Sunshine glinted off the gold-plated shovel as it was jammed awkwardly into the cracked dirt of the construction site. Pressure from brand new work-boots drove the ceremonial spade deeper into the dirt. The gentle hands that were stuffed inside crisp new work-gloves grasped the handle of the shovel, pulled up, and cast aside the first heap of dirt, shakily onto a square of plastic tarp.
The crowd of on-lookers clapped and hooted, which might have seemed odd to anyone present who wasn’t a member of the construction crew. In fact, it did seem odd to Marshall Aarhus, a press reporter from the Daily United News, but his personal observations were edited out before the story went to print.
A young man in a business suit who seemed to have no business on a construction site scooped up the ceremonial dirt into an official looking jar. Its gold lid reflected the sunshine such that it ruined a near-perfect shot for the photographer who was documenting the event for the Daily U.
The oldest man on the island removed his hands from the gloves and threw them carelessly on the ground. He turned to face the crowd and held up a hand as though he were waiting for someone to call on him to hear his question. His over-starched uniform fit him loosely, as he’d lost a lot of weight and at least an inch in height since the last time he’d worn it, just after the war. He smiled without showing his teeth because he’d once heard that flashing one’s pearly whites was a sign of weakness. Anyway, no one wanted to see his crooked, graying choppers anyway.
People would get to see them regardless, moments later, when the old man let down his guard. Holding onto the post as it was being shoved into the ground, he squinted against the sun, and looked up at the sign.
“Fulger Triangle,” it read, a bold black type on a glittering gold background.
He smiled up at his name on the sign, not out of pride for his place in the history of the new alliance with the United Mainland, as the news article would insist. Rather, his grin was filled with the guilt of being a veteran for losing side of the war. He couldn’t say why he smiled so big, other than a dose of bittersweet goes down better with a shot of something saccharine, and other things unfit to print.
Major Peter V. Fulger cracked his arthritic knuckles, placed his hands on his hips and let the grin slide from his weathered face as the photographer captured his pose for posterity.
#
Scurvytown, Fulger Triangle; June 7, 2050; 8:09 am
Captain Benjamin C. Tullis opened his eyes at the sound of a nearby bird squawking loudly. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the sky. The clouds were big and fluffy like marshmallows he remembered scorching in a fire-pit as a young boy. He had tossed marshmallow after marshmallow into the flames, watching each one puff up, melt, and twist into a sticky charcoal mass before tossing in the next. The clouds weren’t doing that, exactly, but he remembered more than a few nights when they had, blast after blast in his eardrums, the entire boat rocking with each explosion feeling closer, until, “Splat.” The squawking bird took flight and made its load lighter, splattering the Captain’s favorite blouse with berries and cream.
He grunted as he rolled over on his stomach and looked out at the ocean as if he were that kind of seaman trying to get his bearings. A real navigator would use the stars, he remembered, but the only one he could see right now was the sun, playing hide and seek behind pearlescent marshmallows.
The Captain grunted again, this time at his own flowery thoughts. He stood up and staggered a few feet. He had felt okay, lying in the sand, but the moment he stood up, his head began to spin, and the world seemed to be spinning in the opposite direction.
He walked a bit further and stumbled over something soft that was half-buried in the sand. He bent over and picked up his stuffed monkey, which everyone in town knew he carried around wherever he went. On the monkey’s butt-tag, a name was scrawled in black permanent marker. His name was Hopewell, and the Captain liked to carry on conversations with him, much to the amusement and bewilderment of others.
As much as he tried to recall them, the events of the previous night were vague and blurry, kind of like his vision. A glint of sun caught his attention, and he stumbled across the path and into a grassy patch that beheld a golden landmark. He pushed his nose right up to the sign and read, “Fulger Triangle.”
“Oh,” he said, frowning.
