• Ashes fell as silently and softly as a cruelly misery-twisted snowfall. They wandered from the heavy grey shrouds, gently drifting downward to stain the land beneath and its people a lifeless grey, to match the color of what remained of their souls.

    They toiled on once-fertile fields, wearily prodding bent and broken plants, starving with no sun. They clutched remnants of tools, fruitlessly scraping at the barren ground. The volcano which had given the land its richness now stripped it of its beauty.

    Every so often, one would raise its pallid face to the sky, as though searching for a glimmer of sun, of hope. But there was none. Nothing but miles and miles of darkness and ashes. And so they would return their eyes to the equally bleak ground, wondering if there was still something in this world that was capable of bringing joy.

    A large bell clanged off towards what had once been east. The sound seemed distant through the greyness, and, for a moment, merely a memory. And for that moment, they did not move, perhaps treasuring the thought that this might only be a memory, and they would wake from this daydream surrounded by the joyful laughter of loved ones and the golden sunshine streaming through an open window. But the moment was merely a moment, and the next their overseers were set upon them, pounding battered spoons against dented pots, running with the most dignity they could muster now that their horses had died and their trumpets had rusted stiff. Chasing them down the rows of withered plants, their keepers herded them towards the barracks.

    They stumbled, only exhaustion dampening their fear of the overseers’ whips. They tried to run as demanded, desperate not to be last and suffer the long leather strips which pierced their skin and opened the gates for infection and death, but the constant fatigue and the ashes caught in their lungs pulled them back.

    Finally they passed the thick cement walls. The gargantuan stone bricks and their wire crowns served as a corral for the men and women who were more spirits than prisoners. Their fatigued run came to an ungainly halt as they massed at the gates, stumbling and tripping over one another.

    They were directed towards the center of the prison. Here the ash was almost half a foot thick. At the center of the courtyard sat two heavy black cauldrons, cinders piled in an inch high on the rims. They formed untidy lines before the two cauldrons, filled with a watery broth, on the surface of which whitish dust swam. Two overseers slouched against the cauldrons as they ladled ungenerous portions of the repulsive liquid into blocks of rotting wood with the smallest impressions for which the soup was to sit, congealing with grit.

    Once with their meager meal, the prisoners sat in the soot and poured the foul fluid down their throat, careful not to taste it. Some of the newer prisoners prodded the soup, now gelatinous with clouded sediments, weighing their hunger against their health; they lacked the experience to eat it before they could think.

    A quiet murmuring of impersonal requests and directions was barely audible over the muteness. Friendships, alliances, rivalries, grudges all died quickly here. Their daily labor was not tiring, but there was no life when there was neither light nor darkness, and all was the falling ash and the silent grey it brought.

    A cluster of faded men and women sat together where the soot was deepest. They had once known each others’ names, but such identifying effects were pointless. Now they sat there out of habit.

    “The ash has picked up today,” one of them whispered hoarsely to another.

    “The sulfur grows thicker at the base of the volcano. I hear two collapsed because of it,” she whispered back. They spoke softly for there was no alternative; they had heard no sound besides the clanging of the great bell and pounding of spoons against bowls, and the whispers of speech embedded in their fading memories.

    “Who?”

    A few of the whittled souls turned to the source of the voice, which had dared speak with a shred of assurance. Their reddened eyes found a man, no older than thirty. He was a new arrival, for his hair still held some black and his skin was still clean beneath his clothes. Around his wrist he wore a red scarf, as soft as ashes which clung to it, but his constant worryings had revealed some of its hue. The specters stared at the bit of color.

    An old man cackled from his seat against the wall of one of the barracks.
    “Who, you ask? Why ask who? No one is anyone. Everyone is the same. Everyone is anyone. Any one is no one. We have no identities. We are merely ‘them’ or ‘it’, or maybe even ‘him’ or ‘her’. Forget who we were before this godforsaken encampment, because we were all someone.” The old man spat in the dust and gestured beside him for the young man to sit down. He obliged. “But nevertheless, we are here, and while we are here, we might as well be who we are. You may call me Garret.”

