Author’s Note:
Up until a couple of years ago, I fancied myself primarily a fiction author—with a particular liking for short stories. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but I’ve also never read very quickly; combine that with my corroded attention span (thank you, social media and instant gratification), and short stories become a pragmatic decision.
Where I view poetry as a more visceral, spontaneous medium, for me fiction has always felt more intellectual, calculated. It takes me a while to write (dangling infinitive, I know; but, I like to live dangerously).
I wrote my first draft of “Chosen” in 2019, as the first of two pieces for Martin Riker’s introductory Fiction Writing class at WashU. The second piece turned out… less than satisfactory: I felt I had to up the bar and, more-than-drawing from my favorite author at the time—Sir Joseph Conrad—I churned out a steaming husk of a “tribute” (imitation, really; and not in the “sincerest form of flattery” type of way). Even going back now, salvaging a half-decent story would require more than I believe it’s worth (two vague pronouns, a dangling infinitive, and a very passive voice walk into a bar).
Anyhoo, I took “Chosen” and gave it the brutal demolition and ground-up reconstruction / rewriting I believed it deserved; and, with pleasure, I can assert that I feel proud of what the piece has become. I hope you enjoy it.
- Jackson Riley
Chosen
As the monorail jets forward, Nate peers out through the tinted plexiglass, light from the cabin sloshing and baying along the tunnel’s nondescript concrete walls.
I’m going home, he thinks, in an effort to console himself; the thought does little to quell the anxiety welling up in his esophagus. It’s been twenty years since he left. Is it even really his home anymore? How will everything look? Will he still be able to find his way around? He tries picturing the city in his head, but has trouble drowning out the throbbing headache he has felt all morning.
He must look pretty shitty, since the stranger across the aisle from him pipes up, “Hey, you alright, love?”
Nate, with migraine-induced lethargy, turns to face the voice.
“Take these! For your head!”
The short, cotton-candy haired girl extends one caramel hand toward Nate, two large, orange capsules in her palm. He glances down at the pills, then back at her—stretching her fingers toward him, hand flat, as one might approach an animal at the zoo. A toothy smile reveals a gaping black hole in the shape of her top left incisor. Reluctantly, Nate swipes the pills and tosses them back into his mouth. There’s a reason why you weren’t supposed to feed the animals. The drugs take effect almost instantly.
“Try not to think too hard,” she admonishes him. “Your brain needs rest.”
Nate scoffs.
“All that time in the tank wasn’t enough rest for it, huh?”
The girl cocks her head to the side, confusion washing over her now-sideways face.
Looking down at the floor, she—with scrunched nose and furrowed brow—shakes her head, exclaiming, “Well, when you’ve been under that long, it’s just common sense that there would be a little bit of an adjustment period for your brain to get used to working again. I mean-”
“I was joking. It was a joke.” Nate interrupts the girl before she can prattle on further.
Her cheeks flush scarlet as her eyes grow to twice their size.
“I am so sorry! I am terrible at reading people! Just the worst when it comes to social cues, I-”
“It’s fine, really.”
At this point, Nate’s headache has nearly subsided, but he really doesn’t have much interest in listening to the girl’s apologies, especially when they’re this long-winded. Does she ever stop talking? Maybe if he wouldn’t have accepted those pills, he wouldn’t feel so goddamn obligated.
The girl sniffles.
“Your name is Nathan, right?”
“How-”
She points to the storage compartment overhead, where Nathan J. Stewart is embroidered across the side of his duffel bag.
“Oh. I completely forgot, it has my name on it. I guess we can chalk that one up to the brain adjustment period.”
The girl smiles.
“My name’s Lilith, but I’d rather you just call me Lily. No one really calls me Lilith anymore. I mean, my mother used to. She-”
Nate grits his teeth as a hot knife drives its way into his solar plexus. The girl in front of him vanishes—replaced by a delicate, olive-skinned woman, her silky brown hair nearly obscuring a poorly-masked melancholy. Mom.
“Nathan?”
Nate blinks twice. Lily’s shooting him a concerned look.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” he mutters, unconvincing even to himself.
“Are you sure?”
How is she not taking the hint? What about his responses could possibly be inviting more conversation?
“Yes, I’m sure. I’m fine. I already told you, I’m fine. Why do you give a fuck anyway?”
The girl purses her lips and squints intently at the floor beneath her feet, as if trying to contrive some new conversation topic with which to assuage the boy’s hostility—or at least to divert it. Maybe Nathan was a tad cruel there, but the silence is already working wonders.
As the shuttle eases to a halt, a tall, bow legged man in a navy uniform—bedazzled with medals of various colors, sizes, and other degrees of ostentation—rises in the front row.
