The boy peered up, starry-eyed, at the sky overhead, the mauve heavens reflecting in his void-colored eyes. He could stand there for hours, studying the dotted lines and arrows and circles that spanned overhead in a grandiose answer sheet scrawled into the atmosphere.
"What are you looking at?" his father asked, displeasure in his tone. "You can't stare up at the sky, son. That's when we'll have trouble."
"But the lines…" he began, pointing up with a confident gesture. "There are dotted lines up in the-"
"There are no lines in the sky!" snapped the man, impatient and tense. "Escept for the government's chemtrails, but those are put there to protect us from the dangers of free thought. What are they teaching you kids in school these days?"
Steve let out a quiet sigh, kicking at the red earth that stained his white sneakers with its dust. "Can we go back inside now? I'm hungry."
The man shook off the boy's hand when he tried to hold his, feeling uncomfortable with the small, clammy appendage and its needy fingers. "No, son, we have to wait until the secret police tell us it's safe."
"I miss my real dad," grunted the child, shoving his hands into his pockets. "He saw the lines, too."
"There are no lines, son," insisted the replacement. "Now stand up straight and praise the beams for their mercy, Scott."
"My name's Steve," he sighed for the tenth time that day. "Steve Ca-"
"Carlsberg," finished the man whose silicon face mask was slipping down to reveal some horrid, insect-like head nestled within. "No relationship to the Outsider. No relation to the whistleblower."
Steve bit his lip, but remembered his father's last screamed advice as the secret police dragged him away. He had to survive until he was old enough to spread the truth. He had to wait to speak up until he was a man who could command attention from his fellow citizens.
"Steve Carlsburg," hummbed the insect man, the name buzzing out of his mandibles that protruded out through his mask's mouth.
Looking up into the now magenta sky, the boy followed the arrows until they disappeared into the horizon made jagged by those strange, nonexistent landmarks called "mountains".
"It's safe to go inside again, Stanley," said his new father.
"Steve," was the quiet reply. Sighing and following strange, limping being back into the house, he cast one last, wistful glance up at the sprawling heavens as the sun began to sink, shrieking, below the edge of their desert world. The circles and arrows and dotted lines told him why his life had become like this, why his hometown had turned on his outsider father who had whispered tales of a far off land called "Oh-high-oh".
"Close the door before you grow another eye," chided the false parent, calling from the kitchen. "Then come in to it. Your orange milk is getting cold."
Steve turned slowly, rubbing out the moisture from his upper left eye with the heel of his hand as he pulled the door shut behind him.
"Coming, Dad," he murmured, biting back the truths that stacked themselves up on his tongue. He had to survive until the day he could fulfil his father's final wish. Someday, Steve Ca- … Steve Carlsberg would be a name that demanded respect and stood for truth and justice.