    “Like Garret Hummel? Professor Garret Hummel?” he asked, disbelievingly. “Head of the Department of Literature?”

    “Yours truly,” Garret said, bowing his head slightly.
    “Really? It’s an honor to meet you, sir—”

    Garret cut the young man off with a sharp knock to his head. “None of that nonsense now. Now we’re all the same: nobody. No one cares who you are, what you are. Be you criminal or hero, here we are all the same. Names are unnecessary, and here, everything unnecessary is dropped. Anything unnecessary will only slow you down, make you die faster,” Garret wheezed. “But even so, give me your name, so I’ve got something to call you by.”

    “Lawrence Elmore, Lars,” he said quietly, settling deeper within the powder.

    “Now don’t say my last name again, or they’ll have my skin,” he said, referring to the overseers. “Poor Pruitt was singled out on his first day here. They killed him, just because those papers on physics became so well known. It was nothing controversial, but he was famous,” he said wistfully. “So what do the tides of politics have against you?”

    “I’m a novelist, and I wrote on the nature of humankind as a whole in a few psychology journals,” he said softly. He began to stroke the red silk on his wrist.

    “Only so? And these were rather widely distributed novels?”

    Lars nodded. “I know that there were several in the Central Library.”

    Try as he could, Lars could not hide the regret in his voice. The library had been a magnificent marble building, piled high with as many books and magazines anyone could’ve imagined. Cramped shelves were crammed with books on every subject ever written about, with half a dozen wings and mazes of shelves big enough to get lost in. But that glorious monument to knowledge had been toppled with the economy. The movement to restore stability had required everyone to downsize and simplify. Advertisements were replaced by campaigns to spread fear of overgrowth. It was when expansion became synonymous with evil that the government began searching for someone to pin the blame on.

    And they chose many people. When all the politicians had been shut away, the remaining desperately searched for others to fill society’s insatiable appetite for justice to relieve themselves of blame. Following the logic that expansion came from knowledge, and knowledge came from people, they began not only to hunt out those who had spread knowledge, the writers, the scientists, the economists, the historians, but also to discourage scientific insight and higher learning. Schools were closed by the hundreds as their professors were shipped away to the far corners of the country to toil in fields which no one could coax into life. This was one such establishment.

    And the library had burned. Its steady pillars depleted to the ash which wiped away the livelihood of thousands.

    “You weren’t caught for so long?” Garret asked.

    Lars he sifted the fine ash through his fingers. They were so similar to those left in the library after the burning. He had been one of many to stand in the streets, helplessly held back by what seemed miles and miles of impenetrable police tape. He had been there to see only the catalogue emerge from the ruins, and there to listen as thousands and thousands of names, including his own, were read off of the cards to be publicized around the world as not criminals, but entities equal or lower than liars and rats.

    “I hid well. And I wasn’t important enough for them to track down,” he sighed. “But I was caught in the end. Now I suppose I’ll spend the rest of my life here, toiling away for no purpose, and no reason. But I suppose that’s the purpose. To have no reason.”

    “Stripping us from our place, and making us useless. It wounds more than a thousand swords,” Garret agreed. “So what did it in the end?” he asked curiously.

    Lars untied the red ribbon from his wrist. It was beginning to lose its color already. Lars shook it out and ran it between his fingers. “A girl, as you can imagine. I thought she loved me, but I guess in the end, it was too much for her. She turned me in, so I come here with a broken heart, if anyone here isn’t brokenhearted. What about you?”

    Garret laughed sharply. “You know who I am. I was the first they came for. It was even early enough for me to argue my case in court. We were close, but in the end, the prosecution pointed out that I was once again spreading doubt and lies, which was exactly what I was being tried for. Granted, back then not everyone was afraid. It was close in every way.”

