I have only vague memories of my early years. The before times, I like to call them. In my life, there is a strict demarcation of before and after. Everything before seems… fake, in some sort of fundamental way. I know it happened, logically. But there’s something deeper, some sort of emotional wall—one that I haven’t managed to break down, not after all of these years; only seeing Elba on her deathbed managed to spark any type of reconciliation. Even that faded away as Elba did.

I asked Marco about it a few days ago. I asked him if he had something similar, that sort of impenetrable mist. He was there with me, when all of our lives changed. Mine and Elba’s and Marco’s. He was there from the start— Elba was away; we wouldn’t discover she was like us for some time yet.

We were together then as kids. He lived in the house next door, the stout red stucco hut. It had a crude wooden door stained bright blue. Their door would always get dusty, from the horses passing on the dirt road. The red dust caked miserably. The wobbly glass windows facing the street were not spared either.

So I asked him about it, about before. He surprised me in saying that he didn’t have that wall I’d described. To him, life is fluid— it was always fluid. That fits with Marco perfectly, as I think about it now. Marco doesn’t know what a wall is. All that seems to divide everything and everyone else, all of those imagined barriers, none of them ever touched Marco. He lived life in the moment, in all of the moments, forever.

I remember when we were kids. This wasn’t before, this was shortly after. We were still coming to terms with what happened to us. What made us different, what elevated us above the others but also sank us down into the dirt. That dirt that I’ve been crawling out of for years. I’ve washed and washed and washed, but it never gets out of my fingernails.

We were talking to some of the other village kids. They weren’t like us, as we had recently been made aware. In spite of this, he invited them to swim with us. It was a hot day, the water was perfectly cool and crisp, and swimming was a lot less fun with two. The sun glinted off of the water so brightly it was like a million little suns, all dancing and swimming around in there with us. It was too beautiful to hoard. Marco saw that clearly.

They weren’t supposed to be there swimming with us. It was a mix of reverence and fear that kept them away. That, and a stern warning from their parents. The only reason they were able to was that things hadn’t been solidified yet. Shortly after, things were like unhardened clay. They could be molded and shifted as we wanted them. Marco stretched things like taffy, then, until it all solidified into hard reality.

He called the other kids over, from their patchy shade under a scrubby tree nearby. He asked them to play Marco Polo and laughed, flashing his gapped teeth. He didn’t even like the game that much, he just liked that it was named like him. He made that joke a lot, every time we swam.

The other kids came over. Atya, Karalia, Amicus, and Jo. Jo was scarcely three. The four of them came over very carefully, like we were going to trick them. Like we were dirty. Jo was sitting down on the stone edge of the swimming hole when Karalia pulled him up. Karalia stared at us intensely with her dark eyes.

“Do you want to swim? The water’s too perfect not to share.” Marco said casually.

Karalia looked unmoved. “The water does look nice.” She looked back nervously at the others.

“So come on in!” said Marco.

“Well,” she hesitated. “We’re not supposed to. You know.”

“I do know.” Marco’s face took on a rare serious look, then broke into a mischievous smile. “C’mon, it’s just swimming. Plus there’s nobody around to see. Don’t be a wimp”

He said it in a fun, jokey way, like most everything else. Still, there was something there. Some bite to Marco. To be honest, I didn’t like him very much before. I still wasn’t a fan of him at the swimming hole. But when all we had was each other, we became very close.

Karalia was stone-faced. Amicus was less stoic. “I’m not a wimp! You take that back!”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Get in the water, then,” Marco deadpanned.

Amicus muttered something to Karalia. Meanwhile, Jo was off in his own little world. Karalia whispered something to Atya, who shot her a look. Karalia approached the water, then dipped a toe in. At that, Amicus jumped in. Atya and Jo followed.

It was awkward at first, how couldn’t it have been? We just looked at each other for a while, standing in the water. Then, Marco splashed some water at Amicus. It may have seemed impulsive, but it wasn’t. Amicus was ruthlessly competitive and would never let that splash go unchallenged. Marco knew this, and he splashed him wanting to break the sheet of tension hanging over us.

