The End of Eden (Water Worlds 1)

Prologue

Mid 21st Century

I can't remember a time I wasn't drawing circles.

Mother saved them all, of course. On a hot morning in late autumn, many years after Father destroyed the world, she showed them to me.

It would be scorching soon, but Mother insisted on getting some air. I helped her over the threshold to the small balcony of our flat, high over Vancouver, and steadied her the few steps it took to get to our small, bamboo table.

She shooed away the soot with a white linen handkerchief, gripped in her free hand, and laid flat an old black portfolio with the other. I wiped off two chairs and helped her settle in, the taste of the air sharp and metallic. The rising sun flared from behind the empty block of flats across the road, stinging my eyes closed. A blue-green afterimage of dragons flashed beneath my eyelids, and I blinked them open, fighting an urge to sneeze.

As she unzipped and opened the cracked vinyl cover, the dirty orange sunlight spilled into the open portfolio. Nestled in the black velvet like an oyster pearl, perfectly bundled and tied with a lavender lace ribbon, was what looked like every drawing I had ever made.

That can't be, can it? I thought, as I watched Mother carefully loosen the knot.

Many of the pages were roughly drawn on cheap, blue-lined wood-pulp paper, torn out of my composition books, proof of my childish boredom in language class. I felt a sudden shame I was so easily distracted then.

"Look at all of this effort," Mother said kindly. "Do you remember how you'd spend hours and hours drawing these? You were a girl possessed."

I didn't say anything at first. I was not entirely comfortable with what she meant by possessed, and it made me uneasy.

"I don't remember making those," I lied casually, looking away. "I was so young then."

But I did remember. Allof it.

I remembered our one, small room in Wonsan with the large, low table, around which we'd eat, read, and even argue sometimes. It was the table beside which my brother, Joo Chen, and I would sleep, and the one that held the screen we would watch for hours and hours. It was the table on which Father once pounded his fist so hard I was afraid he would break Mother's little vase, the one she arranged every day with fresh wildflowers or sprigs of wild mint or whatever else she could find.

That table was literally the center of our lives, and I hadn't thought about it in years. Strange how it came to mind just then.

I wonder what happened to it?I thought.

I hoped someone was still using it. I hated to think of it as discarded or broken up for firewood, as so often happened to furniture in Wonsan. Or worse, lost forever.

Like our lives back then.

Ah, Wonsan. I could still smell the fish Mother would steam for breakfast when we were lucky enough to have it, and I remembered how, as we sat around that table laughing and eating and spitting out bones, the air would be so thick with the salty, fishy smell you'd think the whole of the East Sea was in the room with us.

I could draw for hours at that table and knew every bump and all the cracks. Unconsciously, I would caress the wood surface with one hand like I was petting it, searching the texture with my fingertips while my other hand was busy drawing, as if on its own. And I remembered my green cardboard box, full of pencils, sitting on that table, and how it would rattle as the military lorries rumbled along the well-rutted dirt road just outside the wall, as I huddled against the winter cold and drew circles.