Young Writers Society

Alexei had become Grandfather’s newspaper articles, and I was inventing my own secret language. Except these graffiti words were not being crossed out, but rather added to, the way Kosma added to Sonya, who added to Natalia, who added to me. It was a revelation of sorts, to learn this different technique; to make the world say what it did not say.

Ukraine was a relieving place, not in the sense it was better, but in the simple fact that it was very much not. It rescued my silent hope (that was also fear) for England—the place of fog and umbrellas. The place of angels. The place of coastlines and ocean-filled sleep. The place stars had gazed upon.

The place without The Walls.

“Where do ya think you’re going?” Kosma called from behind, his younger legs stirring up the path dust like the smoke from Alexei’s cigarettes.

Good question. I wasn’t certain if I was living by thoughts anymore. Maybe I never had, and that was precisely why I had been able to escape Russia.

“You’re going the wrong way! The Poland border is to the west.”

Natalia and I slowed to a sheepish stop out front of a damaged building, which looked like a fire had eaten half of it, before diverting its appetite to the apartment lines of St. Petersburg. I took guilty pleasure in that brilliant, flaming imagining—my place to live lighting up with gold again, with the warmth of her again. A burning, golden home among the dull grey.

Kosma soon reached our side, with Sonya scampering not far behind him, her bare feet dirty from gardening the Bosworth Field.

“We need to catch the edgy kid, before his devils catch him first,” I stated matter-of-factly. My heart was racing, and I kept picturing the sunset we’d seen on our beginning walk, when it was only three of us, and understood now that Alexei had graffitied it there—right there in the blue sky—for me to snap photographs of.

He was alive somehow. He had resurrected from his icy pond grave to teach the world a life lesson. Like Jesus, or something of equally distant past. An immortal rebel.

Natalia added to my sentiment. “Show us the way, Kosma,” she ordered, direct and dauntless as ever.

Sonya, on the other hand, seemed lost in the depths of her mind, and I was sure she'd lose her grip on the bread bags she carried. “Devils…” she mumbled, with an expression that held both confusion and insight.

As I had been observing Sonya, Kosma had advanced a few meters ahead of the group. “Well? Are you coming?” he asked, although it was more of an interrogation.

And that was where our second journey commenced, as the four of us traversed the twisted maze of Ukraine’s historical scars and bruises.

And it was in that moment, Inheritor, when I remembered the glass cut on my finger, and realised that it, too, would likely become a scar one day.

You will find that life goes on irrelevant to those scars, and that people make places to live inside of them. That is what the world actually says, when nothing is added or crossed out.

But I have always been an idealist.

The sky had grown dark, but Kosma led us onward long after the sun fell below the horizon. No light shone upon our pale northern skin. Perhaps it was the devils which forced the sun down every night, weighing on him so much he was pushed below. Maybe someday I would be pushed below. Before the sun had gone down entirely, the sky turned a hazy shade of red, and for one spectacular moment, our world was covered in a layer of red. It was beautiful, as though the sky was raining rubies. Or blood.

From beside me, I heard a loud thump, before Natalia cussed. In the dark, I couldn't make out anything, so I grabbed my camera, set it for flash, and took a picture, revealing Natalia on the ground, and the corner of a building in front of her. I did a mental facepalm, realizing what had occurred.

Kosma had long since figured out what she had done, also doing a facepalm, but not mentally. "I swear, you people are hopeless. It's like you've never been in a city."

"That would be because we haven't," Sonya responded pointedly, clearly annoyed by the arrogant boy who they had, for some reason, hired as a guide.

"Well, it's pretty self explanatory. Don't walk into buildings, and you'll probably be fine."

Natalia groaned. "Maybe that would be easier if we could see the buildings."

"How about we stop and find a place to sleep? There's no point in pushing onwards when we can't even see where we're going," I both suggested and demanded simultaneously.

"I can see," Kosma bragged. "Besides, your friend will get further ahead of us if we take a rest."

"But he won't be traveling in the dark either. We're stopping to rest, and that's final."

