Wow here we are finally!! I haven't worked on this in a while so here, finally, is chapter two!! Please give me any edits you have!!
The entrance to the city lies a ways after the forest, along a crumbling dirt road. I know this because I’ve seen it, the first (and only) time Mom took me to see the robots. They walk so smoothly, making no sound, it is hard to believe they even exist. Their skin shines in different hues purple and ebony and silver and some luminescent tan, like an ultra-glorified version of mine. If you squint, they could almost be like us. Except for one thing. They don’t have hair.
When I say “don’t have hair,” I mean they literally have no hair. No brownish stubble on their heads, no wispy threads on their cheeks. They are completely and totally smooth, in a slightly eerie way. Like they couldn’t possibly be real. And in a way, I forcibly remind myself, they’re not.
Mom always had to wear her green shawl when she went scrounging for scraps. It would cover her head and face, knotted tightly at her shoulders. I’m sure the people (and I say people, because I don’t know what else to call them) thought it was strange. Robots have no reason to cover themselves up. Why should they, when they are completely and totally perfect?
As I tie the scarf around my head, I look around the cave again. Everything I needed was packed in a small bag that we owned, from stealing or from my mother’s past, I didn’t know. I didn’t know much about her past at all, other than that my father had been a wonderful man with a knack for making people laugh. She preferred to only think about the present, saying that the past was only full of regrets and the future was only full of questions.
Right now, the future was full of walking. Because I couldn’t exactly stroll right through the main entrance, I had to travel to the east edge of the forest and crawl through a small gap in the mesh fence. Most of the main fence is made of steel, but they had used less expensive material for the back area of the city, so as not to waste resources. I guess robots didn’t really care about anything getting in. If it was a robot, they were kin (evidently, robots didn’t use force against each other.) And since they were under the impression that nothing lived near this particular city (the biggest one in the world) they obviously had nothing to worry about.
Mom had shown me how to get through this gap one day “just in case.” It was a ways away, so I prepared myself for walking. I was used to exercise, since there wasn’t much else to do in the yellow forest. I used to do cartwheels in one of the open spots with less trees, laughing and getting dizzy while my dark hair whirled around my face and Mom sat making dandelion crowns for when we would go climb trees high above the lake. I wipe away hot tears as my small, quick feet begin to pound the leaft-strewn ground.
Humming is the only way to pass the time, so I do, buzzing out notes to songs like “How Will I Know” and “Perfect,” my mom’s old favorites. We used to sing together at night, to the stars, braiding each other’s hair and imagining new futures. I also make up my own songs, trying nonsense notes until they fit together. When I finally reach the edge of the city, the sun is far too bright and burning my scalp, right over my thick hair Mom used to say I had the kind of hair that was difficult: beautiful to the eyes and soft to the touch, but tangly and tough. I had to finger comb it each night, wincing through each knot. We were able to keep it short, about to my shoulders, with a small pocket knife Mom had packed with her when she first left her family. It was still annoying, and got in my way a lot of the time, though.
The gap is right where I remember it, a ripped hole at the bottom of the fence. The day I first came here, my heart was beating out of my chest, and I kept glancing around, expecting someone to come take us away at any second. Today, it’s not that different. I’ve never liked being near the city, and that hasn’t changed over eight years.
My bag snags on the wire as I crawl through the hole, and I have to pull it away to get inside. I’m in a short, scratchy field that wraps around the city. It’s obvious that I should stay of sight as long as I can, so I start walking on the grass towards the east. I feel like thousands of eyes are on me, now that I’m inside the city boundaries. I’ve never been in here before, and I don’t feel right.
As I walk, I start to wonder what this little hiding place will be. Will there be a bed or just a dusty floor? This was really going to be the place Mom lived before the forest. What would she do?
When the path starts to curve, I know I should probably go into the city. I slip through a crack between two buildings and find myself in a metallic climate. Buildings are curved and sleek, mostly in spotless white, but there are some soft grays and occasionally a gold accent. Mom had told me buildings were tall, and I had seen some from the side, but there was nothing that could prepare me for being inside, feeling like I’m about to be swallowed up, yet my feet still firmly planted on the ground, my neck craning up, my body stretching, ready to fly.
