Man Made

Man was on the brink of extinction. Only one village in all the world was left, and one horrible day, the fire came upon the village. People ran, screaming for Lord Kanti to come down and save them, begging for forgiveness, until Lord Kanti could bear the screams of the people no longer. He decided to give them one chance.

Down he came to the village, and there he saw a little girl, crying over the bodies of her burnt parents. He came to her and handed her a strange looking club.

"What will you do, little child?" he asked, "No amount of force shall bring this torrent down, neither any amount of begging. Fire has no mercy. You are the only one who can save your people. What will you do?"

The girl took the club and ran to the fire, then yelled up to it.

"Fire! Fire! You have taken my family, my village, my friends. Soon, you will take the whole world, and then you, too, will die. But if you allow me, I will protect you. If you burn little by little and allow man to rebuild, then you can live forever! Come down and rest upon this club. Soon there will be more for you to burn."

Slowly, slowly, the fire became smaller and smaller, until it was no bigger then that of a basket, and then it hopped onto the club, the torch, and that was that.

"That's the most ridiculous story I've ever heard, Mamimi!" Naota sad, struggling against the arm that pinned him to her chest.

"Nuh uh, it's true, Takkun!" She said, tapping her Fire Starter game against his head.

Defeated, he rolled his eyes and slouched. For a moment, he thought about baseball, and America, alien girls and school girls and what happens to you when you're raised in a house full of men who never think you're going to be something because your brother's already been everything. Stuck under the arm of a shoeless girl, your pants soaking in the wet grass the water rushing by near feet away, and what it felt like to know that this was all that was real. All that was true, set aside from what should have been so.

He thought of agents, spaceships, robots. Things that shouldn't be real but that there was no real reason they shouldn't, only the mind of the naysayer, the men who say it can't be done and trick everyone else into saying the same thing, except those few precious people who make the fire, the wheel, the world.

There was no reason Mamimi's story couldn't be real.

And, he thought, if that was so, if everything he had clung to could be shattered so easily, if all that he'd held onto, all that was supposed to be possible and normal, could be stripped away, at least he knew that he was the one the girl holding the torch had her arm around.

For now, that was enough.