The Stamp Collector

A young black boy sat in the mud, his stomach wrenching from shame while three other boys roared with hysterical laughter by the success of their accomplishment. The depravity of the moment knew no boundaries to the sensitivities of a child, for a tear had sprung from his eye as the boys spat their taunts, and then ran off into the depths of the city.

One moment led to the next, and soon the little boy wiped away his tears and stood up out of the puddle. Life in the inner city was riddled with such moments inasmuch for the boy, who suffered a slight pinch of obscurity: his eyes were unmatched in color. Deep blue on the left and piercing white with a black pupil on the right. The deviation withheld no disabling properties, not considering the insensitive attention he gathered from his peers. It could have been a bizarre plot hatched by fate that allowed children to behave in such a manner: the world was full of illogical designs--innane circumstances that inevitably wove themselves into the very fabric of nature. But the human condition allowed for special circumstances at times, and on that day, the boy would be flinging the mud away from his legs and making his way to the orphanage in a flight of subconscious cartharsis. It was the last time he ever cried.

A priest took note of the messy boy as he came through the double doors, but the boy retained a rather placid disposition. The specter of his past had paved the way for his emotional resilience: his mother passed from an overdose within days after his birth, and only God knew who the father was. From the day he became consciously aware of his surroundings, the boy had never known of a home aside from the church. He glanced at the priest with a look only a child could give, and the priest instructed a seminary student to assist the young child in a hurried clean-up, for an instruction in music was to be given as it was a daily affair to engage the orphanage children in group activities.

Year after year the boy grew closer to the church and to the concept of God as clarified in the Bible. He grew to study the word of God and ultimately became a student of the seminary himself. His introduction into the priesthood could very well have been a divine calling, for the world around him was dramatically changing for the worse. With undaunted faith he embraced his belief despite the negative opinion encroaching upon the church, and though the vanishing influence of the ministry tugged unkindly at the strings of his heart, he had grown to become a young man who sincerely loved his God.

The point in time arrived when tangible monetary exchange became obsolete. Countries across the globe became infested with terrorism, and hostility toward the American ideal came in many forms, including that of economic warfare. The dollar value system had depleted to dangerous levels leaving the U.S. to retaliate and adapt by linking into a unified, globally observed form of electronic currency. This move allowed America to continue in its renowned status as a world power. With the continuing advancement of technology, an additional weapon against the enemy emerged in the ability to utterly disrupt, if not, completely halt all forms of funding toward the terrorist design. The tactic was implemented through the oversight of a universal database network for the conduction of all financially based transactions. Cash money had become a relic of the past. Furthermore, in order to secure the country to the safest possible level, the government created a standardized method of identification and commercial exchange. One could receive an electronic bone-stamp at any federal building across the country. The stamp would allow an individual to earn money, maintain a bank account, visit doctors, shop, or any other type of living necessity that required an I.D.--in the utmost of safety. Programs were created within the system to flag and alert authorities of any transaction, on a global level, involving the purchase of suspicious and dangerous substances, chemicals, weaponry, etc.

The conversion was a sour pill for the American public, and it took many years to fully acclimate to the system. After the last of the revolts, the dust settled and Americans were finally resolved on the matter. In fact, the system proved to all appearances, quite successful once all the details had been ironed out: the stamp actually made life much easier for people. By the time the three boys who'd taunted the harmless child into the mud were old enough, obtaining bone-stamp identification was a commonplace practice.


LKwinterÓ 

On a cosmic level, the earth remained unscathed and ever lucky in its preservation for the longest of ages. There had been global warming and the usual lot of earthquakes, hurricanes and volcano eruptions, yet nothing occurred since the dawn of the digital age resembling anything close to global devastation. Earth’s luck changed when a trend of large meteors began frequenting the inner solar vicinity. One after another, by the decade, they plummeted through the sky, and on one occasion, a super massive rock barely missed the moon. Under a United Nations cooperative, a missile system was created specifically for the purpose of mitigating the threat of a meteor collision. The system failed miserably when a rock the size of Rhode Island passed through the atmosphere over the coast of India. The weapon split the rock into a six-to-one ratio; the impact of the two pieces sent clouds of dust and smoke barreling into the atmosphere while simultaneously destabilizing seismic fault lines around the entire Eurasian continent. In America, the sun went down that day, never to be seen again.

Within hours, the earth began to open up and swallow people by the thousands. Billowing, black clouds laced with tiny corpuscles of electricity sparked by magnitudes of static charge rolled over the sky, their silhouettes neon with glistening orange. For the young priest with the mixed-matched eyes, the ensuing panic throughout the city gave him not the slightest scare, yet to the contrary, an insurmountable sense of urgency. Impulsively, he joined his brothers in preparation for a disaster relief effort, long before they realized the true vanity of their efforts.

With startling suddenness, from out of the crimson blackness of the skyline, there came a brilliant white light that flooded the entire earth, piercing its way into the very depths of all darkness. The cataclysmic destruction unfolding on the ground boosted tempuratures to rise to unbearable levels, and with people dying in multitudes by the second, the white light began casting a myriad tapestry of bizarre, elongated shadows. As people died, their spirits rose into the air, but for some, their spirit only rose to a certain extent, for as the light beamed in its intensity, a shadow extended from the bone-stamp of all those who had received one. Each shadow was long and thin, and stretched like a thin rope reaching to the very core of the earth. Thousands and thousands of these ropelike shadows could be seen, the ends of which lied in the palm of a certain spirit, mounted iniquitous upon a rock engulfed in lava. Dangling in the air like kites, the souls of those both evil and innocent were caught in the malevolent grip of the haughty lord, proudly stern through the midst of his giggling. 

As the ends of all earth trembled in torrents of mass obliteration, the young man with the mixed-matched eyes bowed his head and passed freely beyond the clouds into the afterlife alongside many of his brethren, whom, too, refused the stamp. By means of the church and its sanctity, he had spent life loving and obeying his God, with expressed concern for denying what he feared to be the mark of the beast. His concern proved valid, for his soul was lifted and drawn like a magnet into the brilliance of the light. By the wayside and suspended in mid air, the three young men who had so cruelly taunted him began to shout and scream among countless others gasping in the smoke filled sky, their bone-stamp cast shadow now fully visible as a tangible line by which the fiend reeled them in. Not all souls caught might have deserved such a fate, but it was fair to say the devil didn’t play fair.


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