    “It wouldn’t have mattered anyways. I’m here without even an arrest, forgetting search warrants and trials. You would be here even if proven innocent.”

    “Or dead,” Garret mused.

    The silence now consisted only of the sound of piling cinders and the rustling of thin clothing against the many layers of caked dust. Their conversation had carried across the courtyard and drained the sound from everyone else. In awe, Lars realized how the same they were: to the point where they shared everything among them, from their voices to their vibrancy; he, with his life, had only been allowed to come here because others had lost theirs.

    “Do you ever wish you were dead?” Lars asked suddenly. Several faces turned to look at him.

    “Why do you ask, son?” Garret gave him a sidelong glance.

    “No reason,” he said, though there was an unmistakable quaver in his voice.

    Garret smiled sadly. “No, we don’t feel like dying. Not us, at least. The ones who want to die have already died. The rest of us can’t manage it yet. We still have a hope for hope. You’re the only one who hasn’t been determined yet.”

    Lars frowned slightly, and lay back against the dusty wall.

    “But don’t be in any hurry to decide. It’ll come with time.”

    Lars retied the rag around his wrist and turned his eyes once more the skies. “So these ghosts were the most resilient of the best and brightest.”

    Garret shook his head. “No, they still are. They just need someone to wake them up. The habit of thinking never leaves you. There’s hope for them yet.”

    “You haven’t tried?” Lars asked curiously.

    “An old man like me? Of course not. I haven’t the energy to wake myself up from bed these sorry-excuses-for-days, even less to arouse energy in others. Though I must say, you did a fine job with me.”

    “Hm?” Lars frowned again.

    “Look at us. Chatting as if it were a summer afternoon. In a place like this.” Garret gave a hacking laugh. “I shan’t be sorry if today’s my last day.”

    “Professor Hummel?”

    “Garret,” he corrected. “The sulfur’s picking up, and I’m an old man. My position’s at the base of the volcano, where the ash is nearly two feet thick. The two on either side of me died today. My days are numbered, and I feel I’m just living on stolen time. It was good to meet you son. Thank you.”

    The great bell clanged once again, signaling the end of the time allotted for meals. Overseers rushed into the courtyard, some of them slipping comically in the soft sediments. They ushered the prisoners into drunken lines, too weary to hold them to the same cruel standards they had once taken delight in. Lars stood at the back, unsure what was happening.

    The warden officer marched stiffly to the center of the rows of prisoners. His movements were precise but lacking energy. He, though not expected to venture out of his sheltered pigeonhole, was as greyed and weary as his charges. He barked a single word which barely broke through the layers of ash.

    “Sing!”

    Slowly, the prisoners began to drone a chant which may have once been a song, but had been repeated so many times by so many unwilling mouths, that any trace of a tune had dissipated into the groans of the shackles of oppression. It was a haunting sound which had the same silencing effect of a thousand whispers.

    “We are rats.
    Hear us squeak,
    As we spread lies and disease
    Telling good men and women
    To turn to rats
    And sink their teeth into greed.
    “We are rats
    Steal away our long tails
    Steal away our greedy teeth
    Take them away
    So we cannot ensnare
    So we cannot bite
    So we cannot infect our lies.”

    The rumbling died away as slowly as it grew. The warden marched away as stiltedly as he had come. The prisoners floated away as they had before, filing out of the courtyard, as silent as the grave.



    The ash was blacker. It fell more heavily, and the air was thick with the feeling of smoke. A noxious wind blew at the prisoner’s bodies, decorated with odd stripes where their sweat had washed away weeks’ worth of ash. One by one they fell heavily in the dirt, too tired and weak to move. The bell clanged and the few with enough energy left to move dragged themselves towards the courtyard. But their parched throats found no rancid liquid, for there was not even sour broth.