He had a quick flash of a dream that he was sailing the skies the way he had before the war. Things had been so much simpler when he ran the floating ferry service. Even the floating brothel was a good gig, until his boat was commandeered by the military. Now his boat sat with its back broken on an island far from what he used to think of as home.
The Captain sat Hopewell on his shoulder and together they walked along the dirt path towards the boat, which made a pretty decent home.
“Hopewell, take a memo!” The Captain instructed his inert companion as they plodded down the path.
“The road to Scurvytown was not paved with good intentions. In fact, most of the roads in and around the town, and on the entire island, had disintegrated after years of neglect.”
“You get all that?” He asked, pausing in both speech and gait as if anticipating a response.
Captain Tullis continued to walk down the path, stopping to urinate on a shrub. The most annoying thing about wearing long, flowing skirts was that they were ill-equipped for men in need of a quick wee. If he could just wiggle his winky through a hole in the front, it would be so simple, but because he favored such lengthy attire, he had to hike it up with one hand while carefully aiming with the other. Maybe he could take up sewing, he thought, and invent more male-friendly ankle-length skirts. As he was wondering where he might procure a sewing machine, a local boy passed by on a bicycle, averting his eyes from the old man.
“You’re next, boy!” He called after the child, pumping his fist in the air.
He hadn’t meant it, of course, but he had to keep up appearances. Ever since he landed his broken boat on the island, a certain level of eccentricity had been expected of him. His overt attempts to seem insane were the most likely explanation about what he was doing passed out on the beach on the outskirts of Fulger Triangle. He had most likely drank himself into a stupor and wandered out there to sleep it off. He’d done it many times before, usually waking up near the massive squid water fountain in the town square, or underneath a bench in the Red Light District.
Fulger Triangle was nowhere near his usual haunts, and a good mile’s walk from the bar. He felt like he had gone out there for a reason, but unfortunately, there seemed to be no recalling it. Confusing times usually called for step-retracing measures, but the Captain couldn’t remember where to begin.
He turned the corner of the now rubble-strewn path that lead to his home, his boat. He paused to look up at her. She was still as beautiful as the day he first saw her in one of those commercial overpriced used shipyards somewhere in the state of In-between, which was always so uncomfortably cramped betwixt Iowa and Nebraska, that it hadn’t been surprising that it was the first state to go.
Privately, he called his boat Margaret. To the world, or at least in certain circles, she was The Enchanted Pussy. Those letters were still tattooed on her side, faded slightly by the sun, which had cast a brown tint to the once shiny black paint. During the war, he had thought about changing her name to something more patriotic, but he wasn’t sure on which side of the war he flew. He knew which forces claimed his vessel, and he diligently flew supply runs as commanded. It was work when he needed it, because quite frankly, most of The Enchanted Pussy’s clientele had dried up.
“From In-between to Scurvytown,” he said softly, shaking his head, his blue-gray eyes filled with sadness.
“Well, my dear,” he cooed to his boat, “This’ll not be your gravesite, long as I have breath in my lungs. We’ll get you flying again one day, or I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”
Hopewell, from his perch on Captain Tullis’s shoulder, seemed to shudder at the suggestion. He fell to the dirt path, and peered up at the Captain, his cool brown plastic eyes seeming to reflect his owner’s depressed thoughts.
Captain Tullis snatched up the monkey by the paw. “Dirty paw to dirty paw,” he thought.
He swung open the makeshift door he’d fashioned in the boat’s hull, and stepped inside his island home. He sat Hopewell down gently in his washtub, as a hopeful reminder that he’d think to give the monkey his bath. Then he climbed the ladder to his living quarters, which were in a bit of a state of disarray, to say the least.
“How did we get here, my love?” He asked, looking at the mounds of junk mail and unopened correspondence that littered the boat.
Even his small wire-framed bed was covered by piles of mail. It was no wonder he spent most nights passed out somewhere on the island. Scurvytown was prone to gorgeous weather about 90% of the year. When the occasional rain fell, he always seemed to get stuck in the middle of it, and never felt quite so alive as when the warm rain caught him unawares. It reminded him of past nights of ill-refute, of racing the lightning, and then later on, outrunning sky-bombs.
