Fiction Short Story – Curfew
Photo credit: NinoAndonis from morguefile.com
It’s been a long time since the Curfew was set. The name was taken from an old term for a limit adults put on how late a child could stay out. Now, though, it is a limit on life. No one knows anymore who, or what, it was that set the Curfew, it was so long ago. Though it’s been set and that is the law of the world. That when you turn 18 it is your time to die. Some choose how they will die; a gun, pills, sometimes something lavish like a public hanging. No matter what, on your eighteenth birthday, you will die. Every day is someone’s birthday, and today, it is yours.
Your father was 17 when he met your mother; his Curfew came up before you even had a chance to see him in this world. You’re mother, though; she was only twelve when she had you. You remember her well. You’re most vivid memory of the woman was standing with your younger half-sister as she met her own Curfew. She had always been a woman to make a statement, and with her death she made one. Standing in what had once, long long ago, been Times Square, she had made her final words to the world. “Today, I will die.”
She had said and you remember how those words had made you cry.
“Everyone I have ever known died before they ever had a chance to live! We didn’t used to have to die, doesn’t anyone know that? Doesn’t anyone know that we don’t have to? Have we all become so blind…..?”
Tears crashed down your mother’s face, her eyes going to you and your sister. She looked out at the crowd of people who had come to watch a crying woman die with morbid, disgusting human wonder.
“You killed my mother and my father with this Curfew, you have killed every man I have ever known, and someday,” tears ran down her face as she knelt to touch you and your sisters cheeks, “someday you will take my children as well.”
She leans in close to you, and whispers “take good care of your sister, I love you very much.”
She stood and turned her face towards the heavens and, despite you and your sister’s screams, she brought the gun up to her lips. That is how you remember your mother. As a woman with last words on her lips, tears in her eyes, and blood in her hair. You remember her better and in more detail now, more than ever before. As you stand in the spot she’d been in, twelve years ago, with that same pistol in your hand, still stained with her crimson blood. You bite your lip, and stare down at the face of your sister, only two short, sweet years from her own Curfew. Tears run down your cheeks, you can’t hope to stop them. She begs you not to but, just as your mother hadn’t listened, neither do you.
“Maybe, sister, if enough of us speak, then we can be heard.” You tell her, a solemn grin on your lips. You begin your speech, “Today, I will die…..”
__END__
