Young Writers Society

No one knows how Kemp got here, and no one cares enough to know. It's round and green, and a great sandstorm whips around it, as if it's trapped in a snow globe. 

But there's no glass to contain our town, and sometimes, I go with Ryan and his friends down to the edge and put my hand out into the storm. It stings and kinda itches, like bees were stinging you, and Ryan always makes sure he's the one with his hand out there the longest. When he pulls his hand back, he has to make sure his momma don't see because she'd tan him if she knew he'd been skinning his hand out in the storm. Like she didn't do it when she was our age.

The grass goes right up to the edge of town, bright green and soft to roll in. I always thought it was weird that it did that, but I don't know if anyone else did. Maybe they just don't talk about it very much.

No one talks about the tower, neither. It stands in the exact middle of town, and it's made of metal, I think. It's duller than you'd expect, (if it is made of metal) except for the top, which is a big ball that sits on top and glows with gentle light down on the town during the day, and lets the shadow of the sandstorm cast darkness at night.

My momma told me never to climb the tower. She told me about Robbie Thornton, and how he climbed it but slipped and fell because it gets cold and icy at night, and broke all the bones in his body. She said it looks pretty, but it's not there for us to play on.

I asked her what it was really for, but I don't think she ever gave me a good answer. She told me to stop worrying about things that a little girl don't need to worry about, so I stopped asking her about it.

I can't stop thinking about that tower now, though. I doodle it on my homework, and my teachers lecture me, and Robbie Thornton always comes up in conversation.

“Ryan,” I says one day, “do you think they made up Robbie Thornton?”

He's busy climbing Mrs. Borges' apple tree, trying to get our kite, which had got stuck. “What're you asking about Robbie for, Katy?”

I squint up at him as I clean my glasses on my t-shirt. “I dunno, I just kinda want to climb the tower.”

He wrestles the kite out of the branches and sends it floating down, its red and yellow tail coiling in a pile on the ground like a snake.

“You'll get in a lotta trouble if you get caught,” he warns, scraping his palms on the bark as he slides down the trunk. “Besides,” he says, “don't seem like much fun anyway.”

It's hard to explain my curiosity. “But Ryan, what if there's something great up there? Like what if we can see beyond the storm? Or what if there's a plane, like Mrs. Borges talks about sometimes?”

“Mrs. Borges' stories don't mean a thing, Katy. She makes nice pies, but she's senile. Machines can't make you fly.” He begins to walk away, but I catch him by his overall straps.

“But no one will know if no one will go up there.”

“You're gonna break your neck if you go up there, Katy Finch.”

“I'm gonna do it,” I says, all puffed up like a songbird when it's chilly.

Ryan turns, then looks around, like he's about to cuss or something. “I ain't gonna let you go by yourself, but mark that I am not going because I want to, but because–” his mouth is a thin line. “Well, I don't know, but I gotta go with you.” His face is a little red, and I remember seven months previous, him being the same kinda red when we played spin the bottle at my 12th birthday party.

I'm a little surprised, and my eyes get all big before Ryan says, “you wanna climb it tonight?”

“I guess so,” I says, and he tells me he'll meet me after dinner at the base of the tower.

It's Saturday, and just after lunch, and he leaves to go swimming in the quarry down by the farm equipment sheds with his other friends while I gotta chase down Henry the dog and give him a bath. Momma says he's been skunked, and since he sleeps in my room, she says I “would find it valuable and in my interests to get him smelling nice” before I go to bed tonight, and though I know I won't be sleeping much, I do it anyway. He is not happy about the situation, and since he is a big dog, I gotta bathe my muddied up self before I eat dinner.

Dinner is beef stroganoff, and I thank momma for it because she knows it's my favorite and she don't always have the beef for it unless my uncle lets us have some of his beef from one of his cows that he slaughtered. I know she'd rather freeze it for something more fancy, too, so I thank her twice.

I realize over dinner that I love my momma, and my pa, too, and even stinky Henry the dog, and I knew that at least Henry would be very upset if I didn't come home after tonight.

So before I leave I wash the dishes, and make sure to kiss momma on the cheek, who is mending pa's sock, and I kiss pa, too, who jumps and burns his finger trying to light his cigar out on the porch. “What'd you do that for?” He yells as I scamper off into the moving shadows cast by the howling of the wind outside our little town.

