The Barrens (NaNoWriMo Day 1)

Day 1 of NaNoWriMo! This is a story I've been thinking about for a while, but I've never done any work on it before. It will be interesting to dive into a longer work without a plan or an outline, which I almost always use when I write. No idea how this will resolve or where it will end up, but that's the fun of it all! I'm going to shoot for about 1600-1700 words a day, unless I miss a day, which I inevitably will. Enjoy, and I welcome all criticism and feedback!

Day 1 Word Count: 1617
Total Word Count: 1617
Goal: 50,000
Remaining: 48,383

---

“You don’t need to be nervous. These aren’t trick questions. This isn’t an interrogation. We just want to help you.”

Rasul watched the needle on the polygraph. It held steady, fluctuating up and down slightly in regular patterns. A beeping sound from the machine behind him tracked his heart. It too was slow and rhythmic. Rasul timed his breaths. The machines were linked to him by wires with little clamps on the end, securely fastened to his fingertips. Another clamp squeezed around the back of his head, with its wires trailing off to other monitors that faced the therapist. His bandages were in the way, and the device sat awkwardly on his head.

Outside, Avalon was transitioning into night. The little room they were in was dark, lit only by a lamp on the therapist’s desk, and Rasul was already feeling numb in his stiff chair. The discomfort was the only thing keeping him awake. The day felt like it would never end.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just a little unnerving to be plugged into all these machines.”

“Those are just to help us identify any triggers,” the therapist said. She smiled. “What you experienced is often the result of some kind of past trauma. We want to be sure we capture anything that might be associated with that.”

Her smile was probably meant to be reassuring, but its ambiguity set Rasul on edge. She wasn’t even looking up from her computer. He exhaled slowly through his nostrils, trying to fight off the beads of sweat he felt forming at his hairline. If past trauma caused fainting, Rasul was sure that he wouldn’t have gone so long without it happening.

“Was today’s episode at the foundry the first time you had ever experienced anything like that?” the therapist asked.

“Yes,” Rasul said. He could barely remember anything that had happened in the first part of the day. He knew he had passed out at work. It happened so fast. There was a pain in his head like it was being split open, and he had lost his balance, dropping the boxes he was carrying. He had thought the lights were flickering, but then everything went dim.

When he woke up in the hospital room, he was so pumped full of painkillers that he thought he was flying. He could remember church officials crowding the room as he regained consciousness, but he couldn’t make out anything they were saying. When he had come to, they were gone. After the doctor had released him and the church had brought him in for a counseling with one of its therapists, the pain under his bandages began to throb. They told him he had hit his head on a workbench when he passed out.

“You mentioned that you had been having disturbing dreams,” the therapist said.

“Yes,” Rasul said.

“Can you elaborate?”

“They’re more like flashes,” Rasul said. He looked towards the door. The light at its base was obscured slightly at the bottom, and he could hear the guard outside shifting his weight. The guard coughed. “It’s never a single place or anything. They’re just moments.”

“Moments you recognize?”

“Not really. There’s a lot of grass. I’ve spent most of my life in the Forges, so that’s not very familiar. I see a lot of people dressed like scientists, but we don’t really get any scientists in the foundry.”

“How long have you been having these dreams?”

“About a month.”

The therapist clicked away at her keyboard, never once looking at Rasul as she asked or listened. Despite the barrage of questions, her body language indicated a complete lack of interest. Rasul didn’t care. He wasn’t interested in what she had to say. He couldn’t even remember the name she introduced herself as when she was hooking him up to the machines. All he wanted was to get home and sleep the day off.

“That’s an interesting name,” she said. “Rasul. Is it your confirmation name?”

You know it isn’t, he thought. Everybody knows it isn’t. There’s nobody in the Bible named “Rasul.”

“No,” he said. “The vicarage that took me in confirmed me as John.”

“But you don’t like to use that name?”

“My mother called me Rasul,” he said. The heart rate monitor picked up in speed, and Rasul tried to calm himself down again. “It helps me remember her.”

