themselves against the domes. I wondered how the Kyrians survive, down below in the unfiltered air and heat. But we weren’t allowed beyond the Rising Flats because of the weather, though in the Rising, all were sure that we were well protected.

    Advisors crammed us into rooms to spend our Idle Period, because it was too dangerous to cross the glass bridge so we could spend the time in the dormitories.

    I was sitting in a corner, dully memorizing the past accomplishments of the day; a punishment given to me by Sir Merona who immediately heard of the fiasco in the Picture Garden. Not willing to admit I was being punished because I had insulted a Burn Head, he told me it was for leaving the dormitories too early.

    It was 16th of Kerta; before the Suffocation and the Adaptation, it had been called October. The time seemed to pass more slowly, the number nagging and pulling at the memories in my brain, until I finally realized it was the day I was born.

    My Creation Day.

    I had seen Seventeen years. Seventeen years of being isolated on an island beyond the boundaries of society; despised by Risers and Advisors, not to mention by fellow peers.

    “Keep reading,” Merona snapped, smacking me lightly across the head.

    “Blark!”

    I furrowed my brow and bent over my notes and calendar.

    “Hey, Blark!”

    Merona was gone. He probably wouldn’t have said anything anyway.

    “For Blue’s sake, go fall, Job!”

    “You fall, Naradin! Shut your mouth!” I shouted through gritted teeth.

    “Just tell us if Merona is coming back, you idiot!”

    I turned around, seeing Naradin and a small group of Seventeens gathered about him in a shadowy side of the room. I couldn’t make out what was in his hands until I saw the blue lid.

    “Is that Oxygen?” I snorted in disbelief.

    “Not your business, Blark, just keep an eye out for Merona…shut the door, will you?”

    “No, I get in enough trouble when I’m only being myself,” I muttered, turning back to my work.

    ”Yeah, because you’re a Blark,” Kirdell chortled, loosing a bottle of ink and spilling its contents all over my writing.

    ”Go fall, Kirdell, everybody knows your fat mother donor was a Burn Head!”

    “If anyone’s going to fall to the Blue, Naradin, it’ll be you!” Kirdell, one of the tallest and strongest, lunged across the room at Naradin, pulling him to the ground.

    The inkbottle burst into black, glittering shards; like dark eyes watching me, but glinting like Reielle’s.

    A jagged cold grasped my stomach, running up to my throat, tightening.

    I tried to tell myself she was just a Burn Head, but I could only see her as a woman, a young woman.

    The only one I felt drawn to.

    In their fight, Naradin and Kirdell knocked over a table, the entire water supply for the afternoon cracked and burst. Excited at the sudden freedom, the water trickled eagerly across the tiles, pulling, crawling, spreading before it was wiped away.

    Like scars, stretching.

    Like shadows, reaching.

    Reaching for something.

    “Most boys play during Idle Period instead of giving each other bloody noses!” came Merona’s elderly but booming voice. The water shivered and paused in its scurry. Sir Merona was very angry. He was whacking his cane against the walls as he came down the hall. Soon, the top of his bristly head could be seen from the window in the door. Similar to the water’s escape, the group of boys seemed to burst and scatter.

    Something cool was shoved into my hands, and before my gray eyes looked down, I knew that I would see that blue lid with the mark, “H20.”

    -- --


    Standing inside the Falling Room, its clear walls glistening in the muddy sunlight, I watched the sky. Now red with bits of gray. I could make out a small round object, its light suffocating as it tried to squeeze through the excess pollution which mutated the sky.

    To squeeze through so that the earth might be warm.

    Mutated sky; not the color it ought to be.

    Just like my hair.

    Secondary air is toxic; the reason why the domes and Flats were built. Until the filters were adapted and put to use, there had been no air to breathe. I often wondered how the people had gotten by.

    I had tried to explain about the Oxygen.

    That it was Naradin’s illegal substance, not mine.

    But they already believed my reputation.

    And wanted to get rid of me.

    So my words were dropped, like garbage into the Blue.

    Sentenced to Banishment. My Creation day would be my death.

    I looked across the many different domes to the Rising Flats where I was raised. Sleeping in the dormitories. Going to classes. Being hated.

    I looked down, to where I was going to be dropped.

    The Blue, where I was to land, where I was to die. But I would rather drown in the rolling hills of the Blue than be left on land to suffocate or be murdered by the Kyrians.

    I took a last look at the rest of the Flats, lingering for a second on the cramped little dome that was the Hollows. I wondered what Reielle was doing. If she knew that morning in the Picture Garden was the last she’d see of me. Maybe she would be glad. I looked to the shops and companies, because that thought had hurt too badly.

    Shops, companies, houses, safely covered from the toxic secondary air and heat waves by filters and coolers. The great metal dome, which covered everything else.

    Domes within domes.

    For safety.

    The great platforms which held us so high in the air.

    I looked away from the Blue.

