I have always believed that the best song to begin or end a story with is "Yellow Submarine", sung by the Beatles. So I don't mind if you've got music playing while you read this, but I'd be well humored if you'd make it that song. Because I always wanted it to be played at my funeral, and now that it seems this will be the best funeral I get, I'd like you to play it now.

It's funny how my life didn't really start until the world ended. I was -- hmm. I would have been about twelve or so. No. Fourteen, surely. And then of course you know the year and the date -- July 28th. That's my birthday. I've regretted it ever since, because it happens to coincide with a lot of very unpleasant executions, and it's terribly hard to explain to strangers that you're not lying so you look more patriotic.

It was my fifteenth birthday. A friend of mine from school had offered to take me in; see, my parents had been among the first people accused and jailed for crimes. And she went to see the executions, because her uncle (or cousin, or something) was scheduled to be executed that day. I can hear her saying it; she told me over breakfast, in her careful, almost English pronunciation.

We didn't get special places or anything because we were -- or she was -- related to the soon-to-be deceased. It was a terrible jostle, but everyone was surprisingly civil, being that it was the first public execution in a very long time. And that the man who wound up being executed was so famous. Jeb Batchelder. His execution ought to have been -- had, in fact, been scheduled for -- months earlier, but he had been sick, very ill, and had been kept hidden by Anna's uncle.

It really didn't amount to very much, I suppose. They led him up onto the stage, and I remember how he stumbled and almost fell going up the steps. The crowd gave a great laugh, and I thought it was a terrible laugh, bloodthirsty. Like a wolf's laugh, or a shark's laugh, if a wolf or a shark could laugh. Hungry.

They stood him on the stage and read off a list of his crimes to the crowd. I saw he was shaking, and there was a spot of blood between his eyebrows. He was very pale, and I remember thinking then that they would have to call it off, he looked as if he would die of his own accord any moment.

They asked him if he had anything to say, and he licked his lips, and for a moment he didn't say anything, so they put the noose about his neck and the priest started saying some kind of Latin babble, and he said:

"I'm just going outside--"

The trapdoor went with a bang when the executioner hit the lever with his foot, and he was cut off in the middle of it. The crowd roared, but I could see the shapes of words on his lips. I wish I could tell you what he said, but I could never read lips. I knew the rest of the quotation, though. It's what Lawrence Oates said when he walked out into the blizzard to die; "I am just going outside and may be some time."

I thought it very apt for some reason. He wasn't very old when he died; neither of them were. Barely in their thirties. Jeb, though, looked old.

Anna and I went home in her little Honda, and I don't remember anything in particular of the journey. Pity; it was one of my last rides in a motorcar. We had cake and tea, and I remember Anna was laughing over some stupid joke I'd told when the man knocked at the door. That's how we knew it was serious, see; normally, people ring the doorbell.

She got up and went to answer the door, and stayed away for just a moment. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I heard her say very clearly:

"Thank you."

And then she shut the door and came back to the kitchen where we were sitting. She sat down at the table with me, and she sipped her tea, breathing in the steam for a moment. I watched her, serenely confident that it would have been a wrong house or someone soliciting.

She spoke into her mug of tea. "Uncle Nathan's dead."

I watched her carefully for any sign of emotion, and asked, "How?"

"Shot himself this morning." She closed her eyes. "Funeral's to be day after tomorrow."

I went into the back room that had become my bedroom. I'd hardly known him. Well, I'd never met him, to be exact. Just like I'd never had a chance to meet Jake, who'd been Anna's first friend. He'd died before I ever met Anna. And Adolph I'd only met once or twice; he was a bit flighty, one might say. Bird had gone to California with Shane as escort a while back, and so I'd hardly met the two of them.

Suddenly, though, I was very aware of how close we all were to death. Anna and Adolph (and Bird, maybe) were given a secure status in the new administration. Shane was safe as well, more or less; a fine, upstanding young man, if you want to put it that way. Me, though -- I was the child of two known criminals. Who knew what they might have taught me?

The funeral is the last relatively normal time I remember. Anna and I got into our best clothes and she drove us to the church where the ceremony was being held. It was an open-casket funeral -- God knows how they managed that -- and so I took a moment and familiarized myself with my face. Anna had photographs of him somewhere, but I wanted to get to know him as best I could.

Someone brushed past me, and I heard them say something in another language. I didn't care much; I was trying to get familiar with him. After my parents were taken away, Anna was my mother, really, and I knew that he would have acted as best a father as he could.

Afterwards, I mainly stood around the lobby while Anna fielded questions from the people who somehow knew she was related to the man in the casket. A few people said hello, and I was starting to get quite bored and fed up with the entire situation when someone famous bumped into me.

