1:

We are four

We play beneath an afternoon sky so clear until without warning the day’s light. Turns. NAKED.

SO BRIGHT RIGHT THROUGH US.

Such sunburn we have never felt, no not even after the longest summer day swimming at the pond.

Bodies are being stacked in rows at the schoolyard, our fingernails have fallen out, and we want our mother. Who can tell the dead from the living with eyes grown so tired with weeping?

2:

We are eight.

We are a Chivvier and we walk above these Scum who scurry beneath us grubbing in the dirt for food as ordered.

WE wear the helmet, WE carry the Glock and the club, WE have the helmets to guard our faces from the malformed nova sun overhead.

The Scum obey, bareheaded.

The Masters are smart. The Masters are good.

A bored Master explains to us once: they coordinate intersecting arcs between the calorie usage required by the scum’s scrabbling search for food, and the so far elusive magic number of sustainable scum population for keeping Masters and Chivviers alive.

The Scum’s desperation weakens and slows making calorie investment in them ever less profitable. We Chivviers must enforce a higher percentage of daily mandatory die off.

The Master’s words hurt my head. Still it is fun to hear the Scum’s skin split under the club when they tarry, it is good to starve less than somebody else.

3:

We are twelve, and have escaped the Masters.

Escaped? A laugh track arises in our head from an old sitcom from when we were young.

Nobody will pursue where we go.

The sun’s blackened ovoid still burns overhead and the earth is baked and dead beneath our knees as we collapse at the end of our road.

Words come from us, here at the end. Do we say them aloud?

O god of melted cities, scalded eyes. O god of weeping sores and charred forests. O laughing god enclosing our world in your empty void, the scalded earth displays and serves your will.