“Boys exit on the left, girls on the right. DO NOT forget your bags. And let’s move it. We are running right on time.”
Before Nate can stir, Lily is across the shuttle, ducking out the right door. With a loud exhale, he grabs his overhead bag and moves to follow the man’s instructions. He isn’t sure if he’s ready to return to the city yet, but that doesn’t matter. He’s here.
Ducking out of the left door, Nate, bag slung over his shoulder, is ushered down a tight corridor toward what looks like an old classroom. Once inside, he can make out what he estimates must be at least ten rows of plastic chairs, tightly packed, all facing the same wall. He plops down in the first empty seat that he finds, in the back, near the aisle. The cramped seating arrangement offers hardly enough room for him to stretch his legs past ninety degrees; in spite of this annoyance, he manages to jam his bag between his heels and the chair’s thin metal forelegs.
Before he can fully bask in his victory, however, the man in the navy suit strolls in, something in his right hand. There is a sudden whirring noise over and behind Nate’s left shoulder; turning to locate its source, he’s immediately blinded by a tractor beam of intense blue and white light.
“Mother FUCKER!” he exclaims, whipping his head back to the front of the room.
“Never seen a projector before?” a voice on Nate’s left quips, following with a low chuckle. “And they had those before we went under.”
Nate scowls, pressing his palms to his eyes: an effort to remove the large black circle hovering centerfold in his cone of vision. The effort is in vain.
“I know what a projector is, jackass.” Nate hisses.
“If you say so…” the voice teases back. “ I mean, you looked RIGHT at it. I can see that you’re hurting, though. Sorry ‘bout that. Name’s Miles.”
“Nate.”
“Where you from, Nate?”
“Have you seen Krieg-”
“May I have your attention?”
Nate’s sentence is cut short. Still visually-impaired, he cranes his neck to, out of his peripheral, catch a glimpse of the man in the navy suit—standing in front of the first row, remote in surprisingly-stubby hand, his tall shadow looming over the dingy projector screen at his side.
“As you all know, by now, you are among the first brave group that we are sending back into the city. We woke you all up today because this is the first time that it has been safe to go back since-”
“Where’d you say you were from?” Miles leans over and whispers to Nate.
Without averting his forward gaze, Nate ever-so-subtly nods his head toward the projector screen, where Mr. Navy-Suit-Bow-Legged-So-And-So is putting his fat little baby fingers to work, showcasing remarkable dexterity, as he makes all manner of gesticulations. There’s a joke here about the importance of size.
“It’s fine, man. He doesn’t care if we talk. Doubt he even cares if we make it back. He just has to get this out of the way so that, if we get hurt out there, nothing falls back on them. Liability and all that shit.”
Nate, past the now all-but-faded afterimage, can finally make out his seat-neighbor: a lanky, dark-skinned boy with a buzz-cut, rectangular glasses, and an impressive mottle of cystic acne pockmarking his forehead and chin, the latter of which remains almost wholly uncovered by a patchy black goatee. I wonder what I look like right now. After a short deliberation, Nate decides he’d rather not know.
The man clears his throat, catching both boys’ attention.
“-landscape is irradiated, but, with your suits on, there should be nothing to worry about. That being said, you should limit your time around-”
Nate turns back to Miles.
“I’m from old downtown. Right by Fratelli’s. The pizza place from the third Krieger movie. The one with-”
“Yeah, Anthony Pazello. I used to watch the shit out of those with my pops, growing up.”
He pauses briefly before continuing on. "I’m from the boating district. Right by the wharf.”
Nate nods to indicate that he is familiar with the area. Then, just as quickly as it had turned on, the projector clicks off, and the room is suddenly flooded with bright, white light. In response, the room airs a collective groan—with more than a few expletives sprinkled in.
“Alright, gentlemen. Get suited up. You will exit through the double-doors behind me. Godspeed to you all.”
He pauses for a moment, as if having forgotten his next line.
“Remember, our country is counting on you.”
The man nods, sufficiently satisfied with himself, and promptly disappears back into the hallway through which they arrived, passing along a wall lined with umpteen thin metal lockers.
“Our country is counting on us, huh?” Nate jests, turning to discover that Miles has already up and left.
Sighing, he crosses the room and sets his bag in front of the first free locker he finds—the number fifty-seven inscribed, slightly askew, in silver serif lettering just above its handle.
