The Pedestrian's Niece

Fahrenheit 451 fan fiction

2037, 15 years after the atomic wars.

     “Quick, Ralph!” Leonard chirped. “Hand me that fuse spool, it’s a good thing we got 1000 yards of the stuff, huh? Gives us more time to run away!” Leonard smiled as he jostled Ralph’s hat. Leonard and Ralph had been blowing stuff up since they were kids, but this time they weren’t just using bottle rockets and fire crackers. Leonard said this one wasn’t going to be like the others. This one was big, this explosion, this one meant something. The pair ran through the stripped down, skeletal halls of the abandoned building. Rotting floorboards complained loudly beneath the two young men, it wasn’t used to bearing weight, even a load so light as Leonard and Ralph was enough to make the floors cry out. Wind blew into the place through a thousand openings making the building whistling and humming like an out of tune organ. Old leaves were scattered all throughout the place and made it smell faintly of smoky tobacco and rich, damp soil. The rooms perfumed with the scent of decay were intoxicating and reminded Leonard of the autumns spent on the grounds of this once wondrous building.
     The two of them ran at the pinhole of light that led them out of the ruins of the old place. Ralph handed the length of fuse to Leonard. Leonard took out a book of matches from his pocket, then he looked at Ralph and started talking more at him than to him.
     “This is a big thing, Ralph. People will talk about it. And it’s about time it’s done! Think about this place, Ralph, think about how many people have come through here. Think about all the writers, and politicians, actors, and astronauts, how grand it once was!  Now just look how it stands there. Empty and grown over, beat down and tread upon. It’s a damn shame.
     “We don’t leave the corpses of people out in the sun to rot, and turn to dust, and we don’t put them in the ground out of sight anymore either. We cremate them, we send them into oblivion. It’s the only decent thing to do. To get rid of the body like that. When we buried them you couldn’t remember the person despite their tomb stone. That’s all you see when you think about them, just a grey stone and dates. They’re not gone and they’re not here. That’s why we stopped burring people. When we cremate them and scatter the ashes they’re free, and then they’re free in our minds too!” Leonard excitedly tapped the side of his head, Ralph just listened. It wasn’t that Ralph didn’t get what they were doing, but Leonard was so good at putting his thoughts into words that it never bothered him to listen. Leonard went on.
     “They’re not locked in those cramped graves anymore. They’re more alive without the body being in a hole in the ground.”
     “So I thought, why don’t we do it to institutions too, Ralph? Why should this place not deserve the respect of a body. People were made here, molded here! If anything could be close to being human, having a consciousness, it would be places like this. So much life has been lived here it’s just impossible to think that none of it rubbed off on the walls of the place!”
     “So we shouldn’t just leave buildings like this when they’re used up to be fenced off and beaten down by years and years of disuse. It’s cruel. That’s why we have to blow the old place up! It can be great again, if we do this.”
     “But what if they don’t get it? What if people don’t understand what we’re doing?” Ralph asked.
     “They will” Leonard replied confidently. “The ones like us, the ones who see things clear will get it. They’ll know that we saved this place by destroying it.” Leonard looked to Ralph and handed him the book of matches and the fuse. Ralph accepted it. Then Leonard went on speaking.
     “See, I think all great places deserve to be blown up. I think as soon as a place is put out of use it should be demolished. Before the local school boys throw rock through all the windows, and children start telling stories of how ghosts sulk around the place”
     “It’s all that reasoning that I’m glad Atlantis was sucked up by the ocean. It’s pure and untouched in our minds. Not like how Rome sits there like the shed skin of the human race.” Leonard shivered like he was trying to shake the dusk of a thousand years off his back. “You go there, and you see the Coliseum or the Roman Forum and your tour guides tell you, ‘This once great place’ that’s what they say, ‘this once great place’. And they’re right. It’s not great anymore, it’s just bones now, Ralph. We can touch it and we’re all the worse for it.”
    Leonard nodded to Ralph who then struck a match and reverently lit the fuse. The two of them turned to run away from the place laughing. The fuse rushed back into the building to find its charges. Then in a storm of cannon fire and thunder the place was washed free of its foundation as two young men ran away as fast as they could, letting the golden flash of light heat and bathe their backs. As they ran they remembered the place as it used to be. Grand.
                              
                               * * *    

 43 years later.