Kosma just grunted before turning and leading them into a back alley. At the end of it was a crevice with a jagged rock roof and an unlit lantern. Kosma lit it, but without letting us see how he did so. He silently layed on the cold stone ground, immediately falling into a deep slumber. I glanced at Sonya, who shrugged and also plopped to the ground, falling asleep shortly thereafter.

Natalia and I sat alone in the light of the lantern, too weary to talk but too energetic to sleep. Finally, I broke the silence by asking how her nose felt, pointing out how hard she had it.

She rubbed the red skin on it slowly, wincing at the feeling.

She concluded the poetry, smiling.

"Who wrote that one?" I asked curiously.

"I did. While we were up on the roof of my house, watching the stars."

"Ah. I think it's a beautiful. Though I'm a little hurt that you were writing poetry instead of enjoying the moment with me," I teased, grinning.

She sighed contentedly and rested her head on my shoulder. I wrapped my arm around her side, and we sat silently, watching the lantern flicker. Her eyes lit up, shining beautifully, and her hair reflected the light as though it was the moon. She gave off an eerie glow, but in the setting, it only made her appear more perfect than I thought was possible.

"I can't wait to reach England," she muttered groggily.

"I can't either. Maybe when we arrive, we can-" I stopped, feeling the rhythmic beating of her heart. Her eyes were closed, and she was definitely sound asleep.

I watched the lantern alone for the rest of night, unable to sleep. The world around was silent, and so was I. Admiring the quiet peace silence could give to a troubled self, I was interrupted by rushed footsteps outside.

"Volody!" A familiar voice called from outside the crevice. It was most definitely Alexei.

Surprised, I tried to get up, but by then, Natalia had her arms and her head draped over my side. To get up would be to wake her. And besides, I convinced myself Alexei was only a figment of my imagination, in this instance.

It wasn't until the next morning, when I found a half-empty pack of the same cigarettes Alexei smoked in the alley, that I realized perhaps I wasn't imagining things.

The following memory is allocated
in the space docking the bridge
between calamities. Please see references.

"Ser."

"Vecher."

"Zaklyuchennyy, kak prosili."

"Spasibo, Mayklson."

The camera flickers on to show a white room where a young man with long black hair is hung up by his arms and ankles, water dripping from his dipping points. A man you recognize approaches the young man and brings a gloved hand across his face, sending his head tumbling to the side.

It is then that you notice that his body is covered in scars of bullet wounds. Slowly, he stirs and expels blood and refuse from his mouth.

The man speaks in Russian too low for the audio to catch, and then he projects a photo of me. You. Us. on the wall. The young man looks away.

Familiar man takes this well and retrieves a syringe from his kit off camera, shoving it in the back of the neck of the young man. He screams. He fights. A man shoots the young man in the head, and immediately the room is flooded.

Weeks had passed, congealed and frozen tartly into months that passed like ichorous melancholy from the boughs of the trees all about. Fifteen meters to the northeast were the barbed sandbags of the Ukrainian militant border.

Thirty yards to the southwest were the razor-topped mortar and brick walls concealing England in its fog and tea times. In the snow, Volody's stomach growled. Just one mile, he estimated, remained between him and the border of Broken Japan.

And here's where things became difficult for him to process. When their guide had led them to Russian territory, when Alexei had left him goods at their campsite, his faith in the ordeal had redoubled.

He had faith in someone helping him once more, and so while his father worked, he had returned to Dadushka Nikolas on his balcony--alone, but with Natalia.

"Volody, you have impressed me by dying in such a way that I cannot write your poem," he said.

Natalia was concerned. "I do not understand."

Volody shook his head. "Truants to the Oligarch do not receive media coverage when dead...or gone." He held his moment. "Dadushka, does this mean I am unknown?"

"Yet by three, my golden sun. Is that not enough to be known in this world?"

Volody's gaze fixated and trembled. "Whoever could be the third?"

Nikolas took his time to smile and drink his coffee. "Another dead man, of course."

