015
A world created in seven days.
I had never really considered the incredible truth of that, but by the time it was over, it was all a bit of an irony.
It started on a new day: a day exactly the same as the one before. It was the same thing I thought every morning when I'd wake up, normally on the floor. I was naturally a restless sleeper, and my older sister took up much of the bed. She slept sprawled out in starfish position, according to a science book I'd read one night after being forced out of bed by her odd sleeping habits.
Wednesday.
Wednesday wasn't anything fantastic. It was just Wednesday. Wednesday with no date. We didn't count days with a calendar anymore: there was just no use. School started when it was an appropriate time to let the children walk outdoors without danger of frostbite or heatstroke, and birthdays were celebrated by the season, not by the day. When the first flowers came up in spring, we'd celebrate my sister's birthday, when the ships arrived at the docks with provisions, my little brother aged another year, and when the first snow fell this year in particular, I would be fifteen, an adult at last. Likewise, my mother and father's birthdays and marriage were all celebrated on the same day: the Sunday after the first day of planting.
I sat up, wincing when my shoulders ached from the hardness of the floor, and promptly smacked my head on the wooden frame of the bed. My head crashed back to the floor as the ringing in my ears diminished so that I could climb out from under the bed and go into the bathroom to wash my face.
I dressed myself in a neon green dress - the colour for that day - and reminded myself that in mere weeks, the snow would fall and I could start wearing the adult tones. Every day of the week, all the people wore a specific colour: red for Sunday, orange for Monday, yellow for Tuesday, green for Wednesday, blue for Thursday, purple for Friday, and pink for Saturday. Children wore neon tones and adults wore pastel, or sometimes just a less-neon version of the colour.
Rousing Melanin, my sister, was the most difficult chore of the morning. The girl slept like a log; the kind that stretched from one side of the bed to the other in the most impossible way. She pushed me away, muttering about how horrible little sisters were before rolling over to go back to sleep. My sister was eighteen going on eight. I pushed her left arm into her side, tucked her shoulder down, and rolled her completely off the bed, leaving before she could come to terms with the fact that she's just hit the floor.
Waking Calix was different, though. My two- year-old brother put his tiny arms around my neck and allowed me to pick him up and carry him into the kitchen where I deposited him on his chair and turned to get him a bowl of cereal. This task had just been completed when my mother entered the room, silent, as usual.
I didn't remember a time Mother hadn't been silent and morose. Certainly not in my brother's lifetime, and probably not in my own. My mother spoke when she needed to, and at no other time. There were photos of her and Father holding Melanin, both of them smiling and laughing, Melanin kicking and screaming, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen Mother smile. Actually, I could. She'd smiled when Melanin had blown out the eighteen candles on her cake.
Melanin had always made her smile, it seemed. Calix, too. I remembered her smiling, even as her face was streaked in tears and sweat, after the birth of my brother. Granted, there wasn't a face not smiling at my brother's birth. We'd waited too long for a son and a brother, I suppose, to be anything other than ecstatic.
After we had finished eating, I took Calix back to Mother and Father's bedroom to help him get dressed while Mother did the dishes and Melanin did... something. I rarely understood what my sister did and why. It was pointless trying to figure her out. She had exactly two things on her mind: style and swain.
It was at that point that we heard it: the loud, high siren. I carried my brother, dressed in his black pants and long-sleeved neon-green t-shirt to the kitchen where my parents had exchanged the look and even my sister stilled. An unexpected announcement was rarely a good thing, but regardless, we were still required to drop everything and make haste to the town-square where the Teliboard was.
The Teliboard was the only television in the vicinity. It was massive, suspended over the town-square seemingly by nothing. It could be surrounded on all sides and viewed from all angles. All the people arrived at nearly the same time, most of us around the same distance from it, and we crowded in close. It was said that there was safety in numbers, but I was never so terrified as when we were packed by the thousands into the town-square, waiting for the massive electric billboard to flicker on and give us the news: good or bad.
Another five minutes passed before the screen lit and we saw Senator Josef Sly, the head of all the world as we knew it. My parents and sister raved over how wonderful he was and all the good he had done, and as for myself... well, quite frankly, I hated the man. I hated his smile, which was fake; his eyes, which were cold; his news, which was always bad.
He'd been elected the year I turned seven, after the death of Simeon Kirtland, our previous leader. Kirtland had been kind, but weak. He'd let too many people get away with too many moral crimes against humanity for the sake of keeping peace. He'd asked for peace, begged for peace, and even fought for peace, which was truly an irony. Peace was all he wanted, and then he'd gone and died an accidental death by a knife in the back.
"People of the vicinities," Sly announced loudly, (that was another thing I disliked about him: his voice, which was too loud), "I am here to make an announcement. Starting in the place we all rely on, China, there has been trouble, which will sweep across the entire world."
He fell silent, waiting for our responses. He was taunting us: waiting for us to react in fear. I was shocked that we weren't immune to fear at that point. No one spoke until a lady called forward.
"What is the trouble?"
Senator Sly gave a chilling smile meant to appear as a grimace. But he was an experienced faker, and I didn't believe for one moment that it had been his best stage moment, if he'd been trying. She'd just given him what he was looking for: proof that we were, truly, hanging onto his every word.
"There was an accident," he started darkly, and then seemed to change his tactic. "There is an epidemic running rampant throughout the world... and it kills within an hour of contraction."
No words of comfort, no guidance on how to stay safe, and no more information.
Screaming and chaos filled the town-square, and I held Calix tight to my side to avoid his getting run over in the riot. My eyes were still fixed on the Teliboard: waiting... watching...
Senator Josef Sly threw one more expression: a purely triumphant smile. He turned to the left and uttered, "Cut them off!" and then the screen went black.