    So very high, I then noticed. My heart raced, shivering and shaking in anticipation.

    Perhaps…could I escape? I was thinking nonsense.

    A domed community millions of miles in the air- where was I to escape?
    No one would take in a Blark…not the Burn Heads in the Hollows… Reielle…would she slam the door in my face?

    Panic shaking me by the shoulders, back and forth, back and forth, I looked hopelessly to the doors of the Falling Room. One in front of me, which led to a flat overlooking the Blue. A small bar around the edge, as if someone would stand outside. The door behind me led to the armed guards watching through the glass with glazed eyes, or glaring slits.

    Cautiously, as if my whole body would plunge to the Blue if my eyes looked through the glass at my feet, I watched the floor. The floor which really was not a floor, because it was made to drop convicts like me into the Blue, instead of holding us away from it.

    The Leaders entered the Falling Room to read the sentencing. The Leader of the Golden Hair spoke first, as the leader of the Night Hair followed, unrolling some ancient writing. A material similar to the fiber in the Picture Garden.

    “Job Karita,” The GH Leader looked at me during the silence which my caste name should have filled. “You have been sentenced to death by banishment for possessing Oxygen; a substance which was outlawed in Wyr 807 to stop the mass panic spreading through the Flats.”

    “Lord Rister, first Organizer and Leader of the Flats,” NH Leader said, reading from the strange material. “Wyr 1, ‘For all or for none.’ May death come quickly to end your suffering.” She met my eyes, and I saw she was sad. Her fine robes black, lined with the Flats’ color, her long Night Hair sweeping to her hips. She came forward, elegantly, and lifted my chin, kissing me on each cheek. That ice crept up my throat, and it grew tight, closing, and I could not speak.

    Since I had been thinking of the “Higher Meaning,” I wasn’t seeing people the way I was supposed to.

    I didn’t see flaming red haired people cleaning the streets and picking up the trash.

    Dark haired people practicing medicine and lounging in their personal domes.

    Goldens not working at all.

    They all just seemed like people.

    People, horrible people. A society that had my life in their hands; everyone’s life in their hands.

    Somehow, I knew it did not belong there.

    “…Only my locked future, you idiot.”

    “Mine too, Blark, and everyone else’s’…whether its for better or worse.”

    A “Higher Meaning.”

    It was still in their hands.

    Everyone’s lives; it didn’t belong there.

    I couldn’t save everyone.

    I couldn’t free anyone.

    But I could end the pain in my own heart.

    The pain that came when the beating was done.

    Pain when the scratches were scars.

    Pain when the bruises were healed.

    Pain inside, which made me writhe in my bed. The pain which had shrunk something inside.

    I couldn’t free anyone.

    I was only a Blark.

    But I could leave the note. Leave the sign.

    The rest would be up to them.

    The Leaders were leaving. It was almost too late.

    “For better or worse,” I said. “My fate is my own.”

    GH Leader turned, NH Leader already watching me.

    But I was already bolting towards the door. The door to the balcony. I threw it open and thrust myself out into the heat. I staggered, trying to gasp but found no air, only needles to run down my throat.

    It felt like waves, gritty heat blew past my long hair, and I feared I would collapse, but then, a moment of cold. I was suffocating, dying on the balcony. The vast Blue beneath me, the red, gray sky above, glaring. Sand…sand was blowing in a hot wind. I staggered, leaning against the bar and forcing my eyes to stay open. I shoved myself over the last of the Flats, falling, into the Blue. In my mind’s eye, I was diving, elegantly, into the foamy hills.

    But I found, in my semi-conscious state, that the Blue was not solid. It spattered around me, breaking into fierce shards, but as I sunk deeper, deeper, I saw blue in my mind. It was soft as a blanket. Cool and silky. Like water—the Blue was water!

    The Blue, I realized ridiculously cheered by my last rational thought, the Blue was water…

    It swirled about me, and in a hazy dream, it seemed to form into arms which held me close.

    Would I find Reielle? Would she want to see me? No, the arms were taking me to a different place, cool and bright. With other Blarks? No, with everybody looking the way they did, but alike at the same time, because they were, after all, just people.

    Family, I thought. And I wasn't embarrassed.

    Something hot and comforting rose in my chest.

    Family. Like Reielle’s…

    Yes, I could see it now. It was drawing closer, becoming clearer, though I thought my eyes were closed. No, my eyes were far behind. The Flats eyes.

    Like Reielle’s family…

    Only the person I met at the end did not call me, “Blark,” or, “deformed.”

    He called me son.

    -- --



    Author's Note: Hoped you enjoyed Rising Flats! This is an old story of mine, four years old, I think. I have been constantly considering making it a novel instead of a short story, what do you think? I might just post the other chapters here for you to see!
    Please vote and leave me a little note, I love comments and advice ^^
    Feel free to PM me if you'd like, I love to RP and all that stuff too!