The Lost
The boy didn’t really understand why he wasn’t allowed outside the fences. “There’s dangerous people,” his father would say. “It’s safer in here.” The boy had seen the dangerous people, and they didn’t seem like threats. They could hardly walk in a straight line. The boy, eager to please his father, obeyed his commands. He would get up in the morning, he would water the plants, he would play with other children, and he would go to bed. Nothing more.
Strangely enough, the boy would enjoy watering the plants the most.
His father tended to the community’s farm, and he enlisted the help of his son and Ignacio, an older boy who had lost his family. Together, they made sure that the harvest of each year would sustain the community between supply runs. The wonderful thing about the farm was that it was by the edge of the fence. It looked out onto the nearby road which led to town, and occasionally one of the dangerous people would wander by the fence in a daze. The boy would wave, hoping that they might respond. They never did, but that didn’t stop him from trying.
Ignacio couldn’t understand the boy’s fascination with the lost. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t try to understand, however. As far as Ignacio could tell, the boy had never lived in a world without the lost. They had always been there, but they hadn’t ever meant anything to the boy. Ignacio did his best to answer the boy’s questions, but Ignacio himself had limited experience with the lost. On the first day, Ignacio came home from elementary and found his parents with milky eyes and dropped jaws. They looked at Ignacio, but they didn’t seem to recognize him. That was the first time Ignacio’s heart had been broken.They walked towards him with hands outstretched, but Ignacio was scared of them. He ran and ran, and eventually he found adults who embraced him despite not knowing his name. Ignacio cried into their shoulders, and they carried him away with them.
Ignacio grew up in the fence as well. He was adopted by the farmer and his wife, and he would watch over the newborn when the couple needed to take care of business. When Ignacio grew older, he fell in love with the girl who lived across the street. She would sow clothes because her mother taught her to, and occasionally she would sow Ignacio something. He cherished each gift she gave him. The girl, too, had lost people. Her father didn’t come home from work on the first day, and the girl assumed it was because he couldn’t remember how to get home. Ignacio believed that he couldn’t remember what home was or why he would want to go back, but the girl didn’t need to hear that. She didn’t talk about her father often.
The two would often run off together to one of the corners of the community, usually nabbing a couple rolls of bread and water. They would share dinner together and act like adults, though neither of them really knew what that meant. Nobody acted like adults anymore.
The girl, too, had a fascination with the lost. She kept trying to find her father amongst the few who wandered by the fences. Ignacio would help her look, but he didn’t know what her father looked like. She appreciated the help anyways.
Then came a misty morning. On that morning, she thought she saw her father outside. The lost one looked up and met her gaze. Her eyes widened while the lost’s did not. She didn’t come back. This was the second time Ignacio had his heart broken. The first and only girl he’d ever love disappeared without a trace, and that only really meant one thing. She was lost.
The strangest thing is that she did actually see her father.
For weeks, Ignacio was lost in his own work. He couldn’t allow himself to think about her. Missing the lost meant forsaking those not yet lost, but he couldn’t help himself. Like the whole world at one point or another, he cursed the unfairness of life. He was lucky to have felt love, but unlucky to have lost it so soon.
Much like she did, Ignacio would watch outside the fence for her. He didn’t know what finding her would mean, but he knew that the hope of finding her made the pain duller.
The boy and his father felt this pain, the boy less so. His father had once loved too, and he was fortunate enough to have married this woman. The boy had never met her, but he was told stories of who his mother was.
His father took a lot of his pain out onto his work, but what anger wasn’t used constructively was lashed out onto the boy. Ignacio didn’t really understand why the father was so downtrodden and angry with the boy after the woman passed, but then he lost the girl and began to understand. While Ignacio had the disease to blame for the loss of his loved ones, the father only had the boy to blame for the death of his loved one.
There were good times on the farm, of course. Not all was dreary. The boy’s father would occasionally take the boy outside of the fence to fetch some supplies in empty locations. The father was mostly silent on these trips, but the boy would make jokes and his father would crack a smile once in a while. If the boy found a toy in one of these locations, his father would let him keep it.
The boy had a stockade of toys in the community. After all, he was the only resident anywhere near his age. All discarded clothing and toys of young ones who grew up like Ignacio would eventually end up in the boy’s hands.
All things considered, the boy was relatively happy with his life.
Several harvesting seasons would pass, and the boy was no longer as young as he used to be. Very rarely, members of the community would find themselves forgetting things and would be excommunicated and left to fend for themselves outside the fence. They could not risk an outbreak. As far as they knew, the disease wasn’t contagious--not in the traditional sense, anyways; skin-to-skin was surefire spreading--but that didn’t mean they were willing to take the risk of losing more than they already had lost.
