Light from Darkness

Chapter 1- Forgotten memories

Joe and I stepped down a back alley called Barlow Avenue to reach the main shops off of the corn exchange, ducking under some fallen walls collapsed over the alley after moss had crept up the supporting brick arch and bore holes through it. Joe was more than excited to be walking through his home city again after all these years. Joe was a thirty something year old man with a ginger beard that was thick and long, however not as thick as his Yorkshire accent which was starting to spread to my speech as well. He had dull brown eyes with weary eyelids which had small wrinkles and folds in them, although that was mainly because he insisted on standing guard at night when I went to sleep. Understandable in these times. Today he was wearing one of his regularly worn outfits of a stained green shirt with “MOTO” printed in big white block letters across the front, some stolen cherry Dr.martins  with bright yellow shoelaces that were checkered with mud from all the fields we’d trudged through in the past months. All he’s wearing for trousers are plain blue jeans with some rips and tears.

“Over 10 years ago” he had told me one night on the travel here, proud of this wreckage that he called beauty. I asked how he could call such a horrible thing beautiful.

“Things don’t have to be beautiful to be beautiful, a word is only as much as you think of it.” He told me.

“What do you think beautiful is?” I asked in reply.

“An old spitfire fighter plane is beautiful, the last glimpse of the sky is beautiful, this city was, and is beautiful. Beautiful to me is my world and what I was brought up in to, what I was taught to love and always will. It’s not just what everyone thinks is pretty, it’s your own fancies and views because it’s your eyes you see with.”

“Thinking that one up a long time have you?”

“Only since the day I could write and believe for myself, which was quite early so yes I would say it’s been a long time thinking but again it’s my point of view, ever heard of Galapagos turtles? “

“Nope.”  

“They apparently live for a thousand years, or so I heard when I was young, imagine that? Seeing everything grow around you for that long and taking every day so slow as a turtle.”

“Turtles are slow? I thought they were fast? Faster than rabbits anyway.” I mused out loud.

Joe stopped me and stared at me for about ten seconds or so as if I were mad and then finally said “Jeez have I not taught you anything Atticus? Turtles are one of the slowest motherfuckers on earth! Rabbits are pretty damn fast and you should know that from experience catching them for food!”

“But I could have sworn I heard turtles are faster than them!”

“You’re probably thinking of the turtle and the hare, the turtle only beats the hare because the stupid buggar decided to take a nap in the middle of a race they had. It’s in a story from the fables I used to read you.”

 “Oh yeah that’s it, what was the point of that story?”

“Patience and willpower are a virtue to get what you really want, although if you ask me that turtle didn’t have the right ethics if he wanted to just show off to all of the animal kingdom by beating the hare hoping something would go wrong for the hare. Doesn’t really show either of them in a great light.”

“hmmm…” An indication to Joe that I had ended the conversation to think about what Joe had said.

We continued to walk down the winding streets that made the city a labyrinth and retraced back to Joe’s house from his own memory. We passed through cobbled streets with moss growing in the cracks littered by bins fallen over and smashed windows from shops and houses packed along the sides of the streets, a Primark’s sign above the weathered shop entrance shed letters since its glory days so it spelt “prik” I resisted a giggle since I knew how much these moments meant to Joe but came very close to letting it out. He cast a scorning look over me and returned to his own thoughts and memories. I looked around to see plastic phone cases all over the floor from the stalls they were sold at, of course they weren’t needed any more after the electricity disappeared from the world. You’d be surprised how much pointless trinkets and possessions these people kept before they lost their precious electricity. I’ve seen phone cases, TVs, consoles, lamps, computers, speakers, little moving robots, gears and cogs, cars, planes, musical devices, as well as a variety of different coloured bright signs and silly little lights own things called “Christmas trees”. All pointless since an event that coined the term “the great switch off” from Joe’s weird little mind, everything lost its electrical power and everyone went mad with what to do, Joe told me his own mother went hysterical when she tried to phone anyone up for help with the lights since the phone didn’t work. Then she had apparently gone even worse when trying to Google some answers for her dilemma and found the computer didn’t turn on either. All electrical equipment.  Dead.  kaput. Needless to say everyone went crazy in much the same way and many died, Joe was lucky enough to have escaped Leeds, thousands lived there and guns still worked unluckily. He’d found me in his escape of course, I was only a year old and my parents (relatives of Joe) were discovered dead by Joe. I never even had the chance to know them.  Given the chance some would have happily killed everyone around them in trying to find their answer to why this was happening and what they could do about it. Although it wasn’t just quick thinking that got Joe his place in the present, he definitely wasn’t known for that. I find it funny as well, people had wanted others to start cutting down on using electricity and when it went they realised how silly it had been to complain when they were just as reliant on it. We had finally reached our destination at a three storey building within view of the train station where Joe stopped cheerfully to chirp out