Odd comics with no words circulate on this polluted world. It shows people giving ones wearing colorful clothes of red, yellow, and black a wide birth, and yet give them aid when asked. The other images were of the ones with those colors, and people wearing more soothing tones, opening cage doors where people can run free. -- BKF
It had rained paper again. It had also rained rain, staining everything a muddy yellow. Muddier than the yellow of the clouds or the sky. Not as muddy as the ground. Everything was wet, yellowish, and difficult. Rinni had to use a shard of broken plastic just to pick them up. It gave him time to look at the pictures.
They were weird pages, the story was told four ways and it took Rinni a few goes to get it. One page was read top to bottom, the other bottom to top. On one side, they read left to right. On the other, right to left.
There were no words, which was fine because Rinni couldn't read.
The story was simple. A warning. Watch for people wearing three colours: red, yellow, and black. Help them where possible but otherwise leave them to their business.
Rinni figured that it was some weird Executive thing, and spread the word. Everyone else was just glad of the kindling that helped keep them warm in the frozen nights. It was a welcome change from picking through the dumps for things that would burn without making everyone around the fire too sick while they stayed warm.
The people above threw things down. Some worshiped their benevolence. Some just lived off it. A few bitched about it, but everyone had to eat.
Rinni didn't think about it much. He just gathered what he could to help the cluster of people he lived with. Feeding the fire or feeding the people when he wasn't working like anyone else. He only had three more good years before he grew too big to fit in the shells of the machines the Executives wanted.
Running cable paid really well, and Rinni did it as often as they let him.
It was more important to live than to pay attention to pictures. And after the hundredth time of seeing a page, they were just colours on kindling. And not the colours that burned with weird or stinky flames.
Two days after they told Rinni that he was getting too big for cable-running, he saw one of the Special People.
Tall, lithe build. A different skin tone to everyone Rinni knew. Pants bearing stripes of red, black, and yellow. Looking almost like some of the people on the entertainment feed. Rinni almost expected them to start juggling.
Nevertheless, he remembered the kindling pages and offered up the crate of finds he had. "This is all I got. Need any of it?"
"Oh bless," said the stranger. "I'm actually on the way out, and can give something to you." It was an envelope that rattled. "Scatter them on dirt that nobody walks over very often, and wait until you see flowers before you dig up any roots."
Rinni stood, confounded, as the stranger carefully made certain that the envelope was safe in Rinni's hand. "You gotta trade, now," said Rinni. "It's the rules."
"Hm." The stranger looked over Rinni's box, and removed a small plastic head that didn't have a body any more. "This will do nicely. Thank you very much."
Rinni knew the envelope was something special. It was nicer than anything anyone found in the piles from Above. So whatever was in it had to be more special. That was why he took a side-trip to the Poison Lot, the stretch of land that nobody went too close to. It made people sick when they walked across it. If you drank the water from there, you died inside a day. It fit the bill, and Rinni had to wonder what the rattling things would do.
The envelope slid open like a dream, and the rattling things were small, dark, and hard. They looked like the little rocks people would spit out if they were in the bread that got thrown down. They couldn't be magic, like the beans that Jack traded for his cow in the story.
Rinni threw them out into the Poison Lot anyway. He didn't expect a lot. He did keep the envelope because it was very nice material, and kept looking for a better buyer than normal.
In three days, there were plants in the Poison Lot. But nothing grew in the Poison Lot. Nothing stayed alive in there.
But that stuff was.
It was weird that the leaves had skulls and crossbones on them, but everyone knew about Poison Lot anyway. Four more weeks later, the skull leaves fell off and there were fresh new ones. And flowers.
Wait until you see flowers before you dig up any roots.
Poison Lot didn't make Rinni feel sick to walk near it any more. The air smelled funny near the leaves. Feeling like he was going crazy, Rinni dug down with his hands into soil that should have made him feel sick. It didn't even smell bad.
He followed the plant stalk down to a big, thick lump. Which had pictures on its skin. Someone washing it. Someone cutting it up. Someone adding the bits to a container of water over a fire.
The rain had been sweeter, lately. And the sky had been turning a funny shade of blue. People were taking more time before they got sick.
Rinni took the lump home and showed the grownups the pictures. He did have to tell them that he got it out of Poison Lot. So he was voluntold to test it. The grownups used the pot that was almost no good any more, and only boiled up a little of the weird root.
Enough for Rinni to eat.
It tasted good. And Rinni didn't get sick from it at all.
The rest of the house only waited two days to have some because it also smelled delicious. There was enough for everyone, and the plant had a lot of the big ugly roots. Big, ugly, delicious roots.
And those plants were starting to get everywhere. They spread like nothing else.
More paper started raining from the sky. More pictures. People in red making sick people healthy and happy. Now that they all knew about the pictures, they would be looking for the new strangers.
[Photo by Sadnan Bashar on Unsplash]
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