I'm not sure whether it is truly Sci-fi, but it's set in the future!
Jared reared his head up, giving a cursory sniff. His hair seemed to have exploded on his head, fine lines of dark thick bangs pointing upwards, downwards, to the side. He ran a hand through it quickly, but it did little to alleviate the effects of bed-head. His skin was creamy in the early morning light, buffed by a night of rolling around in only his boxers. The sun angling in through the gap in the curtains sliced through the sleeping-pill bottle on his bedside, pasting an orange square onto the back of his hand. Jared rubbed at it numbly. He’d woken up blind and cold; blind because of the pillow draped over his face, and cold because he hadn’t closed the window before the pills had kicked in.
He also had the feeling he was meant to be somewhere else.
The phone chirruped close by, Jared’s early-morning brain startled to overdrive. He threw himself over the edge of the bed and caught the blue plastic receiver. He rested his head on the carpet, legs splayed across the mattress above him, and answered with a sleepy ‘Hello?’
“Jared, I’m having a crisis,”
Jared smiled lazily. He patted his head and was glad to feel the loose curls slowly starting to settle to normality.
“Oh yeah? What kind of crisis Reuben?”
Jared loved it when his brother Reuben had ‘a crisis’. A financial crisis, a work crisis, a relationship crisis, a family crisis, an intellectual crisis, a spiritual crisis….Jared had to admit that he had a few favourites amongst the vast spectrum.
“What the hell? Jared, where are you, haven’t you heard the news? We’re all having a crisis this morning!”
Ah. That was where he was meant to be.
“Dammit,” he hissed.
“Oh Jared, you forgot to go to the news stands again didn’t you?”
Jared rolled onto his back and furled his legs off the bed, crumpling into a small heap with the phone still jammed against his ear.
“No. No, I didn’t. But look Reuben I’ve got to go, you can tell me about the crisis later,”
“Jared-”
Jared slammed down the phone and launched himself at a shirt. After a moment of searching, he found a pair of jeans and jumped into them as quick as he could manage without breaking anything too serious. He hurried into the kitchen, to the front door, and tumbled out onto the stairs. Barefoot, he shot down the chunks of concrete that made up Tennant Building’s main staircase. When he reached the splintered glass of the foyer’s main doors, he had just about got his shirt buttoned up, and was attempting to flatten his hair.
The air was as it always was this time of year; thick, heat swelling every inch so that breathing it in made bruises on your lungs and in your throat. The crowd outside was immense, as it was every Saturday morning. The crudely constructed stage was rickety with age and the weight of the Criers, stood atop with rolls of paper in hand and megaphones in the other. Jared checked the time on his watch. 10:42. He’d missed forty minutes already, and he could tell that whatever crisis Reuben had been going on about he hadn’t been exaggerating. The tense atmosphere of the crowd was hard to miss, mixing with the heat to bring a fine line of sweat to Jared’s hairline. He moved barefoot to the crowd until he found a familiar face.
“Hey. What’ve I missed?”
Calvin looked at him, puzzled, from under the shade his hand was providing for his eyes.
“You missed the headlines again?”
“Christ you sound like my brother,” Jared grumbled, shouldering his way in between Calvin and a lad he knew only as ‘Brick’, “I was working yesterday evening, alright? So I didn’t get to sleep ‘til late last night,”
“I heard you were working. Whenever you hit the streets everybody hears about it,”
“Yeah, yeah, I bet. Now tell me the headlines,”
“Well America are saying they’re not going to hold up on the ‘Prohibitions of Dangerous Peoples’ law, or whatever the hell its called. Germany however have voted it in, thanks to all that propaganda ,”
“What are we saying?”
Calvin paused for a moment, regarding Jared with a careful eye, “You know they were voting on this last night, don’t you?”
Jared nodded, feeling cold all of a sudden, “Yeah. I heard. We all did. I thought we were safe though. Why? What’s happened?”