    The great mountain grumbled its displeasure, spouting yet another cloud of cinders upon the miserable souls below. A shelf on the mountain tumbled down, mocking in its likeness of cool, sweet snow. And as they staggered beneath the losses of their pathetic sustenance, they began to dream.

    They dreamt not only of water and feasts and clean cloth, but also of their family and friends and what they left behind. They missed the sunshine, the rainfall, anything that was not ash. They yearned for the sun-warmed pages of well-worn tomes, the cool and smoothed leather of their favorite chairs. And as they wistfully thought of these luxurious which they had taken for granted so many times, men and women who the world had forsaken as gone, began to wake up.

    Lars dragged his feet, absently watching the long tracks stretch behind him. He, though only here for a few days, also grew weary; sleep was a futile and fruitless attempt, which only opened the gates for nightmares, or worse, dreams which showed precisely what the saddened remnants of humans could not have. Sulfurous winds stung his eyes, causing them to leak precious fluid, though he would never admit that something other than irritation could have caused his tears.

    The courtyard held few people. Very few people. Red eyed and grey-skinned, they could only be recognized as specters, Lars mused. He cast his eyes around, searching for Garret, but his search was unsuccessful. He considered going to search for him, but decided against it. It was near impossible to recognize anyone beneath their coverings of ash.

    “The volcano will erupt soon,” he heard someone whisper. “The sulfur is heavier.”

    “Yes. All who worked by the base died today.”

    Lars spun around. He could feel dread run up his spine, colliding into his mind like a cold sweat. The two women stared at him, startled by his sudden movement.

    “Everyone?” he demanded, not caring that his voice carried loudly across the courtyard.

    One of them nodded slowly. “No one returned from the farthest three rows. Only half came from mine, the fourth.”

    Lars turned around as fiercely as he had before, sighing deeply as he turned to the mountain. He coughed violently and the mountain shook with him. Wiping the tears from his eyes, he thought he glimpsed a streak of orange running down its side. In answer, an uncharacteristic murmur passed through the remaining prisoners.

    “They just need to wake up,” Lars muttered to himself, thinking of Garret’s words. He cast a glance over the courtyard. The same people who sat in this fading prison could just as easily be sitting on a college campus, or a public park. Lars smiled sadly, and spoke softly to himself: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to call your attention to the death of a great man.”

    Several people turned to face him. Surprised, he realized that his voice must have carried farther than he had thought. He turned away, embarrassed for breaking the standard of silence, but even as he turned away, he found more eyes searching out his. As they peered at him, the small streak of orange from the mountain reflected in their eyes, giving them a semblance of interest, of life. Something Lars was foolish enough to mistake as true for the briefest of moments. Or maybe that spark was not just a reflection…

    There’s hope for them yet?

    “Many of you may remember Garret Hummel, head of the Department of Literature,” Lars ventured, trying to disguise his nervousness with a cough. “He along, with many other brilliant minds, perished today, losing their lives to something that no human should have to.”

    The word ‘human’ seemed to have struck their attention. The irony, to think that someone might still have the stupidity, the audacity, the compassion, to think them human, when they themselves had forgotten. The snide remarks, sarcastic comments, and various humorous attacks the professors, and scientists, and thinkers would’ve given in a civilized place. But their weariness ate away their retorts, allowing Lars, unnerved speaking before such an audience, to continue.

    What am I doing? he thought to himself as his voice and words grew alien to even himself. What am I saying? Why?

    “Though death through suffocation is cruel, and something each victim could see slowly approaching as it seeped through cracks in the rocks, this was not what I am talking about. The death I am referring to is worse than that, imbued with a hopelessness that is all too common in this prison. They died by oppression, by none other than fellow human beings. And oppression brought about by ignorance and guilt. Our captors, perhaps not these men who hold us here, but undoubtedly the ones struggling to hold together the remnants of this country knew that they were to blame for this crumbling society, and so they put us here.” Some people were beginning to shift closer. No one spoke a word. They were listening to him. Not because they were interested in what he had to say, but because he was saying something. He was speaking to people who had lost their identities, and this man was returning them.

