I'll walk
the streets of heaven / where all blinds can see.
And just
like for the other kids / it will be a home for me.
It's 1986, and the next generation of children is born with strangeness in it like a bright and frightening thread. There are children born silent, born calm and uncomplaining, and there's something to their eyes that makes the doctors hand them quickly to nurses, the nurses to their mothers. They are born with bright blue eyes, like kittens. Like lightning.
The children (atom children, bomb babies) get cancer early. A lot of them die young with a strange look on their face at the end, after they are made to understand the fact of their mortality. It's like they're listening to something no one else can hear. Like they're watching some incipient horizon.
The ones that live grow quickly, hit all the target marks early. It doesn't reassure their parents. They get fast-tracked at school, shuffled like cards into the decks of higher grades. There aren't many, but they stand out in their classes, so small, so serious, their words carefully chosen, their gaze like knives.
The teachers write things like 'well-behaved' and 'co-operative' on their report cards, and stare at the pieces of paper and chew on their pens and try not to write 'excessively withdrawn' or 'has no real friends'. They stop holding conferences with the children's parents. They can't bear to see the same look on every face, that hope (that fear). They let the parents take their children home each day and try not to notice the way the fathers never touch the children, the mothers never hug them.
In higher education, in sixth grade, the children start to find each other. They find themselves reflected in another's gaze, the blue eyes that never darkened, never grounded. To pick on one is to pick on all of them, and accidents begin to happen to the older kids as the bomb children seep upwards, into seventh grade, eighth, high school.
The teachers write 'highly principled' and 'responsible and courteous to younger students'. They don't write about the lines that are being drawn, the tension that is starting to gather as the kids surge forward, the best and brightest (sharpest, scariest) starting to graduate. The way the fourteen-year-old college students sit in their old school parking lots some days, talking with blue-eyed eighth- and ninth-graders in low voices.
The teachers wouldn't know how to put it, this growing unease, and so they say things like 'remarkable' and 'such an accomplishment' and 'you must be very proud'. The parents nod like mannequins, like wind-up toys, and smile mechanical smiles. Pressure is building, somewhere over the horizon, and as another class graduates the teachers and the students (the normal students, no one says) try not to look at the kids with the blue eyes, try not to feel the shadows stretching towards them.
It's the year 2000 and the first boy in a mask climbs through old Sam Hollis' window, riding the hot electric wind of the coming storm.