Even though everything feels like a blur, what with the transport and gleaming screens and shining surfaces, I know I have a mission. It’s important that I don’t stay out in the open for too long. I begin to walk again, as briskly as I can without worrying about drawing attention to myself.
I know the bakery is to the east, and I know which way is east because Mom showed me a while ago, tracing a compass on my arm. I hold it up, imagining her rough, broken hands, yet with that still soft motherly touch. East - to my right.
I smell the bakery before I reach it. Even though robots technically don’t have to eat, they still do, because they want the taste of it. It’s then filtered out of their bodies a few hours later with a machine. I always found this ridiculous when Mom told me about it. Why eat at all? I guess since robots were the new humans, they kept some of the old human ways. The scents wafting towards me are almost too much to bear. I have no idea what most of them are, having eaten berries and some small amounts of bread for all of my life, but I recognize one. A chocolate chip cookie.
I’ve only ever had a cookie once in my entire fourteen years. Mom was able to steal it from a careless vendor who only had a few stale treats left, and ignored Mom when she came up and inquired about it. So she pocketed it, and brought it home to me. I remember exactly where I was when she came home, holding it out to me, smiling and nodding as I tentatively reached my hands forward. I was only nine, but I can still taste the deliciousness of the chocolate on my tongue, and even though the cookie was stale, it was still the best thing I ever had. Only now do I think about how Mom gave that cookie to me, instead of eating it herself. She hadn’t had a cookie in fifteen years, either, and it must have been incredibly difficult to hand it over when she already knew the wonderful taste of dough sprinkled throughout with drops of heaven.
The scent of the cookie draws me towards a small building sitting squat in between two towering gray skyscrapers that look doubly boring when compared to the cheerful yellow of the shop with a bright glass window on the bottom floor, showing a beautiful array of pastries. I know I shouldn’t go in, but my feet drag my hungry body towards it with no guidance from my brain. At the last moment, I turn. I can’t go in there, and I know it. Mom said the hiding spot was behind the bakery. I notice a narrow alleyway squeezed in between one of the giant gray buildings and the bakery. Turning my body, I slither in.
It’s darker in the alleyway, and not to my surprise, it smells like trash. It doesn’t matter. My heart is racing, and I can feel my stomach start to jump around, waiting for the moment when I’ll see it. For some reason I have a fantasy going on insisde my head that I’ll know who my mother was so much better when I see where she lived before I was there, always with her, never leaving her side, needy, loud, insistent. As I grew older I got quieter, but I was still another mouth to feed, still a constant companion. Who was Julia Hitoworthy before she had a daughter? Before she became a mother?
When I emerge from the alley, I notice a small, collapsing building sitting only a few feet away. This street, on the other side of the bakery, is so small no mode of transportation could ever fit through it. Plus, you’d have to be pretty crazy to come here on foot. It’s kind of a garbage dump. Still, my breathing quickens as my steps do, too, and soon enough I’m pulling open the door of the rotting building.
Inside, I can tell it must have been someone’s house, because there’s a rusty sink in one corner and a ripped apart armchair in the other. Right in the middle of the room, there’s a tiny cot with no bed frame to rest on, and a worn if not too thin blanket tossed aside next to it. At least she must have been warm at night.
There don’t seem to be many belongings in the room, except for a few old utensils in the sink. The windowsill catches my eye as I’m scanning the walls, though, and I notice a wrinkled piece of paper sitting on it. My breath catches in my throat as I walk closer and realize it’s a photograph.
It looks old and kind of crumpled, like it got wet once and never dried. The faces are slightly blurry, but it’s easy to tell that there are two figures, a man and a woman. I know exactly who one of them is, from her height and thin stature, the way she holds herself somewhat delicately, like she knows she could be broken at any moment. This is obviously Mom. The other person doesn’t ring a bell in my mind, though I can tell he’s laughing, and he has the same dark hair I do.
I drop the photo. I don’t think I could bear to look at it for much longer. It’s too painful, the life my mother left behind. The life I could’ve had.
Day is fading fast, leaving behind less bright stars than I can see in the forest. I curl up on the bed, my hand stroking the lines of the blanket over and over, just like Mom stroked the tree right before she left. I have no idea if I’ll be able to sleep, inside walls and cooped up with this old, stale life of my mother’s. But I know there’s nothing else to do. I’ll just have to close my eyes, and try.
