DT 2023: Memories on the Sunset Wind

“We came to this city in 2548. Last thing I remember before cryosleep was the burning castle and remembering we left my mom behind.”
Daniele glanced over to Roxanne as the wind blew their hair eastward, away from the sea. The blonde girl had a faraway look in her pale-blue eyes. She was always attentive and listening as a Spartan, but even she was prone to daydreams and moments of half-listening.
Daniele paid her no mind and continued his story, not sure for who as they loitered on the San Diego-Tijuana ONI Building steps.
“I know she died. I heard her voice-call cutoff when a Covenant battlecruiser rammed her office tower. But… She didn’t make it this far. When I awoke, all I could remember was how pretty the plasma was back there, and that we left her behind.”
“Do you remember what she looked like?” Roxanne asked, barely a whisper on the wind.
Daniele closed his eyes and dug deep, imagining a woman with a mix of flowy-and-fuzzy hair, soft chocolate skin, and dotting eyes. She was there for a moment, but with another gust of wind, the memory unknotted and vanished once more out of reach.
“Maybe,” Daniele replied, but the woman he saw was something he wanted to see. He wasn’t certain. “Maybe…”
“What was she like?” Roxanne’s voice remained distant.
Daniele’s eyes remained open but they took on the same faraway stare as Roxanne. He heard distant laughter from a far-off time, not a place. Someone, two people were stepping wildly in shoes on a stone floor. There was a breeze in the summer trees. Someone’s hands were clapping, small hands. Daniele’s hands.
Someone called out to him, a motherly voice. “Danny, Danny. Come clap-clap along!”
A woman and man were dancing, they looked like Daniele. One was his dad, the other his… Mom. But their faces blurred, grayed out and lacking in detail, like an overexposed filmstrip.
The woman vanished in a twirl of a long skirt, becoming a cloud and then nothing – his imagination replaced by Earth’s sunset sky.
“Danny! Get inside!”
Daniele eyes snapped towards his father. His face was clear now, dark and bearing steel-white teeth like a predator. Sweat and mud caked his body, his summer collared-suit, replaced by a ten-kilogram rifle and a magazine-laden, armored plate carrier.
The man shouted through rain and thunder, pointing to an open, lit door under the darkness. Flashing lights approached in the distance, lining an unseen horizon and racing towards them. Daniele’s father repeated himself but the boy couldn’t hear him beneath wailing and thunder.
Daniele knew what happened next but he couldn’t help trying to run to his father. To reach out. Grab him and pull him inside. It was warmer in there; Mom could be there too.
An invisible force dragged Daniele into the muddy runoff of the shantytown street, the invisible hands latched onto his legs and pulled the boy screaming and kicking into the apartment door. Passing the threshold, the door slammed shut and the lights extinguished themselves, bathing the boy in darkness. The force abandoned him, alone to what came next.
No Mom. No—there was a gunshot. Boom, like thunder, and again, and again. More gunshots.
Then there was quiet.
No Mom, and no Dad.
Daniele allowed himself to convulse and rise, his heartbeat quickened and he shook like a wolf freeing itself from a frozen river. Cold, irritated, weakened, trapped, and angry. His eyes focused on the pair of Spanish-speaking police officers at the bottom of the stairs.
His raging mind tuned into their conversation.
“My daughter’s birthday is tomorrow, you want to come down to the house and say happy birthday?”
“Sure, how old is she?”
“Quinceaneras, fifteen years.”
“Oh, congratulations! She’s finally a young woman. You must be very proud.”
Daniele breathed. And breathed again.
He tuned their conversation out. He focused on his outstretched arm towards them, and noting how he instinctually began the curl of a trigger pull. It was subtle, only his mind completed the action but his discipline was better, it never took the shape of a weapon. But he could imagine the next steps.
His mind raced to the other events between the death of his father and how far Daniele had come as a child, a young adult, and a Spartan supersoldier. He had a team. Four children just like him, with shared life experience, who looked to him as their eldest brother. Their leader, their guide in the darkness. He was always their calm one.
But even he had limits.
“Daniele. What is it?” Roxanne asked, her light hand clasping tightly on his shoulder – a firmness usually reserved for firefights. A shout-through-touch, ‘I am here for you.’
The boy turned quiet, contemplating things and yet his mind grew quiet. Daniele was lost in a web of thoughts; distracted and yet focused on something he could not grasp. It hurt , he could feel it – ancient and deep. Pain, old wounds reopening.
“I… I lost my mom to the War. I lost my father to this city,” Daniele explained, adjusting his outstretched arm into pointing towards a part of the city along the coast where rust-colored homes rested on haphazard-built platforms and reclaimed islands from the sea. “My father died there. Stefan Veracruz. A converted Insurrectionist. I know what he was, but I remember him, and I miss him.”
Daniele looked to Roxanne, facing away from the setting Sun, and masked his tear-streaked face in shadow. Roxanne’s half-lid stormy eyes stayed on him - a look he saw several times before, involving other, similar stories.
But this story was his.
“I can’t remember Mom,” Daniele sniffled after a long silence. He dropped to his knees as the pressure in his throat gave way to a gurgle of cries. Roxanne grabbed onto him and kneeled together, rubbing his back. “I can’t remember her name.”
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories