This story was inspired by one of the items I make and sell on ETSY. Please take a look here. The following is not a commercial, in fact it's not for everyone, it's just some of what inspires me to create metal artifacts runs over into these pulp-shorts.
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Hello. Thank you for coming, it means a great deal. Yes it is truly awful...
The number of abnormal births in our town has jumped tremendously. The colonial governance has even stopped trying to deny it. First, they put out supposedly scientific studies showing that it is caused by normal variations in human breeding. Then they said it was a reaction to the exotic flora and fauna found around our settlement. Some of the supposed dissidents even published a tract saying that it was the fault of England’s continental enemies; poisoning our groundwater or some such. What a convenience that the states most outspoken critics are pinning the blame on the enemy. It’s all a flim-flam anyway. Any critic of the state that puts ink to paper in the colonies is an agent of the state.
Most of us where I work, civil engineering corp., have figured out the true problem. Maybe this will seem too complicated and boring. It’s probably not polite to talk shop at a funeral. But that little bundle in the box is my son and this is one time the state can’t tell me what to say. Where to start…
When the Labor Party was defeated by the War Party in ’74 everyone cheered. By the time they lost to the Science Party in ’99 the country was begging for change. We got it. Parliament rolled out one innovative program after another. Britain learned the year earlier in the Fashoda affair that the status quo would not serve. A purely diplomatic victory is Pyrrhic. The next battle must be won with guns and bombs. So they developed new ships, new cannons, new ways to pave the roads, and new ways to fly above it. And they started experimenting with the most basic ways human creatures operate.
That was when we started winning the wars. Wars. We had to start more, we had gotten so good at winning them. With airships that could pull hydrogen out of the sky. With sub mariner warships, manned by sailors that could breathe the water. With airplanes guided by pilots who could see at great distance and in the dark. The people modified by these programs were heroes; volunteers. The treatments were developed and tested on prisoners, so that was okay too. Nobody really wanted to think about the programs they didn’t tell us about. Besides, those things happened mostly in the colonies, right?
I was a sapper in the Corp. of Engineers for only two years when they moved my new wife and I to the Wattsburg settlement in Eastern Swaziland. The colonists were told we would be installing a waste water treatment facility to improve the quality of their drinking water and to lessen our impact on the native tribes living downstream. This seemed absurdly magnanimous but the nation was at war and people had learned not to ask questions. About four years into the program, we started seeing children born horribly deformed. Or they might look normal but showed the signs of agonizing pain; they might scream for weeks before wasting away or... or finding the mercy of a father’s strong hand.
I’m sorry. Let me get it together. Civilized men don’t discuss these things do they? But... What I had done to my village, to my own son… I can’t claim to fall into that category anymore anyway. You see, it wasn’t a wastewater treatment facility we put in. The people of our little colony, the children… I’m sorry …we weren’t volunteers or prisoners. Even so, we were all subjects of a great and horrible experiment.
The meats brought out to the colony, and many of the dairy products, were adjusted by exposure to chemicals and cosmic rays. The process came out of a lab in London but the food was never served there. Instead we all happily consumed it and gloated when we heard other settlers of other colonies complain about their lack of quality foodstuff. But that kidney pie and sharp cheddar was changing us on the inside.
The problem London was having was in procuring enough iron to supply the war effort. Some genius German named Felix must have felt very smart indeed when he realized that human physiology processes iron out of our diets on a small scale. About five grams of iron is in every adult human. If we could trick the body into producing twice that much a day and excreting the excess, in a village with 3000 people that means fifteen kilograms of pure elemental iron a day. Raise that production to ten times and we can net one hundred thirty-five kilo of iron a day. The Civil Engineers Corp. can figure out a way to extract the iron.
That we did. Even as the scat of three thousand colonists became gritty and gray, and constipation problems were met with industrial laxatives, the average bloke did not think much at all about it. The sewer took his ‘daily offering’ away from his lavatory to the water treatment station on the edge of town; just as it should. Nor did he think much about the narrow gauge rail that ran right through that station supposedly taking loads of iron ore from a faraway mine to a faraway port.
If that were all that was happening to us I doubt anyone would care, even if they did know. But the babies... oh... sorry, it just hurts to think of it... And the women who were encouraged to ‘eat for two’ with extra ration tickets for rich meats, kidney, and liver. Like so many of the women here, my beautiful Parileah... no, I can talk about this... I must... My beautiful wife has... changed.
Her eyes have gone from emerald sea green to rust brown and the scent of her skin is more like blood than summer hay. She has gone cold following the horror of poor Rowland’s birth… we settled on Rowland, each of us, before… when we thought everything would be alright. But I always told her how much I hated that name. I was always telling her that it reminded me of her awful aunt’s dog, Browland. It didn’t really mean much to me but I chided her about that name so often… and now… oh god… If I could take all that back maybe my sweet Pari could find some comfort; some rest.
This rose? Yes, it’s brass. My family has a tradition of placing a rose on the grave of a loved one each year to honor their passing. You see, I don’t plan on being able to place more than one rose on sweet Rowland’s headstone so I had to make it out of brass. The brass is as permanent as my love for him and stronger than the weak flesh and conscience that guided me until this day. This rose must display the bloom of my affection for eternity because tomorrow I die.
I’m sorry, did I shock you? No I don’t mean figuratively. I’m riding the next shipment of granulated iron to the port. It won’t really be iron, but iron oxide and powdered aluminum. Sixty tons of it. When it is safely in the holds of the H.M.S. Covington a second brass rose from my workshop will open and a mechanism therein will discharge an electric arc, white hot like a father's wrath. The inner petals of this special rose, being made of spun magnesium, will catch the spark, expand it, and drive it like a bayonet into the gut of an evil beast.
And I will be there to see it. I will lay that rose onto the ships payload myself. Onto the dirt of my own grave.
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