Ava Fairhall

"So if there is a Creator, why does good people die?" the young boy asks with a plaintive voice.

"Why do good people die," his mother automatically corrects him.

Carrie bites her tongue to keep from saying something she'd regret, disapproving of the way her sister is ignoring the boy's soul searching need to comprehend the massive scale of the tragedy around them, and instead insisted on correcting his grammar.

It wasn't important if he got the words wrong! she wanted to yell, but she knew it would do no good to voice her opinion. Joan wouldn't change her mothering techniques and they'd have an argument about her right to bring up her son the way she thought was best, not Carrie, who didn't even have any children of her own. When she did, then she could criticize. She could hear the argument in her head even know and knew how it would end.

"But why?" Boyd insists on an answer, his large eyes staring up at his mother's face as if the answer lay there.

"The Mighty Creator knows all and sees all. We may not always understand why He calls his children back to Him, only accept that he does." Joan's reply could have been straight from the teacher's mouth, a line of dogma that everyone used to explain things they didn't understand or, more often, didn't want to think about.

"But why?"

Carrie could have hugged the boy for continuing to pester his mother for an answer, but again she refrained. More such questions needed to be asked by everyone, and more answers needed rather than simply accepting the words spoken for generations and passed around the community like a whore. For as long as she could remember she'd wanted to know more about these giant metal structures that they'd found and made into their home? Who had been inside them? What had happened to them? What was their purpose? Had they been abandoned as worthless or had it been an accident? So many questions peppering her brain it was a wonder they didn't trickle out her ears and eyes.

"Boyd, will you stop asking questions!" Joan was getting frustrated now. "Go out and feed the camels and stop pestering me, or you'll get no milk for supper!" she snapped at him, rubbing her forehead with the back of her hand and leaving a smear of flour behind.

Scowling and upset, Boyd scurried outside as he's bidden, knowing the warning tone in his mother's voice usually led to worse things and he's eager to avoid another beating.

Joan's response was typical of the answers Carrie had gotten too. After a while she'd learned not to ask, but rather than sink back down into the dull drudgery of daily life and forget about it like they'd wanted her to, she'd decided to find her own answers.

"It's only natural for him to ask why, Joan," Carrie can't help herself. Boyd's face had been the picture of disappointment and fear and she'd felt so sorry for him that she felt she needed to make one last attempt to get through to her sister. It was like watching the great dunes move: no matter how much you skimmed off the surface there was always piles more sand underneath, but something in Carrie resisted giving up completely and lived in hope that one day things would be different.

"Don't you start," Joan thumped at the yeasty dough she was kneading to make bread to vent some of her anger.

"I'm not saying you should have the answers or that we should be ashamed because we don't know, but--"

"That's exactly what you're saying, so before you try any more of your be nice to the boy crap, you remember that --"

"'I'm the one with kids and when you have some of your own....' yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all that." Carrie cuts her off before the same old lines get spoken yet again. "It's not his fault he's got questions, that's all. Don't punish him for wanting to understand the world, he's only six. The world's a big place and he's trying to make sense of how he fits in."

"Why don't you let me decide how to do that, then, instead of interfering all the time?"

Carrie sighs wearily, knowing they're about to tread over the same old ground again. "I'm going outside." Maybe if she can't get through to Joan, she can help Boyd. He was young, but if she could help him find his own answers and keep that spark of childish wonder alive before it got beaten out of him, maybe, one day, things would change for the better.