Several of the children who became adults like Ignacio found themselves unafraid to bring new life to the community. Three young children were born around the same time, and for several months the community was elated with the prospect of hope for the future. Still, even with the few additions, the community dwindled slowly. There would be a scavenger who didn’t come back or the rare symptoms showing of the disease, but surprisingly nobody died of murder or old age. For the former, there simply wasn’t hatred for the fellow man; they couldn’t afford it. For the latter, nobody ever had the luxury of reaching old age in the community.
Ignacio did not have a partner or child. His heart still belonged to the girl who was lost in the world, and he could not love another while she was still potentially alive. He knew deep down that she was probably gone to the disease, one of the many who forget everyone and eventually forget to eat food and waste away to nothing. As for the child, Ignacio would still take care of the boy. His father recovered from the loss of the boy’s mother more and more each passing harvest, but his eyes were still sunken and gray. As far as Ignacio was concerned, the father was already one of the lost--sure as hell acted like one, anyways.
Ignacio still kept an eye peeled for the girl, but she never came around.
The boy would also watch the lost as they walked by the fence. Ignacio couldn’t quite understand what the boy found interesting about them. The boy wasn’t looking for anybody in particular, it seemed. He just didn’t understand the lost, and it seemed he wanted to.
There came another morning where the boy didn’t come outside to the fields. Ignacio went upstairs into the home to look for him, but he found his bed empty. Ignacio already had a sinking suspicion of what the boy might’ve done, but he had hoped the boy had more sense than he gave him credit for.
He ran to the gatekeepers and asked them if the boy had come through. The gatekeepers told him that the boy had in fact walked through the gates, but he was not alone. The boy’s father accompanied him. They were going on a supply trip, and the gatekeepers thought nothing of it. Ignacio, on the other hand, knew that the boy’s father hadn’t actually been on one of these supply runs in many years; supply runs were now Ignacio’s job when the crops were growing.
Ignacio went back to the farm and gathered some supplies. The boy and his father already took most of the useful supplies, so he found himself improvising several tools that he felt were necessary.
The gatekeepers let him out without a hitch. They didn’t question where he was going, and they didn't question when he was coming back. They didn’t especially care.
The road that led out of the community was a very rough and gray concrete strip. The painted lines had long since faded away, and the edges of the road began to crack and chip away. Little weeds spurted through the small crevices. The grass on the sides of the road was much too tall, and the forest even further still was creeping up slowly onto the pavement.
Ignacio could only really think of one location that the father might’ve taken the boy, and that was to their old family home. It wasn’t too far from the community, but it was in the midsts of suburbia, where most of the lost still wandered around trying to collect information only to forget it moments later.
It wasn’t hard to navigate to the old neighborhood. As he came closer and closer, the amount of lost wandering the streets grew and grew. They would look at Ignacio with gray eyes and passive, lost expressions and they would reach out with their bony hands and slowly step towards him, but he would briskly trot to stay clear of them. After a couple feet of chase, the lost would always seem to forget what they were chasing and come to a stand-still on the road.
Their faces were always faintly reminiscent of people that Ignacio thinks he used to know, but he never was too sure. They all had the same level of recognition to him despite the fact that he knows he couldn’t have known all these people.
Ignacio had never personally lived in the suburbs. He always found it strange that each house was basically the same as the others around it, just with different occupants and slightly different floor plans. The paint jobs might vary, too, but the houses were always neutral colors that were faded from the years of neglect and precipitation. After a little while of wandering from street to street, Ignacio could see and recognize shared blueprints among houses. They lost their individuality to him, and soon they became row of house after house. If he didn’t have the street names to help direct him, Ignacio was almost sure that he couldn’t navigate from one address to another.
In time, Ignacio found that each of the street names were very similar to others as well. Most streets were based on trees or berries, sometimes it would be a cul-de-sac or a ridge or just a road. He wandered from Poppleton to Saddle Ridge to Pierce Circle where he would cut through the backyards to reach Crimson Ridge which led to Oakwood, so on and so forth. The streets were always silent with the exception of the quiet sounds of the lost, many of which were either emaciated and crawling or dead and on the ground. The ones that weren’t were skinny and bony, faces sunken and skin dry. They would walk on the sidewalks, but sometimes they would fall over onto the grass where they would roll over and try to get back up.
In the end, Ignacio never did find the boy and his father. He forgot where he was, what he was doing and why, how he got there, who he was. He became just another man on the concrete streets trying to find his way to where he was going--which, of course, he didn’t remember as well. He would pass by another lost person, brush shoulders for a moment. He would turn and look at them, and they would turn and look at him. One might call it staring, but one would be wrong. They simply tried to recognize the other person, sometimes succeeding in a little nod but sometimes not. The man found that he recognized the others less and less, and soon he was completely and utterly lost.