.1 Smoke and Spring. | Otto

My goddamn calluses were all wrong. My left hand was fine, it was rough all over, no identifiable calluses to speak of. But my right hand was all wrong. A firm callus behind my index finger and thumb, from pressing gun triggers and reloading. Thin calluses running through my palms from stringing up sharp wires at the fuel factory. Calluses from working with a wrench and a shovel. All wrong. For this mission, everything had to be prefect.

I examined my hand and decided what I had to do. I was going in as a neutral from the Organic Fields, a farmer boy who had run away from home in search of a better life in the city. Yeah, it sounds like garbage, but I wasn't the one who came up with it. At any rate, a farming boy would never have trigger calluses.

I stood up and dragged dirty hair out of my eyes. At the far end of the room sat an old stove, burning low because it wasn't snowing yet outside. I unlatched the door and looked inside. Yep, still burning. I fished a bottle of cooking oil out from a box laying to the side and poured some into a chipped kettle. The kettle went on the coals.

I sat and waited. What else would I need to change? Farmers talked about the same as us; they didn’t live that far away and weren’t that much dumber. My voice would stay. Should I try to color my hair somehow? If any Carpathians had seen me around the city, they would surely have remembered my bright auburn hair. No, I would have to risk it. Dye was incredibly expensive. Besides, if they had been close enough to discern my hair color, they would have probably seen my face too, so I’d be fucked either way. Shitty logic, but oh well.

The oil was boiling. I fished the kettle out of the stove and shut the door, not wanting the flames to go out. I held the kettle in my left hand, noticing with apathy how it shook a little. Better to get it over with, then.

I held out my right hand, palm up, and poured a thick stream of boiling oil across it. For the first few seconds I didn’t feel anything, which gave me the opportunity that the oil got on all the calluses. I put the kettle down. For half a second, my hand felt icy cold, and then it *burned.* I must have screamed.

The next thing I remember was waking up, sprawled all over the floor, an empty kettle laying by my right boot. Apparently I had kicked it over when I fell. Well shit, there goes careful maneuvering. The oil hadn’t gotten on my leg, but it was drying into the floorboards now.

My hand killed. I wrapped it in rags, but not before seeing, with grim satisfaction, that the calluses, and most of the rest of the skin on my palm, was blistered and otherwise disfigured so badly that none of my past could be pieced from it.

Holding my aching hand to my chest, I walked over to my mattress on the floor and sat down. Thinking always calmed me down. I could sit and think for hours. Jefferson called it brooding. “You can brood a hole in the wall, Otto,” he said once. Well, fuck him. Jefferson was an idiot. And a virgin.

So I thought. My past seemed as good a topic as any.

Most of my childhood memories were filled with fear and darkness. My earliest one had been of my mother holding me to her chest as the world crumbled around us. By going over and over that memory I eventually figured out that we had been in a burning building, that pieces of the ceiling were raining down on us and my mother was trying to get out.

The house I had been born in burned to the ground that night. Fires were not unusual in those days. There were still oil pipes bursting daily then, because the damage of the bomb was fresh.

My next memory was of when I was about four. My mother and father were working in a patch of tomatoes a few feet away, and I was sitting on the path the patch grew into and poking the earth with a stick. At that point, we lived in the Greenhouse, where my parents worked. The radiation plague had wiped out most adults by now, but my parents had not caught it, so I knew they were safe.

At day, they worked here, amidst the wet, cool, green green green beauty that was the vegetable garden, and at night we slept in cool tents at the edges of the Greenhouse. It felt like we were in a magical kingdom. Everything was so shiny, alive, happy. Mist from the moisture of automatic water pumps sailed around in the air and sometimes I would stick my tongue out to taste it. So sweet.

If you went to the edges of the Greenhouse, you could see the outside world. Gray, brown, broken down and rotting, rusting buildings crookedly sat on jagged, upturned pavement. Sometimes I would press my face against the glass and look outside, only to see a frightened and dirty face of a child looking at me from outside. The children always ran away and I always shivered after seeing them. Soon I would become one of them.

In the spring of my sixth year, Wilhelm was born. Of course, that was not what my mother called him, just as she had not called me Otto, but I can’t remember our given names and do not try to. I can’t remember my mother’s name either.

To this day, I’m not certain my mother had intended to have Wilhelm, because of the absurdity of the situation. We were homeless, living off the Greenhouse, with little nutrition to provide to a baby, and certainly no time and energy for one. But in early spring, there he went, popping right out.

Well, I shouldn’t say that. He didn’t pop right out. He almost didn’t pop out at all. The labor was ridiculously long and my mother did not survive it. After nearly a whole day of screaming and try to push him out, she just gave up. I couldn’t relate to you the pain of childbirth, having never been in the position, but she must have been in significant pain. I don’t blame her. Then again, I barely remember her. A nice old lady, whose name I also don’t know, helped my father get Wilhelm out of her chilling body. He was a small baby, but perfectly healthy, which must have broken a dozen laws of physics. Another woman at the Greenhouse had just had a stillbirth and nursed Wilhelm until he could eat solid food.

When I was eight or so, my dad snapped. Well, no, again, it wasn’t as sudden as a snap. He had it coming. After my mother’s death, he became withdrawn, cold. He worked more than ever in the gardens, ignoring his children. I think he must have been in denial of her death because when he did talk, it was to her.

When he finally snapped, it wasn’t frightening to me. He stood up from his patch one day and lifted his head to look at the glass-covered sky. He stayed like that for nearly an hour, then collapsed, shaking and crying. This went on forever. After that, he was comatose for months, and only when the other Greenhousers stopped bringing us food did he get back up from his cot and go work. The same woman who had helped with the delivery stayed with him among the tomatoes, guiding his movements like he was a child. And he was. After his breakdown, he somehow forgot how to garden, despite doing so for a good half-decade. Forgot all of the details, right down to how to hold a goddamn shovel.

I remember watching him and the nameless old woman work n the mist and green beauty, and experiencing a strange kind of numbing over. The Greenhouse no longer fascinated me. I no longer sat and drew patterns in the ground or stuck my tongue out to taste the mist. It was all over. During the first few weeks of my father’s recovery, the shroud of childhood fell away from my eyes and I saw the world in a clear, cold light.

I waited until Wilhelm turned three and left the sanctuary of the Greenhouse forever.