The therapist stopped typing and looked directly at him. The headlights of a truck passing by outside lit the room up briefly. Rasul hadn’t seen her in the full light yet. She looked even younger than him, and she was so pale that he wondered if she ever left this dark room.

She wore the plain white vestments identifying her as one of the laity of the church. The letters “EV” were stitched on the left side of her frock, and a fish with a staff across it was on the right. Rasul’s doctor wore the same symbol. He remembered it from his training at the vicarage as the sign of the angel Raphael, the healer. Before they trained him for labor in the foundry, he had received the state’s minimum training in ecclesiastical history and hierarchy.

“What was your mother’s occupation?” she asked.

“She was a bookkeeper,” Rasul said. He was so accustomed to telling that lie that he didn’t even need to glance at the polygraph. He knew the needle would stay steady.

“Is she still doing that today?”

“She jumped out of a window when I was four.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the therapist said. She had gone back to her laptop, and her tone didn’t indicate any hint of sympathy. Rasul wondered what she was typing. It was far more than what he was saying.

“I didn’t really understand it, but I knew enough to know that she was gone,” Rasul continued, unprompted.

“And that’s how you ended up in the vicarage?” the therapist asked.

“More or less. After she died, I floated around the Forges for a couple years before I got picked up.”

“That must have been a hard upbringing. I’m sure you’re very thankful the church found you.”

The way she intoned that last sentence made it feel like a threat, but Rasul felt that way anytime he had to listen to somebody talk about the church. He wasn’t “found” by the church, he was abducted in one of their systematic sweeps of the poorest districts of Avalon. As difficult a life as it was, the freedom of the streets of the Forges were better than the vicarage, where he was brought in and primed for a life of labor. When he was ten, they had put him in one of their vocational schools, and a year later he was working in the foundry.

“Absolutely.”

For a few minutes, the therapist worked at her computer. Rasul waited for more questions, but none came. Traffic had stopped outside. Avalon was beginning to sleep. He looked out the window. It faced the front of the church. Most of the buildings in view had gone dark. The wound in his head was sore. He just wanted to be in his bed.

“What you’ve experienced is consistent with exposure to aether,” the therapist finally said. “I don’t want you to worry. This is fairly common with people who work in the foundries. It doesn’t mean you’ve been poisoned, and it doesn’t mean that there will be any long-term effects. In the meantime, the best thing for you to do is get back to work. Some physical activity will help your body purge any aether that might be in your system. I’ll be putting in a transfer request for you to be sent temporarily to a less volatile part of the foundry.”

There was a whirring sound, and a printer on the therapist’s desk spit out a piece of paper. The therapist took it and folded it in half, then opened a drawer and filed the paper away. She stood and approached him, then unclamped the various sensors from his head and fingers. After she had set them all aside, she flipped the machines off.

“So, that’s that?” Rasul asked.

“That’s that. Security will escort you back out.”

Rasul stood up unceremoniously. When he was back on his feet, the wound in his head started to pound again. The therapist opened the door for him. The guard who had led him into the room was waiting for him outside. An emblem of scales was stitched onto his uniform, along with the same “EV” as the therapist. Scales for Michael the Archangel, the great warrior.

They walked silently to the back door of the church. Rasul lifted his wrist, and the guard scanned it with his NRT. After a beep and a green light, the guard opened the door.

“Yep, thanks,” Rasul said. The guard said nothing.

Rasul walked out and the door slammed behind him. It was cold outside. They had begun to dial the temperature down in the evening. Summer had officially ended, and the administration followed a very strict climate pattern. Thankfully, the church was near his apartment, and Rasul walked down the street with his hands shoved in his pockets.

The streets were empty. The church had done another sweep of the Forges recently. Rasul felt like the buildings were watching him, but he attributed the paranoia to all the medication he had taken. There was nothing illegal about walking outside at night. The administration hadn’t called for a curfew in years. Still, he moved as quickly as he could.

It was a clear, starry night. It was always clear, unless a storm was scheduled. Far above, Avalon’s artificial stars twinkled.

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Photo in the public domain