I'm nervous, and I make sure that no one sees me as I make my way closer to the tower, even making sure to steer clear of Mr. Duncan's big picture windows because he likes to stay up late and drink a whiskey before he sleeps.

Ryan is waiting at the base of the ladder when I get there, wearing thick gloves and a scarf even though it is summer. “Why're you so dressed up?” I ask.

“Whenever they talk about Robbie Thornton, they always says his body was frozen solid when they found him.”

“Do you really think that's true, Ryan?” I says, letting my sarcasm into my voice.

Ryan shrugs, and I let him be. He's nervous, too, I can tell.

I start up the ladder first because after all, it's my idea, and I want to be the first to see what's ahead, and Ryan don't seem to mind coming up behind me. I wear pants, and goggles to cover up my glasses, in case they are blown away in the wind.

I'm glad I'm wearing pants, and I regret teasing Ryan because I know he is warmer than I am but I can't show him how cold I am now, so I speed my way up the ladder, hoping to get this over with so I can curl up with Henry.

We're high enough now that anyone could look out their window and see us, two little ants climbing the tower

Soon it's even colder, and my breath is leaving my mouth in little clouds. It don't get this cold on the ground, usually, but we're pretty high up now, and we still have halfway to go.

Twisting around, I look back to Ryan for a moment and see that he is lagging behind. “Hurry up, slowpoke,” I says, but he don't hear me, I think. He don't hurry at all, and I don't wait for him, neither.

My fingers are getting numb, almost like when you leave your hand out in the sandstorm for a little too long. The rungs of the ladder get more rusty as we go on, and sometimes they are so rusted that parts of them poke jaggedly into my palms.

Looking up, I can see we're near the top, and I look back down at Ryan, small beneath me. Above me, it looks like there's a deck around the bottom of the base, made of a metal grid, like the walls of a small animal trap.

I pull myself onto it, and sit down, glad to not have to use my arms to get me anywhere for a moment. Patiently, or as patiently as I can, staring at the giant sphere before me, I wait for Ryan to arrive.

I wait, and I keep waiting, but I've been waiting for a long time now, and I look down the ladder to see if I can see where he is. He's down there, but not moving up, and I think I can hear him wailing. I always thought he was a better climber than I am, but he must be even more tired than me. So I yell down to him things that I know will make him come up, that I believe in him, and I think he hears me because he looks up and reaches with a shaking hand to grab the next rung, but he misses, and I can barely think about what happens next.

Ryan's sneakers slip off the rung, and he holds on for one hand. I scream, and I can hear him screaming, too, his scarf blowing away in the wind and fluttering down to the ground like our kite, hundreds of times before, red and gold and proud, but this is not happy, this is terrifying.

I can't look when he finally loses the ladder rung, the noise of him rushing towards earth enough to make me imagine a horrible crack of bones as he hits the packed dirt at the bottom, but I know that I can't hear that from up here.

There is a terrible nothingness as I sit here, and I cry because I know he didn't want to come, but he did it for me. All I can think about is our kite and putting our hands out in the sandstorm and the way his sneakers got all grass stained from running around in the summer.

And here I am, at the edge of the world, alone.

So I get up and I know I have to look at the sphere before I go back down and face it, Ryan down there all cold and broken.

Even though I'm up so high, the sandstorm is still all around, so thick that you can't see anything through it. So I look at the sphere instead, still shivering and crying.

It's seamless and black, a little shinier than the rest of the tower, but it don't have any doors or anything like that, so I touch it.

Underneath my hand, the material ripples, like when you throw a leaf on a pond's surface. It don't feel wet, but it feels soft, so I push, and my hand goes right through. So I put my body through.

Inside, all is dark. I stand for a moment, hoping that my eyes will adjust, but there's no light source. I hold my arms out in front of me and step forward. The soft tapping of my shoes on a hard floor echo a little, as if something soft is eating the sound. The darkness smells too clean, like the doctor's office far below me, but mechanical, too, like the oily smell of my pa's tractor shed.

I go on, finding nothing with my fingers, and then, there's a voice. It's a rasp more than a voice, like a throat scoured by cigarettes. I can't hear what it says at first, and I spin around, keeping my hands out, scared.

“Hello, Katy, it's nice to finally meet you,” it says.

And then the lights come on. The floor is made of huge tiles, chipped in places, and the ceiling is domed, but made up of a huge machine that works so smoothly that there is no noise. The sides of the sphere are clear, and I can see outside to the sandstorm raging around Kemp.