"Oops, sorry," he said, and went on. He looked familiar... strawberry-blondish hair, bluish-grey eyes, freckles across the bridge of his nose. Suddenly, I recognized him. Who wouldn't have? It was Iggy.

"I -- uh -- sorry," I mumbled after him, and that was the last I ever saw of him. It's not much, is it? I know, you were expecting more to come of that, but no more came of it.

So Anna and I lived on for a while, and things kept getting worse. Only it didn't seem they were getting worse at the time, just that things were going on their previously scheduled ways. The price of oil and gas kept going up, so Anna talked with Shane over the phone about switching to coal for a boiler. The boiler got installed while I was away at school, and we started getting shipments of coal in. She had another man in who did something to the fixtures, and we stopped having light switches then. You turned a little knob on the bottom of the wall fixtures to turn them on, and there was a chain on the ceiling fan in the living room to turn the light on.

And the war started winding down. The President called it off and made a big deal of apologizing to whichever countries it was we'd been fighting, and took the troops out immediately. It was wonderful. I remember asking Anna to go to a party a school friend was holding over it, and she said yes. I remember they still ran their house on gas, and I'd got so used to the boiler that it was strange not hearing it running in the background anymore.

We were asked to start using cars less, and the amazing thing was that people did quit using their cars so much. Anna got a horse and carriage from somewhere and sold the Honda for scrap. My friends started showing up in overpacked little cars, or driving Priuses with a full complement of passengers. More and more people started to get carriages, although it wasn't many for a while; often I had companions for the ride to school, and we rattled along the streets in a companionable silence while I talked to the horse.

That was another funny thing. People like Anna -- the changed people -- started sifting to the top of the social order. Suddenly there were a lot of them wanting to ride with me in the carriage in the mornings, and fewer and fewer of the normal kids. There was a huge social divide forming then. I don't know how we missed its formation; it was like a range of mountains shoving up from the middle of a continent. Absolutely huge.

So when oil started to really run out, everyone started freaking out in concert. Because most of us were all right -- there were deposits of coal enough to run us for a long time -- but the rest of the world wasn't, and we were in danger. They were after us. Shane was called home from California, but we never saw him come home. We got the new version of a Western Union telegram: Regret to inform you...

It was a young man, with brown hair in a Beatles-style cut and greyish eyes. They had a peculiar sheen to them, and I remember he smelled of the sea, as if he'd just come running to the house from some beach magically close to us. He wore a neat grey uniform, almost military, and he seemed slightly puzzled as to what he was doing there.

He had known Shane, he told us, and assured us that Bird and Pablo were fine, had in fact married shortly before. But when the order to evacuate came -- and he twisted his hat in his hands -- Shane refused to go. He gave his things to this young man, and told him where we lived, and bade him give us the news of him that there was.

Anna and I looked at him as one looks at the newspaper one has already read. He had nowhere to go, he said; like me, everyone who had been his family had died in the first of the purges. He had such a pitiable face, and so Anna took him in. He introduced himself properly as Omega sometime thereafter, and I joked:

"Have you got a twin named Alpha then?"

"No," he said, "at least I don't think so."

We laughed, and from then on it was understood that he was part of our family. Bird and Pablo passed us by when they came back to Denver a while after, but they never moved in for more than a day as they went eastwards. They were looking for a place in Kansas or Tennessee maybe, they said. We wished them well.

Adolph dropped by once; he'd gotten a job with the government, he told us, and was going east to Washington, D.C. to work there. He seemed a bit sadder and older now that Nathan was dead, but we gave him good luck and Godspeed on his way. The trains had come back into service, and so we got to send him off from Union Station. That was a treat, going downtown like that.

Oh, I bemoaned the loss of our beautiful old architecture with some of the remodeling they were doing, but without oil it had to be done. They were too inefficient, those lovely fifties constructions. It was strange, though, because some of the new stuff got to stay, and so did most of the stuff from a century before, but almost nothing in between. It was just as strange watching from our suburb as downtown got flatter and flatter; Anna took pictures every day, with a film camera of course, and made a careful record of all that.

At first, Omega was very little more than our shy, uncertain house guest. We treated him like family, and Anna often said he reminded her very much of Nathan when he was young, with his weird grey eyes and shyness. He looked oddly ageless, like Anna did, and a few times we were asked by strangers if I was theirs. Anna blushed a bit more than she ought to have, and Omega would slowly put together an answer. By "slowly" I don't mean that he was a bit dense or anything. He was brilliant, just as Nathan had been, but he thought more in pictures than in English words; he told me once that a lot of his thinking was pictures, with a few simple concepts in English or Chinese. Those were his primary languages, and I remember hearing a lot of shouting in Mandarin when one of his projects didn't come off as he'd thought it would.