     The Fireman had been watching the girl on the bench for a while now. She had just been sitting there. She did not have the electric shells in her ears to listen her music, she was not looking at the Sunday comic which had an extra five pages to hold her interests, and she did not take any of the colorful capsules to ease the passage of time till she went either to work or bed. The girl simply sat and watched as people passed by. As she sat and watched she would occasionally toss small crumbs of bread, almost furtively to the little birds that would land near her, though most of the birds seemed disinterested in what she had to offer them and would shortly fly off. She would look up to the sky from time to time as if it were a parlor screen, like she was searching for something more than the clouds and the sun in the sky. The Fireman had watched her for about half an hour as he drank his coffee and ate his small breakfast. When he was finished he decided to go have a talk with her. It wouldn’t do to have people just sitting about, she must have something she could be doing.
     “Hello, what are you doing?” he said, straight to the point as was his habit, as was every one’s habit. The girl looked at his face for a moment before looking at the rest of him. When she looked at his face her eyes casually fixed him, but as they rolled down and the rest of him was revealed to her she seemed to get smaller. It must have been his uniform. She said nothing.
     “Hello, I said, and what are you doing, I said. I should like an answer.” He spoke again in the same terse manner.
     “Well, I’m just sitting is all.” Said the girl, small and quiet with her eyes no longer fixed on the sky.
     “Do you not have work you could be doing?”
     “Not today. It’s my off day.”
     “Then why don’t you go to a fun park, or go racing on the interstate with your friends? It will hardly do to have people just sitting round.” He gave a small chuckle at the absurdity of the thought. “And what were you doing with the birds?” the Fireman asked after he had his laugh.
     “I was trying to feed them, but most of the birds don’t pay any mind to the crumbs. It’s been so long since people have tried to feed them, they don’t really know what to make of me. And I find that I’m not too fond of fun parks and most people aren’t fond enough of me to take me racing, though I don’t mind. My family is moving soon so it’s okay that I don’t have any friends here. I’ll make many friends where I move too.” As she spoke she kept glancing between the salamander on the Fireman’s uniform and his eyes.
     “Feed the birds?” he repeated to himself. “How strange.”
     “My uncle told me that, at one point in time, people used to feed the birds a lot, and that there used to be more than just the little brown ones there are here. There used to be birds with blue feathers, and birds with red feathers, and birds with yellow feathers. There were some birds that had jeweled tufts on their heads like little papal tiara’s. They aren’t here anymore. They must have all died in the war or flown away somewhere else.” The girl’s voice was dreamy and pure. The sonorous intonation of her voice somehow put the Fireman at ease, while also making him want to grab her shoulders and shout at her to not speak in such a way. He had never heard anyone speak like she did. Speak differently. He wanted to hear more. He knew that there were people out there like this girls and he knew they were dangerous. Cpt. Beatty had warned him, warned all the Firemen about people like her. Though still he could not help himself from talking to her, learning from her. She had more things to tell him, he knew it, and he needed to find them out. Never had he met someone so strange before.
     “Can I sit?” he asked in a voice almost as shy as the one she had used with him a few moments before.
     “Do you have anything else, for the birds, I mean?” he spoke quietly now, as if something had shifted between them.
     “My uncle says everything is for the birds now.” It was her turn to laugh, and she did so. Her laugh was even more musical than her normal voice. It flowed and blossomed. Her laugh was not mechanical nor orderly. It was not the laugh of people watching some idiot clown struck over, and over again on the head with club; one piercing HA! For every blow. Her laugh was not the laughs that were offered to the fizzing, static electric screens. Her laugh sounded like something old and magical. Her laugh was like a river. What was even more maddening about her laugh was that he couldn’t tell why she was laughing, if it was some joke she said he had not the capacity to understand it.
     “Why are you laughing?” he felt embarrassed to ask, but this and so many other things he needed her to tell him.
      “Oh, it’s just an old expression. I suppose it doesn’t have much meaning anymore.” She said with a brief sigh. “Anyways, yes, I do have more things for the birds, and some bread too.” She produced a small stale square of white bread from a coat pocket. She broke it in half and handed the Fireman one of the pieces.
     “What did you say your name was?”
     “I never did say what my name was, but its Clarisse McClellan.”
                          