Opening the door for slightly more room, Nate is greeted by a surfeit of curse words—ranging from juvenile to hate speech—decorating the locker’s inner walls. Unzipping his bag, Nate discovers a large yellow hazmat suit, far too large for him, buried underneath a long, slender metal device with a rubber handle on one end and an LED-screen on the other. Looking around, it seems like everyone has the same size suit. Figures, cheaper that way.
He throws the suit on, mask and all, and, in his right hand, grips the device, its purpose entirely foreign to him. Nate follows the crowd, through the aforementioned double-doors and into another tight corridor, slightly narrower and much longer than the first. Over the sea of blocky, yellow plastic heads, he can make out a faint stream of light—only a trickle but softer and warmer than what’s buzzing above his head. The corridor is leading outside. That’s natural light.
Stepping out, Nate’s eyes take a few seconds to adjust to the sun’s glare. He is standing about five hundred meters away from the city’s front gates. Holy shit, it’s still standing. Nate grins. Suddenly, he’s flying. Well, not quite flying, but it feels that way. Wind assails his face as he darts in and out of traffic, his front tire narrowly avoiding the rear bumper of every bright yellow taxi he swerves around. Many of the drivers greet him with an angry, “fuck you,” a loud honk or, if he’s fortunate enough, his bike riding might elicit one of a few different hand gestures. He doesn’t care, though. It’s a big city, and the odds of him meeting any of these people again are slim to none. Besides, his job isn’t to politic around and make everyone happy. No. It’s simply to deliver his hot, fresh Fratelli’s pizza pie to his customer, as quickly as possible, so as to garner the highest tip. He looks up as he rides, taking in the night sky—not that he can see many stars with so many bright lights shining all about.
“En garde!”
Nate yelps as a sudden jolt in his lower back jerks him out of his trance.
He whips around to discover Miles standing in a riposte stance, slender metal object extended like a rapier. Embarrassed by his girlish reaction, Nate scowls. There. That’s more like it.
“Careful with that thing, man. They aren’t supposed to be used as weapons,” he growls.
“Oh, and I suppose you know what they’re supposed to be used for,” retorts Miles, unarmed hand on his hip.
“It’s a geiger counter.”
Both boys turn to see the short, cotton-candy haired girl looking up at them. The screen on her device is lit up, all manners of numerical readings showing across its surface.
“How did you figure that out?” asks Miles.
Even through the tinted plastic mask of her hazmat suit, Lily’s eye roll is apparent.
“It was in the presentation. Besides, the readings on the device are in roentgen.”
“Of course. Which is the measurement for?” prods Miles.
“Radiation,” she says, matter-of-factly, as if it is obvious to the layman what the hell a roentgen is.
Finally noticing both of the boys’ devices, with their conspicuously not-lit-up screens, Lily struggles to suppress a giggle. In the end, the giggle wins out.
“Did you two not watch any of the presentation?”
“No, clearly we fucking didn’t!” exclaims Nate, shocking both Miles and the girl.
Miles mouths, “What the hell, man?” but Nate pretends not to notice.
“Sorry, he’s on edge,” Miles apologizes. “I’m Miles.” He reaches his hand out to the girl.
“Lily,” she gladly accepts his handshake.
“And this is my friend Na-”
“We’ve already met,” she says, not breaking eye contact.
“Okay. Uh, I wasn’t aware,” says Miles, and, before Nate can warn him not to, he extends Lily an invitation to come along with them into the city.
“Are you sure that it would be alright?” she asks, her eyes sheepishly darting to and back away from Nate.
“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be,” answers Miles, issuing a warm smile her way.
The girl smiles back. Euch. Nate kicks the dirt, sending a small gray pebble careening across the ground, then turns around and starts into the city.
As he gets closer, he starts to realize that the city still standing is a far cry from the city being how he left it. The beautiful white marble architecture has been swapped out for a dull gray and brown, and many of the buildings, now coated in a veneer of ash, are missing walls or entire floors. A thick layer of dust envelops the atmosphere, coating every surface and making it difficult to see more than 50 meters ahead. The most jarring difference between how the city is now and how it used to be, however, has nothing to do with its outward appearance. The city, once filled with the lively, everyday sounds of its citizens hustling and bustling about, is quiet. No, not quiet. Silent. Utterly devoid of sound. No honking cars, sweaty hot-dog vendors, or barking dogs to clear the still, dust-filled air.
“Kind of spooky, huh,” says Miles, nudging Nate with his elbow.
“Eerie, yeah. You think the garbage smell’s still there?”
Miles snorts, then turns in a full circle to admire his surroundings with closer scrutiny.
“What is this area anyway? I’ve never entered from this way,” says Miles.
“I think it’s the financial district,” answers Lily.
“Think or know?” chides Nate.
“What is that?”