Calvin screwed up his lips and sighed, “It’s gone through. It’s been voted in. You’re officially illegal,”
Jared turned his head to the stage, feeling the breath being sucked slowly out of him. The left wings reporters looked very small, despite the volume of the megaphones in their hands. They screeched about the human rights to the sound of a discontent and sweating crowd, their own faces red with the sun and the outrage. The more right wing reporters murmured smugly into their own megaphones, taunting their angered opponents, laughing with any of the crowd who were on their side.
Ever since TVs had gone out after the first of the Electrical Storm five years ago, Jared had come to hating watching the news. It involved a) getting up early every Saturday morning, b) wondering who he was meant to believe as he listened to the varied speakers on the stage, c) discussing politics with his brother directly after the announcements and d) the awkwardness of hearing disastrous news in the middle of the crowd. Jared knew that certain people around him were watching him, laughing at his misfortune, deciding his fate up in their heads. Others blanked him, others looked as desperate as he did. He hid in his face in the shadows of everybody’s backs and wound his way out of the crowd. The group thinned off eventually and he was soon free to scuff his way along Coarser’s Avenue.
Fader’s Bookshop was a massive hunk of cooperate business in the middle of one of the more well-to-do parts of town, and Jared found himself – as he did every Saturday morning – walking barefoot through the front doors and being blasted with the sweet cool power of the over-hyped air conditioning. He slouched down to the English Literature and Philosophy department, and stood in front of the information desk with his hands in his pockets.
“Hey Reuben,” he said, breaking up his brother’s banter. He’d been discussing something Jared never hoped to understand with his colleague Robin Brown. She had cascaded blonde hair and the eyes of a fawn: pretty enough to make average-looking men fall tragically in love with her, but strange enough to make the men she’d choose to chat up leave her with a fake six-digit phone number.
“Jared!” Reuben cried with surprise. Instead of berating the boy for trudging dust and sand in from outside, he clutched the books he’d been organising on his lap and bit his lip.
“You alright?”
“Well I was, until I saw the news,”
“It’ll be fine, both of you,” Robin insisted, rearranging her hair and squeezing Reuben’s arm, “Absolutely fine,”
“Oh, thank you,” Jared murmured. He picked up one of the books the pair had been cataloguing and flicked through lazily, “Does this say anything about the utter pile of crap that is life?”
Reuben snatched the book away and slapped it on top of the towering pile on his lap, “It’s a collection of Dostoyevsky’s best works…of course it does,”
Jared sighed and started to bite at the corner of a fingernail, “So what do we do now?” he asked, finger still jammed to his mouth, “How are we going to convince everyone we’re good enough to stay? You’ve only had this job for a year and are the legal guardian of a jobless younger brother who is medicated to his eyeballs by the healthy service. They’re not going to like that,”
“They can’t send us back,” Reuben said levelly, eyeing the coffee machine they’d set out for the early morning Book Group, “Look, we’ll get around it somehow, Ok, Jared? Now just go home and…have you been taken your medication today?”
“I took some when I went to bed at two this morning. Does that count?”
“No. Go home and take some and…just for God’s sake try not to get deported before I get home tonight, Ok?”
The book store was starting to fill up downstairs, some of the more dedicated shoppers were even venturing down to the lower floors where you needed a map to assist you in finding anything. A student weighing up a volume of Marxist Literature started eyeing up the barefoot boy at the desk with a mixture of concern and amusement. Reuben scowled. His brother had ‘I Stick Out Like A Sore Thumb’ slapped all over him.
Jared smiled at the deliciousness of Reuben’s squirming. He leant forward and said, in a whisper, “I’m not just a black sheep anymore Reuben. By law both of us are dangerous now. We’re Puperis(1), and they want us all gone,”
(1) Please don’t be confused by the randomness of this word, it will be explained straight away in the next bit. If this were in a book or whatever the explanation would come right after so it’d look a little better than it does on here. Sorry.
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