The Meek Read online

  Chapter 2 – The Stories of Crones

  It’s not common, but sometimes, a woman survives childbirth, disease, and violence to live to a crone’s ripe, old age. In the hovel, a crone’s not good for much more than frightening children with stories about the fatcats and the tower they built in the time of our great-great grandparents, as if any of the crones have enough sense to count backwards through so many generations.

  Mary Mary was the name of the crone who first told the story to me when I was a boy in the hovel. Her cloudy, white eyes still appear in my nightmares from time to time; I can still hear the slur in her words when I try to sleep in a private place. According to Mary Mary, everyone wanted to be a fatcat back in the day, though it’s hard for me to believe it, considering how much I’ve come to despise those fatcats while I fight to survive in the hovel. Mary Mary said that the world before the tower was more than just wind and sand, more than the sun that burns us, and more than the elements that rot our teeth and curse our kind with deformities. Mary Mary claimed that plentiful food and sweet water filled the world before the tower. I hate Mary Mary. What did she hope to achieve by sharing such a story with me when I was only a boy? Did she think she was making me strong? Or did she realize she tortured me? Mary Mary was cruel to tell children such stories of the old world, seeing that those boys and girls were never going to know anything like the gardens Mary Mary described, seeing how such stories only gave the children a thirst that would be impossible for any of them to ever satisfy.

  Mary Mary said that world of plenty was never enough for the fatcats, who spent their days tricking folk out of their treasure, who spent their nights surrounded by all their shining baubles. Mary Mary said that the fatcats almost had it all, and so they became obsessed with the last treasure they could not find - the secret of eternal life. For in the time before the tower, the fatcats knew death just as well as all of us living in the hovel, that back in the day, death remained the great equalizer, bringing the richest and poorest together by means of the grave.

  Every crone tells the fatcats’ story a little differently. I’ve heard crones claim that angels descended from the clouds to lift the fatcats into heaven, leaving the rest of us behind, as we didn’t deserve a throne in that celestial realm. Some crones describe a potion the fatcats brew, a magical elixir that keeps their bodies young while they smile in their dreams. Some crones say that the fatcats still die, that they’ve only built a city apart from the shanty in our hovel, that their ancestors still call this wasted world home.

  I don’t know what story deserves my belief. They all scare me, and I hate them all the same. I really don’t care what story best deserves my belief. I’m happy to push old Sparker’s contraption across the waste if that’s the only chance I have to make the fatcats pay for the world they’ve left us.

  The fatcats built their tower very slowly in some of the stories. Other crones claim that the tower rose after a single day. All of the crones tell the children that the fatcats retreated into their tower and vanished into their dreams. Those fatcats must’ve terribly hated us, for the fatcats filled our sky with the buzzkills after leaving our world. Those flying machines of fire and brimstone nearly hunted remaining humankind to extinction, putting entire cities to flame, rooting out one hovel after another until only those of us who dug the deepest shelters survived to sire generations onto the burned and poisoned land that remained to us.

  Mary Mary, as would any good crone, put it on real thick when she described the buzzkills to me. Mary Mary couldn’t resist the urge to scare me into shaking. Maybe that fear was good for me when I was a boy listening to her tell me of the fatcats and the buzzkills for the first time. Maybe that story helped keep me beneath the ground where I belonged as a child, away from the sun and the poison that waited for me on the surface.

  The truth of what really happened to the fatcats, the truth as to why they built their tower before unleashing their buzzkills upon us no doubt resides somewhere beneath all those details the crones have added through the years, but I know I’m not smart enough to dig it up. Whatever happened sentenced generations of us to fester in our stinking hovels. And for generations, there hasn’t been anything we can do about it.

  But old man Sparker and his luscious daughter Sweet Tea have built a contraption to give us hope that we might reach out from our holes and slap those fatcats clean across the face, make those fatcats pay a cost for the ruin they gave us. I don’t care how the fatcats put themselves into their immortal sleep. I’m only focused on doing something that’ll slap those fatcats out of their dreams.

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