We made our home in that beige complex which used to tower over the northern sector. Building C, on the ground floor. She liked it because it was warm, secure, and offered complete shelter from the rain. She marvelled at the way clean water came from the taps. As a native Neo Arcadian, I liked it because it was neither more nor less than what any other Neo Arcadian had. Even X was rumored to have lived in some place similar.
...Why did I say "used to tower," you ask? Because, after she and I were evicted, it was converted into a military barracks. Around the perimeter turrets went up, and barbed wire, and electrified fences. Within each apartment, where generations of families had grown, lived, aged, wept, and loved, crude cinderblock walls were erected. Units were split in two, bay windows were barred; at last each half-unit was forcibly outfitted with eight unwilling reploids.
Five years ago the squadron housed in in Building F went on strike, and so X ordered the entire complex, A to H, along with all the unhappy souls in it, to be blown to bits. So it was.
If walls could talk, I wonder what consolation they could have offered to our successors before their last panicked moments. Comfort of the past, dream of a harmonious age…
If walls could sing, even better...
And if memories could leave behind their imprints for others to see, I would have wished most for them to see the stained-glass which the beloved and I once found washed up on the beach and hung in our bay window.
A mosaic of multi-colored flowers in front of an azure sky. The piece was a rare survivor from the world before the war. We felt the waves had borne it to us directly from an idyllic past. Amazing that, while we were in Paradise, we were searching for it behind us. As if life could be any better.
The stained-glass fractured and hued the afternoon sunlight on our bedroom wall for sixty-five blissful years.
We had no notion that such little acts of beauty were a fight against the future. Her most powerful punch? The way she rose from the bed, beaded with sweat, chest heaving, transfigured into a being of colored light. Her nipples sparkled green and red. Her precious face?
Peacock blue.