Lark Ascending

by Silas House

Don’t give up. A perfect short prayer.

I said the word aloud. Four syllables, four prayers. To the sky, to the word itself, to the flower.

“They’ve taken over. And now we have to fight back because they want everyone to be just like them. They want us to follow their rules.” “And they’re not good rules,” my father added.

My father’s sister and her wife had been taken away weeks ago. My aunts, who had fallen in love and gotten married long before the Fundies took over. Now my parents had learned we’d never see them again. Because they loved each other. This was the beginning of the Slaughters. The priests and professors and artists were killed in the Slaughters, too. The Fundies were in control now and they were the only kinds of believers who were allowed to believe and anyone who defied them disappeared like my aunts. The Fundies always had excuses: they weren’t taken away or killed because of who they were or what they believed in or who they loved. Instead we were told they had been caught making bombs, or destroying property during protests. We were told they had been convicted of treason, jailed for stealing, for any reason except the real ones.

If the Fundies found our family, my father would be forced to swear his allegiance to their cause. He would have stood against a wall to be shot before he would have done that. My mother, Phoebe, and Sera were also living forbidden lives since they were not dressing or behaving the way the Fundamental Laws demanded of women. The new laws had declared them as inferior, as little more than the property of my father.

Phoebe had been a teacher, but that didn’t matter to people much by then.

Now that I am an old man, I know that there is much to believe in, although I do not have a single word for it the way some people do. To be too certain about belief is a dangerous thing.

I doubted the existence of magic, but not enough to completely deny the fact that it might exist. If anything in this world was holy it was a tree. This much I knew for sure.

“Zealots are always ready to take over. No one ever thought it could happen here, but we were overestimating human beings. Turns out it’s easy to convert more people to a cause that takes power from others, that thrives on meanness.”

Back home only the Fundies had firearms. They had always been loudest about making sure there was no gun control until they controlled them all.

Back then I didn’t know hardly anything. I am ninety years old, and I still don’t know a whole lot. But I do know that the worst thing in this world is the intolerance that leads to so much violence. I have had to put it on the page to draw our attention to it so we would be disgusted by it. The only thing I knew for sure that day was that many circumstances—mostly the actions of those in power—had led to that moment and a million others just like it. Everyone who benefited from devastating the natural world. Everyone who participated in the misinformation and discrimination that led to my country’s collapse. Everyone who gained power or money from war.

We had more in common with rocks and rivers than we did with people now. We had seen what happened when people lived together in too big a clump. The better choice was to live with a handful. There is strength in numbers but there is danger in it, as well. Danger of one desiring a rise to power. Danger of many being blinded by one and doing his bidding.

There are all kinds of beauty in this hard world and if you ask me, none of them can be matched by wildness.