Miles is pointing at something over Nate’s shoulder.
Doing a quick 180, and squinting through the haze, Nate can make out what appears to be a large metal slab, charred beyond recognition.
Before Nate can conjecture as to the object’s nature, Lily chirps, “It’s a vault door. Or used to be, anyhow. You know, what would be on a bank safe.”
Miles grins. “You guys game for a little heist action?”
Lily answers with, “You know they don’t have real money in there, right? It’s all electronic now, or it was.”
Nate hardly stifles a groan.
“What the hell would we even do with money now? What would we buy? And from who?”
“From whom,” chides Lily.
Nate’s blood boils. This fucking cu-
“Damn, guys.” Miles, in a feign demonstration of defeat, hangs his head.
In a moment, his disposition swings right back. Turning to Nate, “Hey, isn’t Fratelli’s just a couple blocks away? I could go for a slice of pepperoni!”
“Don’t even joke about that,” says the cotton candy haired girl, giving Miles a playful nudge.
So now she understands humor.
“Oooh, and breadsticks too.”.
“Stop it, I’m serious,” she groans, playfully. Playfully. “I would kill for some pizza right now.”
Appalled by how Miles is able to form such easy repartee with this girl and her cloying personality, Nate interrupts their absurd little banter. “Hey, are we going or not?”
“To Fratelli’s!” shouts Miles, taking the lead.
The girl runs to catch up with him. Nate trudges behind the pair.
As they march onward, Nate feels his chest tightening. His head feels like a bowling ball, one of the heavy ones.
“Wait up,” he croaks, but the pair are too far ahead of him to hear.
He drives the thin end of his slender metal device into the ground, positioning the handle just above his hip, leaning on it for balance. Closing his eyes, he tries to focus on inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly. By the time his heart rate dips back down to normal, and he reopens his eyes, Miles and Lily are nowhere to be found.
It’s fine. Fallout or not, he knows his way home. The lack of street signs can’t impair his geographic familiarity with the area.
As he walks, he glances to his left and takes note of what used to be Antonio’s sandwich shop, where he and his mom used to go and get cold cuts for their Easter charcuterie. On his right, he notices the old Fade Away barbershop, where all the barbers knew him by name. As a regular, he got a discount, on the down-low.
Both stores have been reduced to rubble. He approaches a fork in the road. Going right would take him to Fratelli’s, the best pizza parlor in the city, and the location of his first job. Mr. Fratelli didn’t like to hire anybody who didn’t have their own car, but he owed Nate’s mother a favor. He was a uncouth, unkempt man, with many a grease stain on each of his far-too-tight black or white tank tops. He may be a walking stereotype; but, he is an honest man, a good man. Or, he was. Now he’s dead.
In no rush to reunite with the human autocorrect engine and her new best friend, Nate lets out a heavy exhale and hangs a left. He shivers, as goosebumps pepper his nape. Does he really want to do this? What the hell are you expecting to find? Drawing a deep breath, to steel his nerves, he plods on, head down. And nearly walks right past it.
The old, red brick apartment building that had been his home for the vast majority of his sixteen-year-existence is missing the top nine of its ten floors. The first floor has no ceiling. In fact, it has only two standing walls. The front doorway, now missing its awning, leads to nothing but rubble and ash. Nate’s vision blears as hot red tears stream down his face. Rage.
He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, unable to continue training them on the grotesque sight before him. This isn’t fucking real. It can’t be.
“Why me?” he cries out, to no one in particular. “What did I do to deserve this?”
“Nothing.”
Nate whips around to find Lily, looking up at him, only twenty meters away.
“That’s the point. All minors in the city were chosen. Unquestionably fair.”
Nate shakes his head. “Don’t talk to me about fucking fair,” he hisses.
“Calm down, man. I feel for you, I do.”
Nate turns to see Miles standing just to Lily’s left.
Nate shakes his head at both of them.
“No. You can’t know. You can’t possibly fucking know. She should have been chosen. It should have been her!”
“Should have been whom?” asks Lily.
“Who deserved to die?”
Nate shakes his head and turns back to face the rubble. He’s back in the building. The TV is tuned to the daily news, where an anchor briefs the city on the latest goings-on of the war down South. Even with his fancy rhetoric and immaculately combed hair, the man in the box can do little to sugarcoat the present situation: they are on the losing side.
“Oh, darling, turn that junk off, would you?”
Nate turns toward his mother, her slender figure perched in the doorway. Her pearly smile offers reassurance; her eyes betray disquiet. Nate frowns.
“They say we might not be safe in the city anymore,” Nate protests.