    “But while they are to blame for our pain, they, like us, are not to blame for society’s. In fact, no one is to blame, because everyone is to blame. Decades of greed and overspending are something humankind cannot help. Perhaps one or two of a hundred or thousand may be able to stay above this, but most of us cannot completely. It’s human nature—and so is the tendency to assign blame—and therefore humankind’s fault. But you cannot blame someone for being themselves, and you cannot blame a species for being a species. In the end, it’s no one’s fault.”

    More and more people were turning to watch him as he performed a desperate play before this uninterested audience. Making a fool of himself just to attract attention, like a toddler who throws himself on the ground and screams to be held by his parents. But it was working. There was interest on their faces and they evaluated his words and allowed themselves to believe them. They were accepting him into their throng and allowing him to give them his vigor. Maybe not that they agreed, or he was right, but because he was giving them hope, helping them revive the minds that had numbed to soften the blow for their owners. He inspired them.

    “But that does not change the fact that we are here, against our will, in intolerable conditions. Here, blame does lie with the ones who thought the solution to our crises would end with our imprisonment. But this blame is softened. Politicians, in themselves, can be considered a race of humans, who need public support to survive. Perhaps some sidled in with the public so they could stay afloat, to sway government in a way to make life better for others, deciding that we, the mistreated party, had to hold on until something could be done for everyone else. But even such an excuse cannot excuse them from blame, and therefore punishment.”

    There was some movement behind him, and he caught a glimpse of a grey darker than the sky and ground. The grey of a guard’s uniform. He realized that it must be nearing the time that the prisoners would be forced to chant that loathed rhyme. And he was standing in the warden’s spot. A trill of fear echoed in his heart, but he ignored it. These words were for all. Perhaps the guards would stop to listen.

    “But punishment should not be this. Punishment should be reconciliation. Punishment should be to fix the misdeed that they carried out. The ones in power, who might’ve supported this torture, shouldn’t be subjected to it. They should be made to let us out, and then started to fix what ended us up here in the first place. And then we can forgive them for the blame because, as I said earlier, everyone is to blame. We, the politicians, everyone. This problem is everyone’s, and everyone is responsible. And if the punishment is to come up with a solution, to make amends, then let everyone be blamed, so everyone must come up with solutions and make amends!”

    The guards were behind him now, standing behind him, unsure of what to do. They were so unaccustomed to having a prisoner revolt and had forgotten what to do. There were days where anyone who spoke out would be shot—the rats would turn rebellious at the smallest thing—but it had seemed that would no longer be necessary. The ash had wiped erased their vigor. But it seemed that it was returning. They were shuffling, conferring, and listening with an intent that was nearly tangible. This one, something had to be done. But what? The guns, could they still be used?

    Lars was no longer keeping track of what he was saying. Words were falling from his mouth as his small remembrance of Professor Garret Hummel evolved into a speech to give whatever Lars had left to these people. As he spoke, he realized that he had not even thought of these things himself. The confidence in his voice was not his own. He had no recollection or hint of ever having thought something along these lines, yet they were coming from his mouth, echoing across the courtyard with the grumbles of the volcano, avalanching shelves of ash from the slanting roofs, revealing shingling and textures of wood that their occupants had hardly seen. Lars watched the crowd gravitate him, and realized that his chest, before leaden with heartbreak, was light! He was happy. Euphoria at seeing these deadened people come back to life. It was irrational, and it was brief, but that meant there was hope, and in times like this, there was nothing to do but hope.
    And high above, the volcano spewed yet another column of smoke. The prisoners began to fall silent and still as the warden emerged from his room. With him was an overseer. The overseer had a rifle. The warden grabbed it from his hands.

