Plasma Cat

Prologue: King of the Locusts

He didn't remember much about his homeland. The memories he did have were faded and incomprehensible, as if they were merely the fragmented snapshots of childhood nightmares. He knew that it was hot there, that there were lots of trees, that the land was always wet, and that he and everyone he knew had been miserably poor. But those facts were common knowledge to anyone who bothered to look the place up, and so he often wondered if he could even consider that place his homeland. He had no special insights, knew nothing of the land's culture, and had even lost the ability to speak the language. In many ways that land didn't even exist anymore, and he often wondered if the sea that had swallowed the land of his birth could also swallow up memories.

He did remember his family. A friend had told him that smell was the most powerful trigger of memories, and so he had attempted to rediscover his past through that sense. Numerous visits to restaurants that served the foods of that land did manage to trigger a few memories, almost all of them being of himself, his two sisters, his father, and his mother crowded around a small table in a small apartment, silently eating as the rain came down and the florescent lights flickered. He remembered that his father had been a soldier. He always smelled like cordite, a smell he couldn't identify until he went shooting with a friend who was a hunting enthusiast. He remembered smelling the smoke from the gun after he had fired it, and thinking that it smelled just like his father's cologne. But his father never wore cologne, he couldn't have. It was a silly thing to even consider.

His mother worked as a cleaning lady for a local mosque. She always smelled like scented soaps and rubber gloves. She, like his father, was a very unhappy person. His father dealt with his unhappiness by yelling. He could remember his voice, a loud, angry, booming noise that sent chills down his spine. But he couldn't remember ever seeing his father angry. His father was always looking somewhere else when he yelled, never at him. He was an angry man, but his anger seemed to lay elsewhere. His mother, on the other hand, was a very quiet woman. She dealt with her unhappiness by watching soap operas deep into the night, silently watching over-the-top expressions of loyalty and true love play out on the flickering television. And long after he had been sent to bed, she would still be there on the sofa, silently crying as he sneaked by her to use the bathroom.

He often wondered what had happened to them. Many times, in the middle of the night, the thought would bounce around in his head, refusing to let him sleep and leaving him with a deep feeling of cowardice. Why did he get to live this life in this land while they remained? What of his two sisters, one older and one younger, whom he would never see again? Why didn't they get a chance to survive? He had tried, many times, to get some information about his family, but the records simply didn't exist. Maybe they had escaped, maybe they were living in a refugee camp somewhere. But he knew that was highly unlikely. They would have found him by now, or he would have found them. But no one knew who they were, and that probably meant that they, along with millions of their countrymen, were dead.

He could remember the apartment, and he could remember his family, but he couldn't remember leaving the country. He had only been four years old at the time, and all his adopted father could tell him was that during the evacuation of the UN peacekeeping mission his mother had thrust him into the stranger's arms and had begged the man to save the child. His adopted father said he would, although even now the man couldn't explain why of all the cries for help he decided to answer his mother's. There were thousands of people at that airfield, and thousands of children who were all equally doomed. But as fate would have it, his adopted father took him to his home in California and filled out the paperwork to make him a citizen. And just like that, he became an American.

Those last few days in his homeland were completely unknown to him. He remembered how in school when he told people where he was from they would first fall silent and then begin to ask questions that he didn't know how to answer. Everyone besides himself seemed to know of the horrors that had happened in that land during the last days before the sea came to reclaim what it felt belonged to it. He didn't remember the war. He didn't remember the famine. And he certainly didn't remember all the death. He remembered nothing, except for a small, quiet apartment and his family.

But there was one memory that wasn't like the others. It was so strange, so different, that he often thought that it wasn't real. He is walking with his mother down a dirt road. The sun is low, and the sky is black. The air smells of smoke, and he is hungry. Hungrier than he has even been before or since. They come across a small shack built over a rice paddy, and his mother slowly climbs into it and then curses in disgust. There, in a large barrel lined with plastic, sits a locust. All around it lie little bits and pieces of other locusts, a wing, a leg, a head. And his mother reaches down and picks up the squirming bug.

"Do you see this?" she asks. "This is a very worthy meal for you, my son. This is the King of all the Locusts."

"Why is he the King?" he asks.

"Well, you see," she says as she glares at the bug in her hand, "there once was rice in this barrel. And the locust came and ate all the rice. But then the rice was gone, and so the locust turned on one another. They fought and ate and fought and ate, until there were only two locusts left. And then this locust killed the other locust and ate him up."

She then turns to him and smiles. "Don't you see? He is the King."

Then she crushes the bug and gives it to him to eat. It tastes like ash.