The Divided Line: Caleb [Part 2]
Galaxy image overlay on riot police image
Graham Holtshausen / Jean via Unsplash
It began slowly—the plague, the greed, the riots. Revolutionaries rose up behind symbols, murals, and songs, while the masses were fed machinery and religion. In the wake of the destruction, politicians deemed art a dangerous thing—a worthless thing—and the masses agreed. They took away the paint, the books, and the instruments. But they could not wholly silence the artists. These are the stories they left behind.
CW: violence
Caleb stood on the ledge of the barricade and held the camera to his eye. He framed the view, carefully centering the high-piled demarcation line between two worlds. On one side, the gathered masses danced and sang around a burning effigy of shattered wood pieces. Paint covered the stone walls and flecked both clothes and skin. Bright colored lights pulsed with the rolling cadence of the drum circle, and people stomped and swayed to the rhythm.
On the other side, soldiers stood in rank and file, their riot shields held fast against the protruding billboard post at the forefront of the barricade. Bright white flood lights bore down on their backs, cold and all seeing. They’d been there for nearly four hours now. Always at a distance. Always ready to advance, yet never moving to do so.
As though the revelry were a plague. As though it would kill them too if they got any nearer.
Caleb knew it was only a matter of time before the stalemate broke, before the soldiers realized that this fever of theirs would neither extinguish silently nor dissipate without action.
The energy that’d surged through the mourners as the night encroached had unleashed a sort of choreomania set in a new dark age, dancing and keening the only reprieve to the grief of so much devastation.
And maybe that was what the soldiers and their regime feared the most—this mania.
Art, like humanity, had but one grand desire: To survive. To carve its mark upon time and consciousness. To outlast the inevitability of death, whether it be from a soldier’s bullet or the slow eradication of creation.
Riot cop in front of a bonfire in the dark
Danilo Arenas via Pexels
“Disperse,” boomed the electric voice of the police speakers. “This is an illegal assembly. Disperse.”
But no one left. And the soldiers took no action, stagnant until given a command. The wait was a long held breath. Both sides knew that when it was released, only violence would follow.
Caleb clambered down from the barricade and made his way toward the fire. He lifted the camera once more and held within its frame the leaping hues of oranges and reds that danced across the wood with ruthless choreography.
He slowed the shutter speed and adjusted the focus, capturing the blurred forms of the people who crossed before him. With a click, they froze, streaks of color and light locked into an immortalized fleeting moment. The faint flashes of smiles, arms lifted, movement and life held gently in the camera’s eye.
Serena’s soft touch drew him away from the view. Caleb lowered the camera and planted a light kiss to her brow. “Welcome back,” he said.
Serena took the camera between her hands with reverent care and pulled it from Caleb’s grasp. “You’ve captured it,” she said, “Will you live in it for just a moment with me?”
Caleb eased the camera into its case and took Serena’s hand. “To living,” he said.
A bright smile glanced across Serena’s lips, and she pulled him forward and down into the heated press of people.
Sweat beaded on Caleb’s skin, and the thickness of the air dizzied him. He let that dizziness muddle his mind, let it overwhelm his senses. He lost himself to the entrancing rhythm of the drums and the beat of his stomping feet. He lost himself to the glow of Serena’s eyes in the firelight. He lost himself to the feel of her arms around him.
She leaned in close, pressed a kiss beneath his ear and whispered, “Look up.”
In that moment, the sky alighted with a wash of color. A galaxy projected just overhead, just out of reach. At its center burned the sun, its flaming hues shadowed by the smoke of the fire.
The music stuttered to a stop, and the people froze, gazes locked upward, mouths agape.
Words flashed across the galaxy, one after the other. We. Are. Infinite.
“Do you like it?” Serena asked, analyzing her projection with a critical eye.
Caleb smiled and held Serena close. “It’s incredible,” he said. “You’re incredible.”
She sighed in relief and looked up at him. She started to say something, but the deep thump of a gas launcher silenced her. Someone shouted, the crowd parted, and the can clattered to the ground, erupting with a pop, its white gas billowing skyward.
A murmur rose like a wave, and in its tumult, the sound morphed into terror. Three more cans burst open with their tear gas clouds, and through the haze the first line of soldiers crested the ledge.
Caleb grabbed Serena’s hand and ran.
She kept pace, clinging hard to Caleb’s arm. They didn’t make it far before the congestion of the fleeing masses stopped their progress.
“The tunnels,” Serena said. “Get to the tunnels.”
They turned their course and fled toward the stairwell at the edge of the square which led down into a long abandoned world. But from within, the shadow of a man emerged, heading straight for the lines of soldiers. He held a wired brick in one hand and secured the straps of a gas mask with the other.
Caleb reached into his bag and pulled out his camera. Serena tugged him on, but he dared not move, lest the moment passed without him managing to capture it. The one against the many.
Four soldiers at the forefront of the lines lifted their guns to meet him.
Caleb lifted the camera and held his breath, the seconds passing like a slow-beating heart, then he snapped three photos in swift succession.
The first, the brick arcing out of the man’s hand and over the heads of the front line of soldiers. The second, the man’s bullet-riddled body lying cold and bleeding on the stone. The third…the flaming epicenter of the bomb the man had thrown, and the mutilated corpses of the soldiers who’d been near it.
The Divided Line is an original serial.