So I came to like him, and as a teenager with school to worry about, it was a while before I noticed that Anna had fallen in love with him. I called him by his name, mostly, and so did Anna, except when she called him "my darling soldier boy". And she was about the only one who could ever translate the notes he made for things, or sometimes his talk.

Omega was ferociously shy, remember, and if you asked him to jump he'd ask how high. Any order from anyone sent him scurrying, and we eventually got it set up that we'd take care of our own things, even if it meant dropping our current work sometimes, because Anna and I hated so to see him scurrying about like a servant or a pet. He was a terror when he got into his work, though. Omega was a big one for mechanical things, and he fixed up our boiler most of the time.

Once I really started to see the two of them being so in love, I asked if I might move down into the basement. Mostly it was not wanting to bother the two of them acting like lovebirds, but some of it was wanting to use some of the coal for my sketching. I'd gotten into sketching as a way to pay off some of the cost of the utilities to thank Anna, and I wanted to try the coal as a tool. And of course I agreed to load up the boiler in the nights when it needed refreshing with coal. Sometimes I'd think back to my childhood, heating up water for noodles on the electric stove, and I laughed. Because it seemed so very long ago.

Some time passed, and there were presidential elections. Unanimous. Max was voted President, with Fang as Vice President. We didn't really care, because now that there were no more planes, Washington was so awfully far away.

Omega and Anna married after a while. I would have been in college by then; I was at Greenhame, which was a school that taught from just out of middle school upwards. They were newly established then, and I was more concerned with making top grades. I wasn't really worried about a job; I'd gotten good at sketches, and there was money there. Portraits -- old-fashioned, paint portraits -- were coming back into style again. Oh, the spontaneous snapshot had an audience, but more people liked being caught when they were prepared for preservation. I made a good bit of money doing whole-family portraits for a while. There were no questions for me because Anna was so well known, and it was widely assumed I was her child or close relative due to the last name.

Since I had been in high school, back when change had begun to roll, the divide had grown ever wider. The mountains had become Himalayas. My old friends were now far below me on the social level. It was as if I'd been catapulted upward with Anna while they sank into a sinkhole.

I became an artist in my own right; I was never famous, but I held my own. People came to me to have portraits done; I shared a little studio with a friend of mine, and I remember it was so hot then. I drew portraits of people until my wrist got sore, and then I'd go over them with paints to my meticulous notes.

I was doing one such portrait when we got the news that Washington had been bombed. I dropped my paintbrush and ran downstairs to listen to our radio. We didn't watch a lot of television; it had begun to go out of fashion, curiously. Radio had a certain retro chic, so that was where the news came.

The President and Vice President were safe. So were the members of Congress and the House. Civilian casualties weren't known at the moment, but until danger was disabled, the seat of government was being moved pretty much as far inland as one could get: Denver.

There was a bit of celebration, but mostly it was laced with fear. Because that meant we were abandoning the coasts, which were our only vulnerable borders now, since Canada and Mexico and the little countries in the Caribbean had all joined up with us for protection, and the only attacks could come by sea. We had closed ourselves off from Europe for a while. All news of them would come by radio. It was almost a self-imposed siege.

And then I can't tell you very much about their actual moving in, because Anna and Omega and I were busy at home. There is a portrait existing from around that time; all three of us wearing our best clothes and looking stiff. Omega is wearing the clothes in which he came to us, his cap cocked to his left; Anna an ice-blue dress; I'm wearing black, a shirt with slim sleeves and a long skirt showing the edges of white lacy petticoats beneath. We could be a family from my childhood at the places where you dressed up in historical clothes and got your picture taken. Except our portrait was made in paints, and so for the one long sitting where the artist sketched us, I remember having to stand calmly beside Anna, with Omega behind me smelling of the sea. Anna was wearing vanilla perfume, and someone outside was singing:

"As we live a life of ease,

Every one of us

Has all he needs."

I realized that that wasn't when my childhood ended, although I might have thought that before. I was of age, certainly, but my childhood had ended once the purges began. It was almost as if before the purges everyone had simply gone along as they always had, and then the purges had come, and everything scattered into a new order.

But that moment still seems to stand at the end of an era, for it's the last time I remember being an American, part of one nation, under God, and cockily sure I was safe from all worldly harms. The bombs came soon after the portrait was finished. Thank God they weren't nuclears; we'd have all died. They were just bombs of the usual sort, launched by decaying rockets from countries far away. They were really the last news we ever got from the outside, for they must have been very desperate to launch bombs to try and make us give up our supplies.

