SABIS the SURVIVOR

Part Eight: SABIS and CLARIS

Mother Earth will not be denied. Whenever life runs smoothly, without either a bump or hiccup, Mother Earth will make sure to add her input. She will stir, shake, and agitate; her rhythm will return until She is satisfied that all creatures comprehend how the forces that cause upheaval are the same ones that bind and unite us─in peace, war, and everywhere in between.

Excerpt from the personal journal of Gadi Reyes, the leader of the Survivor tribe, @ 2051, one year after the Earth's orbit was altered.

"Same harsh flatlands and the same pale yellow and grey sky," Sabis moaned to himself.

"If it was destined for me to live my life in this wasteland, then how much longer will I have to remain alone?"

Sabis creased his forehead and wracked his semi-starved brain for the people in his life who he wished to see again. There was his Mother, his younger brother Toris, and the rest of the tribe. He wished that he could smell his Mother's cooking, play with her hair with his fingers, and challenge her and Toris to a friendly balance competition─whoever can stand on a stone seat using only one leg for the longest time without falling off, that person gets to tickle the other two. As for the rest of the tribe members, he missed tossing around a wartis stone and swimming in the Sea of Salinity, and quizzing his fellow students on anatomy and biology topics. One question he would usually ask them was:

"How many eggs does a fertile female have in her ovaries?"

They would usually answer:

"We don't know Sabis. One hundred, two hundred?"

Then he'd tell them in a deadpan fashion:

"if we're talking about your Mother, then only as many as she needed to have you because after your birth, she saw that her eggs were rotten, so she threw the rest out!"

One SkyGod nuisance that he would like to hide from was the occasional gale-force wind. As the frosty current of turbulent air howled across his path, thoughts drifted to his recently lost animal friend Daris. Sabis felt caught between the tracks that he had already laid down on his grueling exploration of SkyGod's domain and the tracks that he would lay down moving forward. He looked at the wrinkled and parched skin on the back of his hands and then he turned over his hands to look at his palm creases. What did his lifeline have in store for him?

If his Mother were here, she would read his palm with ease while stroking it in a loving manner.

He let one solitary tear fall into his palm. Then he moved on.