The entrance to the city lies a ways after the forest, along a crumbling dirt road. I know this because I’ve seen it, the first (and only) time Mom took me to see the robots. They walk so smoothly, making no sound, it is hard to believe they even exist. Their skin shines in different hues purple and ebony and silver and some luminescent tan, like an ultra-glorified version of mine. If you squint, they could almost be like us. Except for one thing. They don’t have hair.
When I say “don’t have hair,” I mean they literally have no hair. No brownish stubble on their heads, no wispy threads on their cheeks. They are completely and totally smooth, in a slightly eerie way. Like they couldn’t possibly be real. And in a way, I forcibly remind myself, they’re not.
Mom always had to wear her green shawl when she went scrounging for scraps. It would cover her head and face, knotted tightly at her shoulders. I’m sure the people (and I say people, because I don’t know what else to call them) thought it was strange. Robots have no reason to cover themselves up. Why should they, when they are completely and totally perfect?
As I tie the scarf around my head, I look around the cave again. Everything I needed was packed in a small bag that we owned, from stealing or from my mother’s past, I didn’t know. I didn’t know much about her past at all, other than that my father had been a wonderful man with a knack for making people laugh. She preferred to only think about the present, saying that the past was only full of regrets and the future was only full of questions.
Right now, the future was full of walking. Because I couldn’t exactly stroll right through the main entrance, I had to travel to the east edge of the forest and crawl through a small gap in the mesh fence. Most of the main fence is made of steel, but they had used less expensive material for the back area of the city, so as not to waste resources. I guess robots didn’t really care about anything getting in. If it was a robot, they were kin (evidently, robots didn’t use force against each other.) And since they were under the impression that nothing lived near this particular city (the biggest one in the world) they obviously had nothing to worry about.
Mom had shown me how to get through this gap one day “just in case.” It was a ways away, so I prepared myself for walking. I was used to exercise, since there wasn’t much else to do in the yellow forest. I used to do cartwheels in one of the open spots with less trees, laughing and getting dizzy while my dark hair whirled around my face and Mom sat making dandelion crowns for when we would go climb trees high above the lake. I wipe away hot tears as my small, quick feet begin to pound the leaft-strewn ground.
Humming is the only way to pass the time, so I do, buzzing out notes to songs like “How Will I Know” and “Perfect,” my mom’s old favorites. We used to sing together at night, to the stars, braiding each other’s hair and imagining new futures. I also make up my own songs, trying nonsense notes until they fit together. When I finally reach the edge of the city, the sun is far too bright and burning my scalp, right over my thick hair Mom used to say I had the kind of hair that was difficult: beautiful to the eyes and soft to the touch, but tangly and tough. I had to finger comb it each night, wincing through each knot. We were able to keep it short, about to my shoulders, with a small pocket knife Mom had packed with her when she first left her family. It was still annoying, and got in my way a lot of the time, though.
The gap is right where I remember it, a ripped hole at the bottom of the fence. The day I first came here, my heart was beating out of my chest, and I kept glancing around, expecting someone to come take us away at any second. Today, it’s not that different. I’ve never liked being near the city, and that hasn’t changed over eight years.
My bag snags on the wire as I crawl through the hole, and I have to pull it away to get inside. I’m in a short, scratchy field that wraps around the city. It’s obvious that I should stay of sight as long as I can, so I start walking on the grass towards the east. I feel like thousands of eyes are on me, now that I’m inside the city boundaries. I’ve never been in here before, and I don’t feel right.
As I walk, I start to wonder what this little hiding place will be. Will there be a bed or just a dusty floor? This was really going to be the place Mom lived before the forest. What would she do?
When the path starts to curve, I know I should probably go into the city. I slip through a crack between two buildings and find myself in a metallic climate. Buildings are curved and sleek, mostly in spotless white, but there are some soft grays and occasionally a gold accent. Mom had told me buildings were tall, and I had seen some from the side, but there was nothing that could prepare me for being inside, feeling like I’m about to be swallowed up, yet my feet still firmly planted on the ground, my neck craning up, my body stretching, ready to fly.