"Who could kill such a love?"

"Only a man who has lost such a love could take that of another."

Volody's face lost color. "Papa."


And Volody's stomach had lost its appetite, its starvation for all but Alexei. Despite all logic, despite all words of surrender from his friends--he could feel something faint behind his heart: the beating of another's.

We had arrived at the border to Broken Japan, Natalia, Sonya, Kosma, and myself. Now, my kin, my blood, my inheritor, this is the part of the story which I have dreaded sharing with you. Throughout my journey, many terrible things happened. Things I cannot forget if I try. But this was the first major tragedy I had faced, and it was completely avoidable, had I not been so rash. Let this story be a lesson to you, a lesson teaching against actions without thought.

“The border’s just over this hill,” Kosma said casually, nodding his head the mound of soil and grass before us. “There’s going to be plenty of Japanese agents patrolling it.” Natalia opened her mouth, but Kosma knew what she would ask. “I’m sure. Broken Japan’s paranoid as hell about outside influence, understandably so when you look at what happened to them. And they’re still getting used to sharing borders with other countries. There will be guards, and they’ll have guns.”

Sonya pondered the issue before looking to the right, her eyes tracing the pathway we had followed without question up until now. “Isn’t there another way into Japan? There has to be some place we can get in without being spotted by guards.”

Kosma rolled his eyes. “Good lord, you people are persistent. Yeah, I guess we could go under the trans-border bridge. They infrequently patrol the banks of the river, because no idiot would ever attempt to swim across it. Your wonderful selves excluded, of course. We’ll have to walk another few hours, and once we make it to the bridge, we would have to wait until sundown to cross when no guards are present.”

“Doesn’t sound like we have much of a choice. Well, it’s noon now,” I said with a glance at the sky. It was cloudy, but I could see the sun bleed through in an especially thin layer of clouds, directly overhead. “We should get a move on.”

Our crew of four troubled, lonely souls began to make our way across the bare grasslands of the Ukrainian-Broken Japan border. As we walked, the sun lowered in the sky, and while we had made it to the bank of the river, it became clear to us that we would not reach the trans-border bridge by sundown. Finally I voiced everyone’s worries. “We won’t make it in time,” I said.

“He’s right,” Natalia commented.

“Kosma, are you positive that the border patrol only breaks at sundown?” Sonya asked. “You’re a Ukrainian merchant, not a Japanese border patroller. How can we be sure you’re remembering this right?”

“You hear a lot when you work on the streets. And I’ve got a photographic memory. It has yet to fail me. Listen, we don’t have many options. We can try and make it to the bridge by sundown, or we wait till dark and cross the river here.”

“Couldn’t we just wait at the bridge until tomorrow evening?” Natalia suggested.

Kosma sighed. “You couldn’t have chosen a worse time to cross the border. The bridge is closed for maintenance from tomorrow morning until next month.”

“We could always camp it out, to be safe,” Sonya pointed out.

“That’s a long wait. Besides, we’ll lose Alexei if we wait. I’m sure he’s already in Broken Japan by now,” I said with a glance at the temporarily unoccupied portion of the boder.

“Then what do you suggest?”

I hesitated before answering. “I say we cross it now. It looks like there’s an inconsistency in the patrol. Let’s take advantage of it.”

Kosma shrugged. “If that’s what you choose. Anyway, I’m not stupid enough to do this with you, so if you don’t mind, I’ll be heading back to my store. Good bye, and good luck. Heavens, you’ll need it.” He turned and walked away without waiting for a response. I tried to call out for him to come back, but the words didn’t come out. He didn’t look back, and kept his head low.

“Well, let’s get a move on. Now’s our chance,” Sonya said after a moment of silence. She led us down to the river, where she silently slid in and swam across the river. Natalia followed her, and they had no trouble. I followed without hesitation.

About halfway across the river, when the water was deepest and my camera was closest to the dark water., a large wave slammed into my arm. The camera was sent into the churning river. Alarmed, I struggled to reach it, but it was moving much faster than I could.

