Bituminous Birth (Draft)
Blackly bred for battle in the Bashtin backwaters. Bleakly born in the brownish bathwater on the bitterest side of the Brutal Boundary. Bravely brought up behind Baron Balthazar’s broken barricade.
Bea read the autobiographical poem she had incised as cuneiform into her own forearm. Each of the strokes was deep enough that it depressed into her arm and ran as a valley, where a shallower cut would raise a scar. The scar was there, however. Resulting ridges of scar stood on either side of the knife strokes in relief to the indentation of the healed cuts.
The result was that, at the age of twelve, Bea could run her thumb across her arm, differentiating the words and letters of the alliterative assault.
She had been eight when the cruel dagger had been thrust into her shaking hand, fingers not yet long enough to wrap the blade’s handle entirely.
Bea peered out of the corner of her eye to the child at attention next to her in her row. He held a chunk of glass with a length of cord wrapped around the bottom half, forming a rudimentary handle to an even cruder blade. The dark-haired girl on her other side held a camping hatchet, the blade’s edge jagged from use by a previous owner, with a rust-colored dried liquid painted along that jagged edge.
“This is your weapon, until you take another one,” she had been instructed. “It is your fork, your pen, your fate, and your friend.” The voice resounded, echoing in all of those young ears.
“You have been practicing your Story.”
The voice paused.
Twelve year old Bea though back to the grueling hours copying those same three lines over and over onto the slate. Penmanship counted. Straight lines only. No curving lines. Bea thought back to how odd the capital B’s had looked, like two stacked sideways triangles. The next day, she imagined them as sideways mountain ranges. The next, the eyes her older siblings had carved into the gourd lanterns on Hallowed Eve.
She had written those thirty words, those one hundred sixty-five letters, and those same three periods so many times that it became a nervous tic of sorts. She would, at times, look down to see her right hand penning the letters in the air or tracing the valleys on her left forearm, realizing she had been doing it subconsciously.
“Today, your story becomes even more a part of you,” the voice resumed. “Take your ‘pen’…” the voice said, its owner so far in the distance it may not have had one. Bea watched as the rows of children ahead of her lifted their bladed weapons in waves in response to the word “pen”.
Bea raised her cruel dagger, suddenly so much more cruel.
“…and begin.” The voice finished.
The instructions, though terse, had been understood by all. Immediate compliance was expected. All knew the punishment.
Bea began.
The dagger ate at the skin of her left forearm. Bea now understood why they had written the letters of their stories with only straight lines.
Blood welled to the surface. Her blood. The blood that was supposed to be in her. Heat rose. The sun-reflected glints sparkled off of all those blades and danced in her vision.
Bea was staff sergeant now. She led a squad of nine other children ranging in age from ten to twelve. Each had their own three line Story cut into their left forearm. Bea knew each of their Stories by heart.
She stared ahead, looking to her platoon’s lieutenant, a fourteen year old named Saul. Saul’s face was laced with as many scars as any’s forearm.
Saul was tanned except where his scars glowed white on his muscled body. His hair was brown but for the hair bleached by the sun. His eyes were brown but reflected gold.
And yet, the most striking aspect of Saul was his left arm. Like everyone, his Story was carved into his forearm, but unlike most, his arm ended there, at the wrist. Though it had happened before Bea’s recruitment, the story still passed through the barracks on occasion before lights out.
Bea remembered when Troy, an eleven year old then, had whispered in her ear the sin Saul had committed that led to his dismemberment:
“Saul shared food!”
Bea, like everyone, knew that sharing food was forbidden. Soldiers were permitted to work together to hunt, fish, and gather. They were allowed to trade duties for food. But, nothing was given freely.
If anyone failed to procure food for themselves, they deserved to starve. Bea also knew that the punishment for any defiance of this philosophy—any of the philosophies—was steep.