Eden

Eden

  B. Zaragoza

  EDEN

  Copyright © 2013 B. Zaragoza

  ISBN: 9781311411785

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to events as well as actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Melissa Muldoon

  Published By

  P.O. Box 211322

  Chula Vista, CA 91921

  Cyril Zyk sat at the kitchen table in his underpants and dipped a hard bread roll into a bowl of tepid water. The bread tasted as good as it did everyday, he told himself, to avoid thinking the obvious—that not only did his mother refuse to stop writing poetry that used words like wet and enter me, but Mamica, he used her first name because the regime deemed everyone should be equal, had also become a protestor.

  Mamica tried to push the cupboard above the sink closed to conceal the burgeoning poems inside. Cyril turned his face away and bit into the hard edge of his roll. When his father still lived with them, Mamica used to tell Cyril that the Albanian regime had achieved success. No family, for example, could own a car. No family could buy more toilet paper than another family. And no person could be issued a passport, which was fortuitous because foreign countries had sex and guns.

  Mamica shuffled over to the breakfast table with Cyril’s military uniform in hand. She helped him with one jacket sleeve at a time and then whispered words that washed over his brain. She said, “My bir. Try not to shoot anyone today.”

  Promptly at 7:00 AM in the town square, Colonel Hoggia, a bow legged man in a faded khaki uniform, marched past seven rows of recruits.

  Cyril stood in the front row because he was considered one of the best shooters in the town. He held a shield made of scratched transparent plastic. His helmet was green and the inside padding was worn down from decades of recruits before him who had served their mandatory two years of military service. His black vest had duck tape on the insides to hold the seams together, but his gun, bought by the leadership from a foreign country, was new.

  To his left stood the recruit who had pounded on his apartment door one night six months ago and taken away Skander, Cyril’s father.

  To his right stood Teutos, a nineteen-year-old recruit whose hard stare rejected any sign that she ever had illegal sex with Cyril. Yesterday evening on his return home from the barracks, she had pulled him into a dark corner after the curfew and had sprinkled her voice into his ear saying, “I want to feel it inside of me at least once before I die.”

  “Are you a man-woman?” Colonel Hoggia asked, snapping Cyril out of his obvious thoughts. Colonel Hoggia was ‘colonel’ because the leadership needed to keep the town free from chaos and therefore military staff had to be more equal than others. “Always remember, nothing is as it seems,” he said.

  The recruits maintained their expressionless stare, glaring into the broad empty boulevard ahead of them. After an hour of waiting, the recruits’ eyes finally detected what they had been told they were not waiting for: a silent mass of enemies. Cyril squinted twice. Coming toward him was a swell of shock white skin. They were protestors and they were all naked. Tits, the images bloated through Cyril’s eyes, those are tits. They held sticks in the air with white paper nailed to them.

  “They have weapons!” Colonel Hoggia yelled.

  Cyril leaned forward on his toes, gripping one hand on his gun and peering harder into the crowd. At the front of the mass he saw Mamica, her legs spindled with varicose veins and her breasts sagging. She held a paper up to the blue sky using the stick that they had used to hold up tomato branches in their garden. The paper read: “Enter Me.”

  Colonel Hoggia commanded, “Look at their weapons! Look at their assault! Nothing is as it seems!”

  The boots of the recruits slapped against the square. They headed toward the boulevard. Cyril marched in step and compared himself to the bronze equestrian statue of Skanderbeg that stood frozen behind them. He wondered, “Did our hero also have obvious thoughts?”

  Then Cyril’s head turned confused. Naked protestors weren’t men-women. They weren’t warriors. They were naked. He wanted to slap his mouth to send his obvious thoughts into the back reaches of his brain, but his right hand had to hold the strap of his shield while his left hand clutched his gun.

  The recruits stopped at the edge of the square and the protestors came right up to where the boulevard and the square met. Without orders from anyone, the protestors pressed their bodies against the plastic shields, pushing forward. The recruits began to push them in the opposite direction. Cyril smelled the musky body odor of a man pressing against his shield.

  Colonel Hoggia’s voice yelled from somewhere behind the recruits, lifting as though he hovered in the sky. “Push them back! Push them back! They are devious sex tanks!”

  The obvious also pushed into Cyril’s brain—that tomorrow disappearances would be a guarantee.

  Then, several naked men raised Mamica up to their shoulders.

  She spoke to the protestors. “Thirty six years ago, the leadership ordered the entire town killed. The protestors, including my Mama and Baba, held bread rolls in their hands. The leadership called their rolls grenades.”

  “This man-woman is a devious sex tank!” Colonel Hoggia said.

  Mamica cupped her hand over her mouth so her voice would echo further. “After the bloodshed, the leadership blamed the colonels. All five colonels were shot in this square.”

  Colonel Hoggia took in a loud breath, but suddenly he had nothing to say.