After The Fall - END

1. Half Human

Finding food on earth is not easy after the alien invasion twenty years ago.

Everything is back to the colonial era. The difference is that in the past you were colonized by the Caucasian or Asian race who felt superior, but now the ones who do it are blue-skinned like Smurfs, an animation that I have never seen, but people often say when they see them.

More precisely, me.

"Move aside, traitor!" was a curse that I often heard, even though my mother covered my ears when other people said it. I quickly learned what it meant faster than my mother expected because I heard the same word so often. Being different among humans because of my different skin color. Or the horrified stares they gave me when they first saw me until they realized that I was not a threat next to my human mother.

Yes, I am half human and alien. The result of my mother's illicit relationship with an alien, who she said was her first love.

What a first love. The alien left her after throwing a bunch of promises to return and take her with him to his planet, which was much more beautiful than the dilapidated earth.

On earth, crime is rampant, with few jobs available. Especially for people like me who didn't get a chance to go to school because all educational institutions were destroyed when the alien planes arrived. The only place I studied was my mother, who fortunately could teach me how to read, write, and count. Important things for what I'm doing now: selling the crops we grow on the outskirts of town.

"No one will buy more than what I offer," the man said angrily, with a disgusted look at me. I knew what he was going to say next, but I waited patiently. "No one wants to buy from a half-alien like you."

I squeezed the sack I had offered to the seller tightly. "The price is not even half the normal price." I tried to negotiate. Rationalizing the irrational.

"Normal prices are only for normal people," he replied angrily.

No matter how much I heard it, the word normal was always foreign to my tongue. I didn't feel like Earth was my place, even though my mother was human like them. Little by little, my hatred for Earth grew until all I wanted was to get out of here. Especially for one thing: marriage.

The old man stared at me for a long time with his eyebrows raised high. I reflexively pulled my hood to cover my face and my mother's scarf to cover my mouth.

"I see you too often here. Why didn't you join the marriage program?" she asked, making me panic. I snatched the coins offered and left my bag of crops and ran as fast as lightning.

With the decline in the population of blue-skinned aliens because of an unknown plague that eliminated women to the point of zero, the government on earth agreed to exchange women who had entered adulthood for food and energy.

Prostitution was no longer taboo. The women had been there since morning. Standing on the side of the road in clothes that left no room for imagination. But what the government did sounded very cruel to my ears.

No one had ever heard of women being sent since the program was running, but poverty had not decreased. Food was still hard to find, energy had not improved either.

The rich were getting richer, and the poor were getting more and more destroyed.

The place to live was like heaven and earth. The rich people had a special environment that was tightly guarded. It was said that the area they lived in was like the earth before the invasion. While the area of ​​the lower middle class? We had to live in buildings that could collapse on us with just a touch. It was completely uninhabitable.

However, my case was different. My mother and I were not even accepted to live there. We had to build a hut on the outskirts of town because a monster like me could not walk among humans without scaring them. So they forced my mother and me, who were just born, to get out of there.

My feet followed each other at high speed until I got out of town. One hand was holding my chest that was sore from being forced to run in the cold air that pierced my bones.

I looked back, making sure no one was following me. For seven years I lived looking behind my back. Hiding behind my mother until our situation no longer allowed it.

My feet walked into the forest with lines that greeted my every step. The rays of the two suns could not even fully penetrate the dense, tall trees. This forest was like my protective wall. The further you walk, the less often you meet humans. Scary tales about wild animals in the forest helped get rid of many humans.

My house was already visible. Mother was planting something on the ground beside the house that we had loosened yesterday. The only thing that had survived after the foreign plane attack was the still fertile soil. Farming was something that was still possible if you wanted to eat or make money. Apart from prostitution and drugs that were addictive and one of the means of exchange besides money.

"Cookie Monster, did you forget to buy the bread?" Mother immediately turned her head when she heard the dry twig that I had deliberately stepped on. Her eyes immediately looked at my empty hand and her lips pursed.

I slapped my forehead. Remembering my stupidity that immediately ran as soon as my panic button was pressed. I forgot the most important thing and my goal was to go to town to exchange our vegetables and fruits to buy bread.

Telling what happened earlier would only make Mother panic and not allow me to go to town in her place. "I'll go back there tomorrow. Now let's eat sweet potatoes first, okay? I'll make it for dinner." I ran into the house when I saw Mother's expression change to worry.

"Cookie, what's wrong?"

"I forgot. It's really crowded in the city, so I'm rushing home. I'll go back there early tomorrow morning."

"I can do it."

"No. I can do it. You can't carry something so heavy. Your waist broke in less than five steps."

Mother gasped. Her trick of pretending to be hurt to make me give in wouldn't fool me. "I carried you from the womb. Do you know how much you weighed when you were born? Six kilograms. How much weight did I gain before giving birth to you? Twenty-five kilograms."

My mouth moved at every word Mom said. I've heard it thousands of times throughout my twenty-five years of life.

"Yes, yes. You're really strong. But now you can't even carry yourself to the city. Remember three months ago I met you on the road to the city at night because you couldn't walk anymore?"

Mom clicked her tongue, and I knew she had forgotten our original topic. Mother was busy putting together sentences to save her self-esteem, which I disturbed.

**

Hi, this is my first story in english. Since english isnt my mother tounge, please forgive me if there are any mistakes in my writing. :)