Luckily, the skies had been free from bombs for years now. Kids who were starting high school now had never known the world before the war, and they were lucky enough not to remember the dark days of battle at all.
“Kids today don’t know how good they have it,” the Captain spat, causing an avalanche of unopened mail as he sat down on the corner of his bed.
He put his hand on the pile of mail beside him, and with slightly sweaty palms, a shiny brochure stuck to him.
He grabbed it with his other hand and read it aloud. “United, We Stand Tall. Support the efforts on the United Mainland.”
It sounded like something left over from the war days, but even though the language hadn’t really changed much, the goals had. This wasn’t about patriotism during the time of war. It was about giving years of service to the government in exchange for, well, everything, down to the most basic of human rights.
The Captain threw the brochure on the ground and stepped on it with his dirt streaked hiking boots. They weren’t the best footwear for the island, he thought, wondering why he was wearing them. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wore anything besides comfortable sandals or his favorite pair of red high-heels. Maybe he got drunk and had delusions of adventure. He couldn’t be certain what he had been up to the previous night, and his vagueness was bothering him more than he liked.
He glared down at the brochure under his feet, the bold black letters of “United” sending rivets of fury through him.
“United,” he spat. “What a cosmic joke.”
A handbook had been issued after the war for all citizenry of the United Mainland. It stated plainly, “Secession is unacceptable; only United do we survive the fall.”
United was of course how everything had fallen, and everyone who knew that truth was afraid to say it. If the dark times of the war had seemed bleak and filled with despair, that was nothing compared to the aftermath. Nothing seemed to be called the same thing anymore. Rules and the general law of the land seemed every bit as back-broken as The Enchanted Pussy.
Even the island had once had a different name, but no one used it anymore. The most structurally sound town on the island became a base of operations. Its joke of a nickname became its real name, and soon the entire island had inherited the gag. Scurvytown, they called it, all for want of citric acid laden fruits, and a place that might be home someday. Secessionists flocked there like sheep, which displaced the actual sheep that had become the rulers of the fertile land.
One of the most annoying things about living in Scurvytown was making the distinction between the town and the Island. It had seemed simple enough during the re-indoctrination ceremony, to use a singular name, especially for a place that was meant to serve as a host for prisoners and folks still claiming loyalty to secession.
Situated off the southern coast of the United Mainland, Scurvytown had been abandoned by people during the B.U., which stood for the “Big Unspeakable.” Folks didn’t much like to talk about it, but the Captain was known to speak of it, if plied with enough liquor. Of course, by his standards, “enough” was more than enough to kill an elephant, back before they got crossed off the endangered species list by extinction. The Captain had once tussled with an elephant, which anyone who had read his memoir, The Misadventures of a Flying Seaman, should know.
The Captain sighed, thinking of the glory days, and the shame that came with complete obliviousness in the face of what was to befall the world. Everyone at least had that in common: the fall.
The Captain’s eyes strayed to a bookshelf, and he strode over and picked up a book. It was titled Hey Stupid: Surviving the Fall. The book was from the “Hey Stupid” book series that explained various concepts and life-skills to the working class. The Fall in question was two things: the autumn of the Big Unspeakable, and the economic crisis that plummeted the world into said unmentionable chaos.
Captain Tullis thumbed to the first page and read the first sentence out loud, ”History is written by two kinds of people: the winners and the fence-sitters.” As far as he was concerned, it was the smartest thing ever written in a book from the “Hey Stupid” series.
The Captain never considered himself much of a proud man, or much of a man at all. He enjoyed wearing women’s underwear, bright red lipstick, and pearl earrings which he claimed to have caught himself. He left out the minor detail that he caught them on sale at a farmers market in the middle of nowhere in Iowa when he was passing through on the midwestern leg of his book tour, and that most likely, they weren’t even real pearls.
