In a decrepit shack, men were sleeping, piled up on the ground. Like others around him, the young man woke up to the strident ringing of a bell.
“Rise and shine, everyone! Same as usual, three minutes to grab your tools and get to work! The salt isn’t going to mine itself!” The Roman slaver in white robes said, repeating the same line he fed them every day, before leaving with his accursed bell.
The young man wanted to kill him. To rid the earth of this scourge and escape. For months already, he had been there. Every day was the same. The shack, the quarry, the whip, the pain, the gruel, the shack…
But he could only submit. The chains at his feet wouldn’t let his fate be otherwise. And neither would the two towering guards the fat man employed.
Every passing day he felt weaker. Perhaps his end was near. As a miner, he had little value, no one would care if he died, not even his owner.
As he left the shack, he threw a longing glance at the last piece of freedom he had, a name he had carved for himself in the shack’s wall, hidden in the corner he always slept in.
‘Innocentis’
All he could afford was a weak smile.
His smile froze.
His muscles cramped.
He hadn’t yet left the shack today, and he never would. He screamed. The slaver turned around, frowning. “Shut him up!”
But he didn’t hear. His body was nothing but pain. He had survived the strain of the work, the heat of the sun, the crack of the whip. But this was what broke him.
For the first time in his life, he wished he were dead.
Piece by piece, shred by shred, his body was gored by an invisible hand until his being was but a thought. Time stopped, the world stopped turning. Who would know what had really happened to him? His body had to have become a pile of warm flesh and blood. As he felt the world and his being fracture in a torturous unison, his last remnants of sanity faded.
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“Happy birthday to you!”
“Happy birthday to youuu!”
“Happy birthday to you Michael!”
“Happy birthday to youuuuuuu!
The whole family rejoiced as Michael blew on his sixteen candles.
“Happy birthday son!” His father, a middle-aged worker at a bakery, had been the one to prepare him a sumptuous cake. He was also the one to bring out his present, dragging it in the living room. It was nicely wrapped in shiny blue paper, with a red ribbon on top, but it was painfully obvious what it was.
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His mother was recording everything on her phone, she didn’t want to miss a single frame of her son on his special day. She was so proud of him. He had worked hard to deserve his present.
They were a rather poor family of seven. So he had worked himself to the bone at school. His grades earned him a paid scholarship at a prestigious college two years before most kids his age finished high-school.
“You bought me a scooter! No way!”
He leaped off his chair. In a sickening crunch, his face hit the hard ground. Through a bleeding mouth, he howled like a banshee.
His mother’s phone hit the ground.
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It was another regular day at her desk.
Filling the last lines of her tax report, she wrote her full name one more time.
‘Gabriela Garcia Fontes’, and signed next to it.
She quickly gave a last look at her editing work for the day. As a branding photographer, making sure her images were clean and crisp, free of any defect, was as important as taking them in the first place. The clients didn’t care if the final product didn’t look like the real thing anymore, in fact, they often asked that it does not.
A young blond-haired boy knocked on the half opened door.
Her son, her sun, her everything.
“Mom, are you working late again? When do we eat…”
She looked at the clock and gasped. Already seven!
“Sorry Mateo, mom is coming right now!”
She rushed out of her office and into the kitchen, in a few steps she reached the oven’s side, and searched through the cupboards. “What do you think about mom’s special Italian pasta today?” she asked, triumphantly shaking a pack of spaghetti.
“I think mom’s-”
She never heard the end of his answer.
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Minato was driving a truck through the sinuous outskirts of Tokyo. His family owned a moving company, his whole job was maintaining the trucks while they weren’t being used. Cleaning, repairing, refueling, all nice things he loved to do.
His trucks were his babies.
He wasn’t driving all that fast, rather slowly even. The last thing he wanted was to cause damage to the surroundings and, most of all, his precious vehicle.
But as his soul left him, departing through the torrents of hell for another world, grasped and savagely ripped from his body, presumably by god himself; no one could stop his truck anymore.
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Near a comfortable bed, layered with many sheets, a peculiar looking man held his wife’s hand.
She had always been slender but these last few months had been hard on her. However, she had never been this happy.
He caressed her bulging belly. “And what if it’s a girl?” he asked.
“Then I’m thinking we should name her after your grand-mother. Kuli.”
That had filled the man with joy for an instant. Then his wife’s hand had limped out of his. Her eyes were glazed over.
And she disappeared.
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The hero awoke on the cold, hard, polished stone floor.
They were surrounded by four large men in shining armor.
Nearby was a nobly dressed young woman, panting on the ground. No one provided help to either of them.
An old man in even more indecently luxurious robes stepped out of the shadows.
“Welcome, Hero! I shall now grant you a new name!”
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