Birthday Update Fest – Number 9

This is my new APH ongoing work… I expect it to be about the same length as "Rise of the Fallen Land," maybe longer, maybe a chapter or two shorter. I hope to update it every week, but I'm sure if you've read my things before you know that isn't quite likely with my schedule. Well anyway, here is the prologue!

And the world comes crashing down. A saying, an overdramatic sentence used in books and movies and all sorts of useless crap that I never got to even look at, let alone read or watch. But I'd heard that saying. I'd seen it in the letters my distant family would write from England, using the paper they were allowed with to write secrets letters to us. The world came crashing down, they would say. Tumble, tumble, tumble. A few minutes and then it's in ruins.

My world was just about as sheltered as you could get. A small town in inland Massachusetts, far from the dangers of the docks. I was born there, went to school there, and was probably going to finish my life there, if I was lucky. And I wasn't.

They came and burned everything down. The Lobsters, I call them, as do all the rest of the people in my town, probably in all the towns. We had all thought that they'd leave Massachusetts alone, for after all, we had been the most willing to follow the rules, the most eager go get things back to the way they had used to be, to cooperate and get rid of the imposed punishments. But we weren't even last. No, not even close. They came to Massachusetts before rebel Maryland, before outspoken Virginia, before loudmouthed New York, before insistent Delaware.

We were wrong to think that they'd just leave us alone. For they just showed up in their red uniforms, guns and torches at the ready. They got everyone out of the houses and burned every last building down. They rounded up all of us boys over eleven and marched us out to the airport, leaving the parents and girls and younger kids just standing there, shocked, wondering what they were supposed to do with piles of ashes.

As we walked, my brother held my hand and cried. Sensitive Matthew, my unlucky twin. The water got trapped under his glasses and I cleaned them, holding tears in myself. I didn't want to go. But it's what we got for having the gall to be born in America. America, the group of rebel colonies that dared take on the greatest power on Earth. America, the group of rebel colonies that just wanted independence and lost any chance of it. America, the group of rebel colonies that dragged Canada down with them. America the failure.

America, still punished now after two hundred twenty-seven years since the failed Revolutionary War. And all of us, the unlucky boys, destined to be shipped back to England and honor the motherland in service. Just because we had the indecency to be born.

Sometimes I wish I hadn't been.

As we boarded the plane I squeezed Matthew's hand. Our eyes met – both covered by glasses, his blue-violet, mine ice blue – and we silently gave each other a promise. We wouldn't be separated. Not ever. No matter what the motherland had in store for us.