“V, what are you doing?” Natalia hissed.

“We’ve got company!” Sonya announced, staring nervously down the river. Two new guards were marching toward us, but they didn’t see us yet.

The camera was swept under the water, and I could no longer see it. Sadly, I turned away from my lost treasure and made it to the shore. Natalia pulled me out, and we turned to Sonya so the three of us could make a getaway, but she wasn’t beside us. Instead she had ran up to thee guards, throwing stones and other small objects at them to distract them. I approached her, but Natalia pulled me back. She dragged us to the small forest just past the border, where we remained hidden. After several minutes, a gunshot rang out. Sonya did not arrive at our clearing in the forest.

I’m not sure how long we were there, me and Natalia. We had been crying into each other’s arms since we had heard the gunshot, but I silenced her as we heard footsteps. They closed in on us, and through the bushes emerged Kosma. He was holding my camera.

“Found this washed up on the bank. Thought I should return it,” he said simply, not noticing our mood. “I never went back to the store. Figured if you survived this that you’d need a guide to get you across Japan. Hey, where’s Sonya?”

Once again we burst into tears.

Broken did no justice to describe the small isolationist colony of Kyoto. Once, before territorial disputes over resources, this land had all belonged to the wonderful and honorable Japanese people, but as I understood our host at the small recon bar, where information on England and Ukraine was traded for goods and services--even luxuries--the Sanctuary had relocated the Japanese to another sector entirely, cutting these stragglers off from their families.

I thought about being cut off from my family, and how it worked out in a manner of words, especially over time. First, my sunlight had been taken, reserved to photographs. And Babushka...how she had fled; but I knew she yet lived for the papers had given grandfather a poem to write of her.

Late that night, I lay in a cot thinking of these things. Beneath the cots were hot coals, and it had stirred me to recall the heat of home where my devils were being named. I remembered the tears and fruitless anger. And I remembered Papa, he who would kill the sun of vengeance.

Kosma, in the cot beside me, rolled and questioned me. "Why do you cry, Volody? We are at last safe."

I shook my head, allowing streaks of tears to fall onto coals and simmer. "These are not tears, Kosma. This is Eridanus, the path of souls; I hope only for him to visit me tonight." A pause.

"And Sonya, too."

Dirge

I walked through the streets of Broken Japan that night, and I did not care if I lived or died.

Sonya was...gone (I could not say it, I would not say it). Our journey felt like a failure because of that. She saved my life from The Richard; she helped me escape St. Petersburg. I knew her only when she was running, and I hoped that, in some distant world or place, she was still running. Running for someone, something, her Alexei in the stars. And I wanted to run with her too, except my own Alexei lived, and I yet had two friends who needed another hand to guide them through this confusing and hopeless little world of Broken Japan, even if that hand was itself lost.

They would be mad at me, I knew as I slipped out of the hotel when the crescent moon was at its highest. But I could not sleep - Sonya left while helping to complete our journey, and so I could think of nothing else but finding Alexei. I stole a pair of muddy boots from the steps of a neighboring house and tromped through the empty streets of Broken Japan. Few of the lamplights worked, and those that did cast off an eerie yellow glow that contrasted with the light of the moon. The bags under my eyes seemed to swell in the shadows, and my face took on deathly and pallid shades.

Yes, I knew the dangers. I had been told Broken Japan had long ago been abandoned, left for the maggots to gnaw at the innocents. I could feel the little slits of eyes poking from distant alleyways, see the flecks of blood on the ground outside shattered windows and splintered doors. But I could also feel that Alexei had left his mark on the city, and that I would happily handle the knives and shards of glass and ravenous jaws of the land's underbelly to see his beautiful face again.

It wasn't long before I found the first one. There was a flashlight outside of a narrow alleyway, soaked in mud, and I picked it up gingerly. When I turned it on, and pointed down the alley, I could see the image of a phoenix rising above the array of cardboard boxes that nudged up against the wall. Around that design was written, "One dies a thousand times before he reaches Heaven." I was tempted to come closer and see how fresh the writing was, but the rustling of a sleeping man in the boxes frightened me, and I fled, though never loosening my white-knuckled grip on the flashlight.