He stumbled over to the mirror and took a look at himself. He was proud that he hadn’t gotten fat in his older years, but his skin look sallow and saggy and made him seem older than he was. Someone told him once that if he stopped drinking, he’d be amazed at how much younger he looked. He had written that down in his journal under the section, “Stupid things said to me at my interventions.” Now that there was no one left who cared enough to stage an intervention, he certainly missed them, mainly because those sections of his journal were now deficient in content.
Captain Tullis kept his journal in the bathroom and referred to it as “The Captain’s Log.” For once, he wasn’t trying to be overtly disgusting; he simply felt that he did his best writing while sitting on the can, whether or not he happened to be using it at the time.
He admired his figure in the mirror for a bit longer. He was tall, just shy of six feet. He noticed that his skirt was ripped along the hemline. His blouse was torn in several places in the back, and it was ruined anyway thanks to the bird splatter from earlier. It was a shame. He’d gotten the shirt by trading his favorite crystal bracelet to an antiques dealer in the shipping loop, and wasn’t likely to find a replacement anytime soon.
The Captain tore the blouse off, the buttons making the perfect popping sounds as he did so. It sounded like it was straight out of a romance novel, which had been his favorite genre to read while ferrying customers from port to port. At the time, he’d had an electronic book that could store up to ten novels at a time. Nowadays, no one could afford such a luxury, so the once dying print industry had found itself in a bit of a quandary. There was no one left who made physical books anymore, but there was suddenly a market for it. It was like someone had reset the clock on technological advancement, and the Captain didn’t like it one bit, even though it might mean having physical copies of his memoirs once again.
Across his chest, there was a tattoo of a whale that seemed to be about ready to dive into his stomach. He inhaled and puffed out his stomach, chuckling as he imagined the inked whale swimming along his flesh. It was a silly notion.
Suddenly, there came a banging noise from below, like someone was rapping on the door of the boat.
“Ahoy!” Captain Tullis shouted, as he grabbed a t-shirt and pulled it over his head.
He carefully climbed down the ladder and into the much more presentable part of the boat, and heaved open the door. Standing outside the boat, shifting on his feet in his full-length lab coat like he was doing the pee dance, was the town doctor, Doc Popov.
“Hey, how’d it go?” He asked, sliding into the boat without invitation.
“How’d what go?” Captain Tullis replied.
“You know, the thing.”
“Funny thing about whatever you’re talking about, I don’t remember a thing from last night.”
“I told you drinking makes you an idiot!” The doctor spat, annoyed.
“And anyway, I thought we were keeping our alliance a secret. Won’t do to have folks see us not at each other’s throats, and in the light of day.”
“When you missed the drop-off, I thought the worst,” hissed the old doctor, spittle building up at the corners of his mouth.
“So instead of celebrating my apparent demise like my tried and true enemy, you came to find me? Who’s stupid now?” Captain Tullis asked, folding his arms across his chest.
“I think I liked you better when we were enemies,” confessed the doctor. “Working with a drunk is like hiring arsonists as firemen.”
The Captain thought about that for a moment. It was true, he had screwed up somehow, but if he couldn’t even remember how, or what he was supposed to be doing.
“I need you to tell me that you do remember,” the doctor said, sternly.
“I woke up at Fulger Triangle with no memory of getting there,” Tullis replied. “I don’t even know what we were after.”
“Good,” the doctor replied. “Then you won’t remember this conversation, either.”
He pulled a needle out of his lab coat and jabbed the Captain in the arm.
“Ouch, you f-” the Captain said, his eyes growing wide, as he slumped over onto the cold, hard floor of the hull.
“I’m sorry it had to be this way,” Doc Popov said, as he stood towering over the fallen man.
The doctor slipped silently out of the boat, and walked along the path back to his office, whistling as if he were simply taking in the ambiance of another beautiful day in Scurvytown.