Even though everything feels like a blur, what with the transport and gleaming screens and shining surfaces, I know I have a mission. It’s important that I don’t stay out in the open for too long. I begin to walk again, as briskly as I can without worrying about drawing attention to myself.
I know the bakery is to the east, and I know which way is east because Mom showed me a while ago, tracing a compass on my arm. I hold it up, imagining her rough, broken hands, yet with that still soft motherly touch. East - to my right.
I smell the bakery before I reach it. Even though robots technically don’t have to eat, they still do, because they want the taste of it. It’s then filtered out of their bodies a few hours later with a machine. I always found this ridiculous when Mom told me about it. Why eat at all? I guess since robots were the new humans, they kept some of the old human ways. The scents wafting towards me are almost too much to bear. I have no idea what most of them are, having eaten berries and some small amounts of bread for all of my life, but I recognize one. A chocolate chip cookie.
I’ve only ever had a cookie once in my entire fourteen years. Mom was able to steal it from a careless vendor who only had a few stale treats left, and ignored Mom when she came up and inquired about it. So she pocketed it, and brought it home to me. I remember exactly where I was when she came home, holding it out to me, smiling and nodding as I tentatively reached my hands forward. I was only nine, but I can still taste the deliciousness of the chocolate on my tongue, and even though the cookie was stale, it was still the best thing I ever had. Only now do I think about how Mom gave that cookie to me, instead of eating it herself. She hadn’t had a cookie in fifteen years, either, and it must have been incredibly difficult to hand it over when she already knew the wonderful taste of dough sprinkled throughout with drops of heaven.
The scent of the cookie draws me towards a small building sitting squat in between two towering gray skyscrapers that look doubly boring when compared to the cheerful yellow of the shop with a bright glass window on the bottom floor, showing a beautiful array of pastries. I know I shouldn’t go in, but my feet drag my hungry body towards it with no guidance from my brain. At the last moment, I turn. I can’t go in there, and I know it. Mom said the hiding spot was behind the bakery. I notice a narrow alleyway squeezed in between one of the giant gray buildings and the bakery. Turning my body, I slither in.
It’s darker in the alleyway, and not to my surprise, it smells like trash. It doesn’t matter. My heart is racing, and I can feel my stomach start to jump around, waiting for the moment when I’ll see it. For some reason I have a fantasy going on insisde my head that I’ll know who my mother was so much better when I see where she lived before I was there, always with her, never leaving her side, needy, loud, insistent. As I grew older I got quieter, but I was still another mouth to feed, still a constant companion. Who was Julia Hitoworthy before she had a daughter? Before she became a mother?
When I emerge from the alley, I notice a small, collapsing building sitting only a few feet away. This street, on the other side of the bakery, is so small no mode of transportation could ever fit through it. Plus, you’d have to be pretty crazy to come here on foot. It’s kind of a garbage dump. Still, my breathing quickens as my steps do, too, and soon enough I’m pulling open the door of the rotting building.
Inside, I can tell it must have been someone’s house, because there’s a rusty sink in one corner and a ripped apart armchair in the other. Right in the middle of the room, there’s a tiny cot with no bed frame to rest on, and a worn if not too thin blanket tossed aside next to it. At least she must have been warm at night.
There don’t seem to be many belongings in the room, except for a few old utensils in the sink. The windowsill catches my eye as I’m scanning the walls, though, and I notice a wrinkled piece of paper sitting on it. My breath catches in my throat as I walk closer and realize it’s a photograph.
It looks old and kind of crumpled, like it got wet once and never dried. The faces are slightly blurry, but it’s easy to tell that there are two figures, a man and a woman. I know exactly who one of them is, from her height and thin stature, the way she holds herself somewhat delicately, like she knows she could be broken at any moment. This is obviously Mom. The other person doesn’t ring a bell in my mind, though I can tell he’s laughing, and he has the same dark hair I do.
I drop the photo. I don’t think I could bear to look at it for much longer. It’s too painful, the life my mother left behind. The life I could’ve had.
Day is fading fast, leaving behind less bright stars than I can see in the forest. I curl up on the bed, my hand stroking the lines of the blanket over and over, just like Mom stroked the tree right before she left. I have no idea if I’ll be able to sleep, inside walls and cooped up with this old, stale life of my mother’s. But I know there’s nothing else to do. I’ll just have to close my eyes, and try.
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