Night And Day

• Jenny Qian, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2018

The night pierced through the village of lights but was suppressed. We continued with our business. Living life as the second generation after the disease wiped out all life on earth. Our parents were the outcasts, sent for underground mining labour or on other planets for data collection; they escaped being infected. The disease was an odd event in itself, discovered in a rural area, they thought it perished but the northern government kept it, bred it and it grew. Finally, they released it as a declaration of their dominance over the world.
The disease killed every living thing on Earth. Our village was named Brighton, meaning light, that drove away the darkness.
We are completely in quarantine from the rest of the destroyed world. On a rather unaffected island with high radiation; wearing protective suits in the morning and living life at night without them. The only living thing they say is us. And of course, the different service machines that seemed ever-present.
Now the old man, the only mystery that didn’t involve history or the disease. He was terrifying. There were rumours about him being one of the infected people that once worked with the older generation to bring this disaster upon us. He sluggishly walked up the street every day to a hill where the radiation was too high for even our suits. He always came down alive.
Recently, a new addition has been going along with him. A piece of flat metal attached to an iron pole. Parents shuffled their children away from him and some reported to the police. They couldn’t do anything, like they ever do, about him since he didn’t break any laws. We could only leave him be. Many audacious young people have tried to converse with him, without being given even a sideward glance, they ran off without interest.
The man strutted up and down the hill daily at midnight when the village lights shone their brightest. Just as we got used to his presence, he disappeared.
It took a while for us to find out that he died. Peacefully in his old house down the street. They held an auction for his antiques and planned on reconstruction over his land.
A young man purchased the metal on a pole. Carved onto it, he saw the faint words. The hill. Before we knew it, our protective suits were on and a small group of us, the strongest men and women of Brighton, strode up the hill.
It took a while for us to get there, and unsure of what we are about to see, we paused just behind the crest of the hill. One of the women who went on let out a gasp, following her, we saw a word on a plaque we only ever saw in our history books. Flowers. And beyond it, a patch of colourful objects, swaying in the wind.