    “Here, they call us rats! We spread infection, and bitterness. The truth, no matter what they may think, is bitter. Even so, why should that stop us from spreading it? Calling it a lie will not help, calling it a disease will not help, because just as it is human nature to blame and be greedy, it is human nature to spread the truth. On that front, we are all rats. And let us all be rats. We can all be to blame. We can all usher our nation back into the light.”

    Lars had not seen the warden behind him, and he hadn’t seen the gun in his hands. And because the warden was behind him, he did not see the warden lifted the rifle to his shoulder with movements as precise as his march. But he heard the click as the safety was removed. A warning that was somehow louder than the volcano’s stewing anger and Lars’ compelling words and the unfamiliar murmurs they brought.

    And Lars knew that unless he stopped, he would be killed.

    And, he realized, he didn’t care.

    “Ladies and gentlemen, the volcano above us has tormented us for so long, erasing our sense of self and our will to do anything but survive. And now, that torment is about to end in a fiery death. Each and every one of us will soon die, unless prisoners and overseers and warden alike can come to agreement and escape this hellish place. And this cannot happen unless we—everyone here—can come to an agreement: we are all the same. We are all equal. We are either all rats, or none of us are. And this name shouldn’t be born with hate or fear. How many times have we seen cultures take a name meant to discourage and humiliate and turn it into a banner under which to unify hope? That, too, is human nature. To foolishly believe until very end, and past it. So let us hope, and irrationally persevere, like rats, through the most grueling of times and terrains, until everywhere and everything are as we hope it should be.”

    And then Lars looked down at his hands, and untied the red scarf from his wrist. There was no applause. He hadn’t expected any. But their attention was all that he wanted. It was all that he needed. It meant they were awake. Maybe only a small step closer to what they used to be, but a step nonetheless. They were all going to die soon, but he was going to die sooner.

    He let the scarf fly, where it was carried high above the courtyard from a sulfurous wind. All eyes followed it as it rose fifty, sixty, eighty feet above the courtyard.

    Lars watched it drift, and the way that over a hundred pairs of eyes followed the streak of color. Maybe it hurt less to die if you knew it was coming. Maybe it hurt less if you knew that you had given something to the people you were about to leave behind. Maybe this was how Professor Hummel felt when he left for the fields to die.

    Melancholy, but not sad. Not afraid, not angry.

    Maybe he felt happy. Maybe he knew that it would not hurt.

    And then the wind abated and the scarf began its descent.

    All eyes followed it. All eyes except two.

    As it reached the head height of the crowd, hands were extended to try to reach that red scrap of cloth, a futile gesture that required an amount of energy unheard of for drained men and women. A gesture that wasted energy that would be used for surviving and nothing more. The red scarf was caught. Lars stared at his hands, and then the sky.

    "Maybe..." The warden fired.

    Maybe not.

    The pain was beyond what Lars could’ve imagined. As if his entire body were laced with cuts and all that pain was condensed into his heart, which had become weak and diluted with euphoria. What he might once have hoped was a hardened heart could not bear it, and exploded in a spurt of liquid as bright as his scarf.

    A moment before, his chest had been light enough to lift him off the ground, and suddenly, that lightness was gone, replaced by dread solidifying like a stone where his heart used to be. Fear and pain made his legs weak, and the weight of the absence of his heart knocked him over. He fell.

    In the end, for all his words, he was nothing more than he was: human.

    But he had closed his eyes, so he could not see the color fade from the world.

    Two overseers dragged his lifeless body away, and the warden stood at attention, a few paces from his usual spot, avoiding the splash of crimson where Lars had died, daring not to stand on the spray of vivid color that was all of remained of the man who had inspired hope in those who had lost hope even in themselves.

    “Line up!” he barked. “There is nothing to see, rats!”




    And it could be said that when that once-loathed song was sung later that day, each prisoner might’ve stood a little taller, and that a tune that had hardly been heard for years could be deciphered from the sound of a hundred withering throats.