“And they say that the rebels have gotten their hands on nu-”
“Shhhhhhhhh.”
His mom crosses the room to cradle his chin between her thumb and forefinger. With her free hand, she draws a letter from her purse. The envelope, impressed with the President’s trademark purple seal, has already been opened. Nate looks up at his mother, raising an eyebrow skeptically.
“Go ahead, sweetheart.” She gives a terse nod.
Shakily, Nate lifts the paper flap to extract the letter inside.
As he rapidly devours its contents, his mother rises and crosses the room to look out the window of their apartment. No rain falls. After finishing the letter, he reads it again. And again. And a fourth time.
To whom it may concern… fears of escalation… imminent… threats of nuclear warfare… all boys and girls at or below the age of eighteen… chosen… advances in cryogenics… under cover of nightfall… as long as it takes… this great nation…
“I’m scared, mom,” Nate says, his voice quavering.
She turns to him, weakly feigning a smile.
“Nathan, it’s going to be okay. I lo-”
Across the apartment, the front door bursts open. Nate’s hairs stand abruptly on end, and his mother quickly twists to attention. There is a soft tinkling, followed by what sounds like a six foot tall raccoon rummaging through their pantry.
Keven, Nate’s mother’s boorish boyfriend, stumbles into the foyer, piss drunk at 6 p.m and smelling like spoiled milk.
“I’m fucking starving,” he blurts out.
“Why don’t you haul your fat ass back to the kitchen and make something yourself?” Nate calls out.
His mom shoots daggers son-ward, then quickly snaps her gaze back toward her feet.
Keven turns slowsly to face Nate, as if just now noting his presence.
“What’s ‘at you got there?” he gestures to the letter in Nate’s hands. “Lemmeseeit,” he commands, slurring his words, seemingly forgetting entirely about his impending starvation.
He could stand to lose a few pounds.
“Here, Kev, sweetie, I’ll fix something up right now,” Nate’s mother says, grabbing him by the arm and stepping between them. With a hard shove, Kev sends her tumbling to the floor. Nate leaps to his feet, both hands balled into fists.
“Oh, you’re gunna to himme now?” Keven taunts. “Letsseeit, big guy!”
Nate opts for a right hook. It misses by a mile; Keven easily sidesteps it, and throws Nate face first into the brick wall behind him. As Nate, stunned and sputtering, struggles to get back onto his hands and knees, he is greeted with a fist—to the back of the head—and a foot to the ribs, for posterity.
As Keven struggles his way through the highfalutin presidential jargon, Nate scans the floor for his mother. She’s not there.
A loud crash is swiftly chased by a low yelp.
Nate turns back to Keven just in time to see his knees buckle, ever-so-slightly cushioning the impact of his head slamming against the wood floor. Nate’s mother stands over the unconscious brute, wild-eyed and panting, a broken piece of baby blue glass (only seconds ago belonging to an ornate hand blown table lamp) in her hand.
“Wha-” Nate starts.
“Shhhhhh. Come on, get up.”
Nate’s mother helps him to his feet, then rummages through Keven’s pants for his keys. Scooping the letter up off the ground, she helps Nate out the door.
His vision ebbs and fades as he staggers into the elevator, his head screaming.
His mom is helping him into a car.
She’s pulling out the letter and typing something into the GPS.
She’s telling him it’s going to be alright.
She’s kissing him on the head, then someone else is pulling him out of the car.
His mother is crying.
She’s driving away.
“Nathan, stop!”
Nate opens his eyes. He is standing in what should have been the doorway to what used to be his apartment building.
“Come back down here, man. I feel for you, I do! I’ve lost people too! But, you stay up there and you’re dead in seconds,” pleads Miles.
“It would take a few minutes, actually, but yeah, that’s a lot of radiation,” adds Lily. “Nate, you should come back down now!”
Nate steps further inside.
What had he done to deserve life? He should have begged her to go, made her. Surely they had had room enough in the cryo chambers for one more body.
“Nathan, come on, man!” Miles screams from below.
Saltwater rushes down Nate’s cheeks. Why did she leave him? Why couldn’t he have died with her? What right had she had to deprive him of that choice?
“Miles, no!” Lily cries.
Nate hears rapid footsteps behind him.
I’m home, mom, he thinks to himself. Closing his eyes to the decrepit world around him, he smiles. I’m home.
“NATHAN!”
Mom.
The footsteps are much closer now.
The geiger counter clatters to the ground.
The world spins.
The world flattens.
And, everything goes dark.
This book is riveting! I was drawn into the scene by the descriptive imagery. I love the fast pace of the action. Well done!
I really enjoyed reading. Some strong details.