                                * * *
     After Clarisse spoke with the Fireman she decided not to take the monorail home and walk instead. She thought that if she walked home it would give more of a chance at seeing her other Fireman. Clarice knew she would not actually be able to tell him that she was leaving, but at least she could talk to him one last time. She did not see her Fireman on her last walk home. When she made it home she walked into the family room. The family room at Clarisse’s house had walls with no screens. Instead the walls were adorned with warm burgundy paint and topped with old framed prints of what used to be famous paintings. Clarice often thought of her house as an after image that gets burned into the back of your eyes after an explosion that washed away everything else, other times she thought of it as a time machine that broke down outside of its century and had no way to go back. But most of all she though of the house as a seed, a thing so small, but with so much potential. Her uncle sat in a chair in the corner of the room with a book, though he seemed to not be reading it. He just sat with it open on his lap and shifted anxiously. He greeted her with a curt nod and quickly asked her a question.
     “Where were you?”
     “I was in the city, I wanted to see it before we left, I wanted to say good bye, I guess.”
     “That was a dangerous thing you did. There are people looking for us. The city is no longer friendly to us.”
     “This city is my first home, and I don’t think I will ever return to see it again, so I thought it would be fitting to go on one last walk. I think you always miss your first home even if it doesn’t miss you, even if it’s as unfriendly as mine, and there are always a few things that are worth remembering.”
     “So what did you say goodbye to?” her uncle had set the book on the small table beside him and was noticeably relaxing now that Clarisse was home.
     “Just some little birds and a Fireman.”
     “You saw your Fireman?”
     “Not my Fireman, well I suppose he is now, but it was a different Fireman.”
     “What did he want?”
     “He saw me sitting and thought that I should be busy like everyone else.”
     “Should we leave early? Will he be trouble?”
     “No, he won’t cause us any harm, we just spoke.”
     “You really seem to draw the attention of these Firemen. It really is good that we’re leaving, but why do you think they find you so interesting?”
      “Who wouldn’t be interested in someone who’s seventeen and crazy?” Clarisse smiled and walked over to a chair near her uncle, who gave a small huff as she sat.
     “But you know that there are no more police men so now the firemen have to keep their eyes open.” She answered.
     “You know,” he said to her as she examined the book he had set aside a few moments before. “I don’t think the Firemen are as dangerous as I once did. It seems to me that more and more of them are having their homes burned down.”
     “Really? How do you know that?”
     “I know because that’s what my friends are telling me. When I first starting hearing it I thought it was absurd, but the more I thought on it the more it seemed to make sense.”
     “What makes sense about it?”
      “They have to be more awake. You said it yourself, they are the ones who watch, while everyone else has their eyes glued shut. And who is around books, Clarisse?” she paused for a moment and thought before she answered.
     “The Firemen and our friends.”
     “Yes, and don’t you think after you spend years burning them and being around them that something could rub off on you, like the yellow of a dandelion?” Uncle Leonard reached over and gently tapped his niece’s chin. Clarisse gave a small smile as her uncle withdrew his hand.
     “So they fall in love with the books?” Clarisse joked back.
     “No, but given time they have the capacity to. It’s just part of what we do as human beings, we change. When were given enough time we may even learn somethings.. And this is one of those rare times in human history where it seems that we can only change for the better. Most of the worst has already happened, so much of life has been stripped away and we’re just living off of bones. People are starving and they don’t know it, they just need a push like your Firemen. We can’t change them all and not right now, but the time is almost here. I have seen how quickly the world can change.”
     “Why did the world change the last time? How did we get here?” Clarisse’s uncle quickly glanced out the window when she asked this question and held his eyes on the empty streets before he spoke to her again.
     “I don’t know. All I know is that it did, by the time I was born you could still read, but not in public and you had to be 18, but we were so ingrained with all the other things to do we didn’t care. I remember the propaganda we used to see, there were books carved out in the shape of guns being held to the sides of children’s heads. The child was always the center of the photo with an adult standing off to the side and you could never see the adults face but they were always dressed as a teacher or a priest, you could tell because there were desks in the school one and in the church you could see the blurry outline of a congregation sitting rows of pews to better view the indoctrination.
     The government said books were lies and they caused harm to many people. Wars were fought and people died over the words of some long past prophet that supposedly only he knew the truth of everything. But there were so many prophets who knew the truth and they all taught such vastly different thoughts and ideas from one another So the government said they weren’t worth it, that they were all just words, silly words! How could we fight for simple words? Schools started to teach that none of them were truth because there is no truth. And the books that weren’t marked as holy could be sometime more dangerous. People read them and the books gave them ideas, and ideas are just as dangerous as wars. Ideas have a swift roots and are not easily killed.
     But people took to the thoughts of their government because their voice was so loud. We believed that the government was showing us the truth. Anything that wasn’t directly in front of us was not real. There was no god, no devils, and nothing after death. We simply live and die, why not live fun? Why bother with ideas and books and wars and things that only bring pain? So we did away with everything old. I remember how my friends and I used go out at night to blow up old buildings because they were part of a dead and cruel past. We thought we did them an honor, but we were just helping to erase our history, because we blamed it for our crimes amongst each other, crimes against mankind.” Clarisse’s uncle paused for a moment and he looked at his niece and said to her, “we must pack our final things, we’re leaving before dawn tomorrow.” He stood up and walked away as if to leave the room, but he paused at the door for a moment and said one last thing to his niece before ending the conversation.
     “You know, I won’t miss this place at all, I think it’s wretched. After we leave this house will be burned down. Washed away. There is so little soil for things to take root here. Where we are going our seeds can truly grow again.” He looked at his nieces face for a moment before he left the room and he thought to himself that the human race was about to find its way out of another dark age.

Author's Note

i"m interested in hearing about anything that needs improvement.

Reviews

[Marie]

You use commas where I would use semi-colons, but I am obsessed with semi-colons. I know an editor who would accept anything with semi-colons in it.
I prefer work shorter than this, but, it's a good story, and I see no room for improvement.