Heartlands, Homelands, Badlands

Homeland, Heartland, Badlands

"The world perishes not from bandits and fires,

but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty

squabbles." -Anton Chekov

The Hunting Trip

"The fabled Musk Deer searches the world

over for the source of the scent that comes

from itself." -Ramakrishna

It was early morning, 6:47 at least, and the sun was just starting to peek its bright, orange head over the mountains in the distance. Those mountains are everything to us. They're our barricade, our Great Wall. This town is Pyramus, the city is Thisbe, and those mountains are the wall between them, keeping us and them miles upon miles apart. Me and Etienne, we had a different goal in our mind. To find a deer. This deer, a strong-legged buck with a grazed hind leg is the one were looking for. It could keep us fed for months, if we ration it into cutlets. We've seen it before, but we never had gotten the chance to shoot em'. Today is the day that we will. Etienne motioned for me to get down on the thick wild grasses. I raised my rifle, about to pull the trigger, but he pushed it down. We wanted to wound it, not kill it. Etienne pulled an arrow out of his quiver, and strung back his bow. We just missed his heart. We walked up to the buck, ready to finish the job. Ettienne pulled a pistol from his belt, and handed it to me. At that moment, the buck and I met eyes. I could tell by the look in his eyes, that somehow, he knew I had to do it,and that he would reluctantly let me. He somehow knew that this kind of thing happens sometimes, one minute, you feel like you're on top world, unstoppable, all powerful, and the next, you're picked off by the ravenous vultures flying overhead.

I pulled the trigger.

The Brother's War

"Civil war? What does that mean?

Is their any foreign war? Isn't every

war fought between men, between

brothers?" - Victor Hugo

The only thing I remember about my brother is a song that he used to sing. A song by Roy Orbison, and I'm sure it was Crying. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. He had a marvelous persona, the kind you very rarely come across in a person, thats why I liked him. That's why we liked him. He was my lifeline ever since my Mom died and my Daddy left us. Three years ago, he left me alone here, in Secar Lake, in our trailer. I really don't know why they have the "lake", at the end, because the titular lake has been bone dry since 1890. I'm on my own here, and have nothing to lose. Every day is the same. It just goes on and on and on in the same pattern, wake up, walk out, go hunting, possibly loot some shops, blah blah blah blah, same thing every day. I live a 10 minutes walk away from Secar Lake, right off Sand Canyon Road, but I live close enough to see the fires that the self proclaimed "police" start at night when the squatters wouldn't leave their makeshift homes of abandoned basements, coal cellars, and sub-basements. I have time to spare most days, because I finish my scavenging the multiple boarded up shops, If I find something to kill time with, like VHS tapes, books, and the like, I'll throw it in my duffle bag and take it home to add to my collection of multiple VHS tapes. Most of them were my brother's before he left me at the trailer. Actually, now that I think about it, most of the things that I own are his. I sometimes think about what happened to him, in the big city, if he died, or what, and if he's doing fine, or if he's huddling under some ruined overhang on a front porch. Wherever he is, and believe me, I really don't care where he is, I hope he's dead.