Soon enough we were all splashing each other, then playing like old times. The water was cool and we played for hours. Even Karalia let loose and laughed. We did play Marco Polo, with Marco as the searcher, of course. It was a lazy summer day just like before. Marco and Amicus even got into one of their scraps. They were tumbling around in the water, fighting and grinning and yelling.

A figure started wandering towards us through the dust. They were coming from the direction of the village, along the tiny path cleared from the stout, hardy shrubs. The ground was all red-packed dirt and smooth stone, even where the shrubs still grew. That same landscape surrounded the swimming hole. The water was a crystalline blue in contrast.

The silhouette continued to trudge along until she came into view. It was Jo’s mother, Azel. She wiped the accumulated dirt from her eyes and face. The dirt and dust here was relentless. Even the adults, who at our age were still semi-mythical figures, struggled to contend with it.

Our tranquility was shattered. Azel had come to check on Jo. At first she waved and smiled as she saw us kids in the water, until she came a little closer. Then she screamed and ran towards Jo. She had fear and disgust written all over her face. I was standing next to Jo, a little protectively. She shoved me aside coldly and muttered something at Jo. She didn’t look me or Marco in the eye.

“Get out!” She snapped in a hushed voice. We were staring at her, me and Marco, and she averted her eyes. The other kids stood frozen now in the water.

“Now!” She continued, sharply. She walked over to the edge of the pool and yanked Jo up by his arm.

At that, the other children quickly scuttled out of the water. Azel shepherded them away, casting a dark glance towards me and Marco.

What scared me the most wasn’t her anger—Azel was known for being a bit of a hothead. It was the way she didn’t address Marco and I. She didn’t even look us in the eyes. I knew that we were different. Marco tore down the wall for a little while, just enough time to forget. But I deluded myself, then. I deluded myself into thinking that nothing had really changed. To see reality was being slapped in the face.

We weren’t particularly close with Azel. But it was a small village, with maybe twenty mothers in total. The net sum of that was that all of the mothers were a little bit our mother. We used to just barge into each other’s houses as we roamed around during the day. We would prance to one of our houses and most of the time we would get a snack and some water. Azel made the best Azukle, crispy and salty.

I love that memory, despite its bitter end. It represents us as we were, Marco and I. I like looking back at our childhood naivete. There’s something I miss about right after. Even after being wordlessly rebuked by Jo’s mother, there was a glorious sense of adventure to the whole thing. To go from unimportant children to objects of intense focus was heady. Even that first biting taste of reality hadn’t soured us yet. That time would come, though.

But it was a good deal after when it all came down around us. Now I want to talk about before. I can peer at some memories through the haze. Some silly details, like Azel’s Azukle. But the emotion of that time is lost to me. It’s like I have no connection to who I was then, as if the revelation changed everything. I have the memory of clinging to my mother’s skirts when I was three, so reluctant to part from her when she left me in the care of one of the other moms. I remember the mechanics of that moment but nothing more. How I felt is lost on me. I cannot even dredge up that love I used to have for her.

I remember my older sister’s name but not her face. Arina. She was much older than me, maybe fifteen years. There was no one in between us, just her one day and me fifteen years later. I never asked Ma about it. Arina was married off and living in another village by the time I was five. I never saw her near the end of before, let alone after.

I feel no emotion for these people, since all of my love for them was before. Marco I love and Elba I loved, since they became my family. I remember those emotions from after clearly.

I’ve been wanting to go through it all, all of after, starting from the day of revelation. Maybe it will help me come to terms with what happened to me. Oh, putting it that way makes me sound like I had no hand in the way things turned out. I did, but I’m not sure if I made things worse or better. Maybe now is finally the time to find out. I’ll tell you the story of how everything changed, how my life was pushed off course into something magnificent and terrible. I'm just a little afraid of what I'll uncover.