The Tribe (FLASH FICTION to wake the dead!)

[Note by the Author: I have set my goal to write the equivalent of one short story a week for one year. 52 stories straight. Bradbury did it. Bradbury is a immortal. And so I set off to skulk in the great shadows of giants, to take camp in their corpses, and escape the sun beneath the cover of their bones. I wrote this in fifteen minutes. It says a lot about humanity, and the bedrock from which we sprung. Fifteen minutes. Entire battles have taken less. Hiroshima took less. Diana burning in her limousine took less. A lot can happen in fifteen minutes.]

From the jungle he sprinted, grunting to the Tribe and smashing his chest with knuckles that he’d bloodied during the hunt. He was five-feet tall, this hunter, with a visor of bone that sloped away into a forehead four times as dense as Homo Sapien. He bared thick rotten teeth at the vanguard of hairy females, their breasts swinging, their fingernails gouging for him when the Hunter tried to near.

The Alpha stood behind them, in the pebbled clearing by the river, grunting and pointing at the hairy child thing that lay half in and half out of the churning water.

It was dead, its head twisted so its chin slumped toward its shoulder blades, its eyes the blue of the great field above, that burned the west every night before the darkness.

The Mother huddled over her offspring, screeching in rudimentary frustration. There was no ego in her demonstration, only instinct and the vague shapes of emotion that would yet take millennia to gestate. She combed her fingers through the child thing’s fine hair, red and bright and only on its head.

The Hunter growled and pulled a fistful of fur from his shoulder. The wound drew blood thick as oil. He loped on his knuckles toward the Alpha, slowly circling back to the child thing, to sprinkle his own hair atop the corpse. The Hunter hissed, pointed, summoning the Alpha in a series of whooping coughs, until finally the scarred and muscled leader shouldered through his harem, and loped closer to the body.

Standing there, with rapids roaring and the jungle hot and green, they could see the difference, this alien, this mutation that had somehow poisoned in the womb. The Alpha looked at the Hunter, curling his lips back from his gums, grunting the low, deadly sound that held all the authority of thunder.

The Tribe disbanded immediately, crowding the Mother, who hissed and struck out, and finally tried to cross the river. They followed, shrieking, beating her without mercy, without shame, without any of the mental complexities that would burden their descendants. They felt only hate of the outsider that lay dead upon the rocks. The outsider birthed from one of their own.

The Tribe left both corpses on the rocks, for the great bears and rock cats to devour. But no rock cat or bear touched the child thing. It rotted through the months, and when the rains suffused the mountain channels, it was taken by the current. And the earth hid it in its womb, the round and ivory skull, the thin, fragile bones, the elongated neck and swollen frontal skull plate, 200,000 years before the first human was theorized to exist. The earth took it in its wisdom, because hate is older than love. Hate is the rotten soil in which love thrives. Hate is the earth itself.

And one day, when She holds her breath for long enough, Earth will tear her own flesh apart, pushing magma from the seas and ash-clouds from the mountains. She will push the very thing that has existed in us always. And she will do so with the skeleton of the child thing pressed firmly against her breast.   

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