And I, still a frightened child, cried as I ran past the battered homes. Clouds came from the east, obscuring part of the moon and forcing me to point the flashlight ahead of me, capturing the ghastly images of rubble and the few growing trees fighting for dominance in this former city. He was here, and I feared I could not find him. He was here, and I feared that he would leave once again, and her death (I could say it, I would say it, I had no choice but to say it) would be for nothing, and we would be abandoned again. We were walking on a minefield, and it had already taken her, and it could take any of us.

I was so infinitely scared of the world, looming over my head in its giant wave.



That night, I found a second image. It was not far from the withered city walls, across the street from where I spent an hour curled up in a ball on a rough bedframe in the second floor of a former apartment building, praying that my time in this city had not been a waste, and that I would not be consumed by endless needs (food, water, companionship, safety, home, family, security, peace of mind), many of which I lacked. When I was at last calm, and had the strength to move my weary bones, I rose and stood by what was once a window. My darkness-adjusted eyes caught something, and I pointed my flashlight towards it, the light running into the face of a neighboring old parking garage. The silhouette of a man standing beneath a balcony held a flag in one hand and flashed a peace sign in the other. "The flesh is nothing like the idea," it said on the balcony.

Surprised, some distant suspicion nagging at my mind, I looked below and saw an empty paint can.



The sunrise caught me heading back to the hotel. I was disconsolate, because my body told me that he had again eluded me, and my efforts were for nothing. I did not bring the paint can with me, as it was not him; I had nestled it in the bedframe on which I had rested before I had wrapped myself in a torrent of emotions that burned through the night, and lay in a collapsed heap now. And I could see Kosma and Natalia coming out, and they looked more alarmed than angry.

Alexei, I thought into the abyss of my mind as I fell into Natalia's arms and cried, where else have we to go? You are the flesh and the idea alike, and we cannot stay here to rot. We will search for you. I will search for you. Please guide us to you.

Please guide us to our home, wherever it may be.

The More Fortunate Hour

I left in the afternoon.

Natalia thought that I was going to the markets of Broken Japan to use our paltry sum of cash and buy some food. And I did go to the markets, and I did buy something. A camera, of some old make that I couldn't recognize (so worn down it had been by age, that the camera looked more like a misshapen pile of metal surrounding a surprisingly intact lens). That lens proved useful in swapping out the damaged one on my original camera, which took me only a half-hour (good for someone without much experience with technology). But I had no interest in food; for him, I would have sacrificed everything else that made me happy. Besides, in buying the camera, I spent almost all of our cash. I reasoned that I could find some more lying about in the abandoned houses that littered Broken Japan (perhaps hidden out of fear they would be stolen, which was not far from the truth). Which is what I tried to do.

I needed to find Alexei, but the camera would correct the impurities in my eyes by photographing his masterpieces. That contented me somewhat. In the hours that passed, however, my eyes lingered more towards the west with each second that I spent wandering Broken Japan for money. He was there. Every bone in my body told me that I could find him beyond the broken walls of the city, making nature into his canvas. And this, dear inheritor, is the reason that I did not tell Natalia the truth. She would never let me leave, not when I could be killed in the wilds that had already taken Sonya.

But I spent too much time with a war in my head. It caused me to trip over cracks in the earth, fling me against tree branches, bloody my face and eat at my clothes. I needed to see Alexei, talk to him, touch him. I couldn't run to him without the others. Alexei could leave at any time, and the others would never join me. Natalia would never stay with me if I abandoned her like this. Natalia was a dear friend. Alexei was, was...

By the end of that hour I had vaulted over the shortest section of wall on the west side of the city. Nature, as though expecting me, had made my travel that much easier - the soldiers scattered about (and here I pitied them, because they were protecting a dying city, and perhaps were only inexperienced and desperate) were lost among the trees and grass that coated the area. I could slip among them without being noticed, if I moved slowly enough and paid attention to every odd noise.