It was soon after that that the coronation must have occurred, and the famous portrait of Iggy and Max and Fang was taken. It was nothing special as photographs went, but it was the last photo of Iggy ever taken. Because he died a few weeks later.

I'm so sorry that I haven't given you any definite dates, but it all runs together in my recollections, like eggs in a pan. All I can tell you is the things that happened, and what order they happened in. And sometimes I can't do that very well.

Shortly after Iggy's death -- some sort of accident with explosives, no body recovered -- Anna gave birth to her first child. It was a little girl, named Charlotte, who had her father's eyes and her mother's light blond hair. She reminded me a little bit of Nathan in the family album Anna had somehow procured, looking much like any other young boy but for the pale eyes and hair. It was a little bit strange, having a small child in the house, but more and more I only visited my former home occasionally, living with one of my friends in a downtown tenement. We shared a studio as well, and I did a tolerable profit doing portraits and sketches. I sent money home to Anna when I could, though she lived a rather short way away. There wasn't a lot of public transportation available back then, so mostly I came home because I knew someone else was going that way and could give me a ride.

It ended up so that the first time I really met Charlotte -- whose full name was Charlotte Johanna Sinclair -- she was three years old. I had never been very good with children, and so I simply introduced myself as her Aunt, and Aunt I was ever after. Whenever I found time to come home from the city, I made sure to say hello to her, and I suppose that she made a mirror of myself. Where Charlotte -- who preferred Cassie among friends or family -- grew up in an expanded two-story house with a few servants and gaslamps and a carriage in which one went to church, I was a girl in a one-story house in the suburbs where we did all the work ourselves and went about town in a speedy motorcar. So I began to see Cassie as the girl I might have been, had I been born later.

The servants were the odd thing; at some point between my fifteenth birthday and Cassie's twelfth birthday, those who were not changed began to take lower positions generally than those who were. It's so hard to explain, though. You shall just have to attempt for yourself. And so there were servants again, who weren't one's social equals, but were lower than one in society. To me, and everyone of a certain age, it was as if we'd slipped back in time to an age which seemed inconceivably far away in our own youth. But now we were living in it again.

On Cassie's twelfth birthday, the last of the unrest ended. Cassie and I had almost shared a birthday; the doctor Anna had consulted placed her due date in late July or early August, but Cassie was born on the 17th of August. We still celebrated each others' birthdays, and I made it a habit of mine to leave the city a few days before my birthday and stay with Anna and Omega until shortly after Cassie's birthday. The summers were dreadful just around then, and it was a great relief to feel the breeze in the suburbs where Anna lived. Once, the house had been rather far from downtown, but now it was close to the outskirts of the city proper. The city had come out to meet the house since the King and Queen had set up there. Almost everyone in the country had begun to cluster around the city; those who didn't come to the new capitol stayed around New York. Jokingly, we called ourselves New London.

It was on her birthday that a message was received in New York from London that the fighting in Europe had stopped, and they wished to make peace with us. Peace was to be duly made, for the King and Queen knew it would be wise to befriend Britain; despite their relative helplessness in my youth, they were still a guiding light for much of the world.

But we didn't get that news for a while; trains only go so fast. What was important to us was the appearance of a man anyone sane would have thought long dead. Nathan's older brother, John. He had long been thought dead in a car accident that occurred in 1964, when his brother was only a few months old. Yet here he was... like a dark reflection of his brother. His blond hair was more sunny than dead white, his eyes more blue than silver in color. And of course both of his eyes had sight.

He did not pause for very long, though, and the only tenuous proof we have of his existence after 1964 is a sketch I made, not much more than a doodle, really. It shows him well enough, though, caught off his guard by a moment of hilarity. I think I shall always remember his laugh. Anna tells me that his brother never laughed very much, so it was odd to see the brother laughing like anyone else. Somehow it was a memorable laugh.

So that is the story of the most interesting times of my life. My name is Melanie Sinclair. I have never married. As far as I know, I have no living relatives, and took the name of my adopted mother, Anna Sinclair, who married Omega and has a small child, Charlotte. I lived through the purges, and I saw my country go from democracy to monarchy, and I saw the rise of a new social order. And the best moment of my life was sitting for a portrait with Anna and her new husband, and hearing someone sing outside:

"So we sailed up to the sun

'Til we found the sea of green

And we lived beneath the waves

In our yellow submarine...

"As we live a life of ease

Every one of us

Has all he needs;

Sky of blue

And sea of green

In our yellow submarine..."

Funny, isn't it?

This was originally conceived as an entry for the Fireplace writing contest, but I decided to enter another story I had come up with. I thought this still deserved a place, and so I chose to upload it.