But what catches me most is the source of the sandpaper voice. Opposite where I enter the sphere, on a clean white bed, there's a person. The eyes are almost hidden under all the wrinkles, and her arms and legs are little more than bones covered in dark, weather beaten skin.

Around the bed, there's a strange ring, black and bristling with dials and machines, connected in back by pulleys and chains to the machine on the ceiling.

“Do not stare, come forth,” the old woman says. Her mouth don't move at all with her words.

I come closer, but I'm scared still, and shaken up, so I do it slowly. “You are right to hesitate,” the rasp says. I don't come any closer.

“Who are you?” I ask, sniffling.

“My name is Kemp.” She takes a long, rattling breath. “I lived here before your town existed.”

“I don't know if there was a time before my town,” I says.

“Katy, I made your town. I created it from the image in the minds of your ancestors.”

I blink, and I sit down on the tiles. They're hard and cold. “I don't know if I believe you.”

“What you see here is how I created Kemp, and how it remains green and full of life. My love came to this place, crash landed in a plane, and I created the town for him. And I love all the people in the town-- they are descended from my love,” Kemp says, the roughness of her voice growing softer for a moment.

“And now and again, someone else must take the place of the previous person. Do you think Robbie Thornton made the journey alone? One doesn't make it, and the other becomes me. You will be here one day, facing another young one like you, and tell her the same things I'm telling you.”

“But why?” I says, my eyes all big.

“My soul powers the town. There must be a body to sustain the my soul. But this body is wearing thin. I must sustain the town. This is why you are here.” Kemp paused, swallowed. “I planted curiosity in you. Led you here to take my place.”

I can't breathe, and I jump up. “No,” I says. “I gotta go back down, to do things! This is only a visit!”

“But Katy,” Kemp says, “don't you want this? You'll see everything. You'll have control of what happens in the town. You'll be a god, Katy. I need you to do this.”

“No,” I says again.

“If you refuse, your town will cease to exist. The storm will raze the buildings, ruin the fields. Your parents, your friends, they cannot live in the endless sand. They will die.”

That makes me think. I think of the freedom I have, of the wind in my hair as I bike around the town, the green of the grass, how I never really kissed someone before, how I don't listen to my teachers closely enough, the warmth of my bed. My momma and pa and Henry. Ryan and our friends.

“I have to,” I gasp, my tears warm on my cheeks. If don't do this, Ryan would not be the only one to die.

Kemp sighs. It's a satisfied sigh, like someone falling into bed after a long day's work. “You must carry me out of this circle,” Kemp says. “I will die soon after, and you must lie down on this bed.”

I feel heavy when I step over the black circle. There's a pleasant warmth, like sunlight on a fall afternoon, and the smell of orange peels and cinnamon, erasing my doubts.

Kemp is easy to lift, almost too easy, as if she has hollow bones. I cradle the ancient woman's head like a newborn's, and Kemp stares up at me with brown eyes. “You must not step outside the circle when I leave it,” Kemp rasps.

I bend over the outside of the circle. “Thank you,” the ancient being rasps. As soon as I put the withered human on the tile outside the black circle, the skin crumbles to dust, leaving a faint residue on my hands as I jump back from the pile of powder that just a second ago spoke to me.

I brush my hands off on my pants fast, I realize that I am alone. There is nothing left to do but lie down on the bed.

But I'm thinking that this is the last chance I have to change my mind. I look at the black circle, and wonder. Is Kemp telling the truth? There's one way to find out.

I step out of the circle.

The gears on the ceiling make a horrible screeching noise as they turn to rust right in front of my eyes, and I can see the sandstorm entering the air around the town where it had never been before. Shingles fly through the air, and it becomes dense with sand. If my hand hurt after a second out there, I don't know what a whole body feels like in that storm.

I step back inside the circle and cry. Kemp was telling the truth.

The gears start to move again with a soft clicking, and the storm goes back to where it belongs.

The bed isn't very cozy looking, but it is neat, and I take off my shoes, and then my glasses, as I become sleepy, too sleepy to keep my eyes open.

I close my eyes, and I am a tunnel of light that everyone passes through. I am the air, the storm, the brilliant grass. I can change anything, the people, the plants, I can even build a plane and send it soaring. But I do not want to–– Kemp's spirit falls into my body like snow, and it don't hurt at all. I am here, forgotten, a peaceful god above the desert.