At a certain distance, all stayed quiet - was it too early, or were there any birds left? There were no orders, or the sounds of boots stomping on the earth, or the glimmer of bayonets in the morning light. I stood up and walked. Part of me wondered if perhaps there had been too few soldiers spread too thin around Broken Japan. That made me all the more bitter, on realizing that we had stumbled upon one of the most active and dangerous areas in an otherwise tranquil place. Even if that route had been among the few ways to get into the area.

My camera at the ready, I searched. Bones and muscles quivered, making my steps unsteady. He was here. If I knew nothing else in this wide world, it was that he was here, and I had to find him.

Light filtered in weak strands between the thick layers of trees (Mother Nature's answer to Broken Japan, and the purification of the latter) while I ducked under massive branches. A wind blew from the north, gently scattering the leaves that I plucked from trees. I sniffed the air, but could not catch any hints of spray paint. As expected.

Each step only made my heartrate pick up. He was here. My energy wasn't sustainable, and I knew that; I could feel my legs buckle, and I had to hold onto a tree with the hand that did not hold the camera. I could collapse soon, too caught up in the frenzy of my own desperation. And the soldiers could find me, and that would, that would, Natalia would...I didn't concern myself with that. He was here.

I nearly fainted once. On walking around a tree, I found something at my feet. It was something made of straw. Crouching, I pulled out my camera and snapped a few pictures. It took some time for my heart to quell enough, whereupon I realized the object was an Oni stick weaving. My heart had realized only thing beforehand. He was here. Heartbeats echoed the phrase, and brought that sentence to life again and again as I looked and saw the weavings beneath many of the neighboring trees.

A rustle in the grass. He was here.

I stood up, turned around, and saw him between two of the tallest trees in the space. He looked pale, but in an almost angelic way. The bags under his eyes, the bundle of straw in his hands, the faint smile on his face – I absorbed all of them. “Alexei, is that really you?” I whispered, pinching myself on the arm.

He nodded. “You still have a ways to go, my friend. Cigarette?” His arms never moved from his hoodie pockets.

Alexei began to recede into the woods. He didn’t seem to be moving, but the trees started to hide his beatific face.

I panicked. “Alexei!” I screamed, as I ran after him, closing the distance. Before he could even begin to turn away, I embraced him and, without thought or any other emotion but love, kissed him.

*****

I woke in the woods. The pinks and reds of sunset painted the trees. I supposed he had made nature his canvas, for me.

It was hard for me to grasp, having the world painted over for me; but the vibrancy of Alexei's strokes had awoken a thrill in me that I believed was novel to the world.

I laid there, you know, until Natalia found me. And it took her into the next night to do so. She told me she'd been searching the whole time, and why are your eyes dilated, and here are your hands, but they're frosty; and here let me put this jacket on you; and why didn't you return to the hostel; and don't tell me it was him. As you do.

"He loves me, Natalia...a love jealous and drowned in stupor."

"You're fucking delirious, Volody. We've got to get you to a doctor."

But his lips were so gentle when they pushed back that it numbed their archaic medicine, their needle prods and boiling water. The way the Japanese men spoke slowed down into an unknown slug-tongue, and as I laughed, they became vividly-colored as well.

There was nowhere his brush could not reach, and this thrilled me. Or it did until my jailer arrived to shackle me down with his worries.

Here was the 'are you a goddamned idiot' and the 'are you trying to die out here or what' but I did not expect this: "You broke our hearts, V. We thought the worst had come of you..."

Volody groggily tilted his head. "When can I see him again? When are we going back to Russia? He--He told me that men were leaving on ships before the next calamity. Can we go see them?"

That night? As I slept with a fever of 104.9*F, Natalia stole a motorcycle from a darkened apartment garage, and having loaded me into the side car covered in blankets, we took off into the snowy black and white night. On my whim, we were returning to Russia.