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This is a rough draft from my creative writing class, and the newest thing on-site. October 6, 2006
Every night after we ate our cold peas and fish-sticks, Dan and I played RISK. As supreme commander of my tent-shaped blue pieces, I would order my armies to Europe and expand my dominion outward turn by turn, like a balloon expanding with each new breath. His presence on the map would shrink slowly, and at the end he'd mumble at his loss, though once he became angry and knocked over the board and the oil lamp. Afterwards we'd have chocolate milk and huddle as close as we could to the fireplace. We would gaze out the window, up at the nearby mountain with all its glowing globes of lights. The Smiths, whose riches were the focus of so many local stories, lived up on that mountain, and many nights from there we heard thumping bass vibrations, or sometimes yelling and splashing if we walked the half mile to the base of the mountain. Those nights, we feared the mountain cracked and crumbled at its roots, and would bury the town in a landslide. But in the daylight, the mountain was silent.
Compared to the Smiths, we are poor. Where we have a house, they have a mansion. A driveway to their boulevard, a lawn to their eighteen-hole golf course. For townspeople, we live well. Our board games are shinier and newer than many of the neighbors' houses. We own a lovely home, one story ranch with bay window, two bedrooms, one bath; it is filled with blocky appliances in sleek, dark colors, ornate wall sconces, and a large icebox. The board games are shelved in the refrigerator, although most of the neighbors just use their refrigerators as decorative surfaces.
Prometheus Smith, he's some sort of distant cousin with close ties to the embarrassing relatives closed up in the Smith basement. With monstrous howls we can hear in the town, they battle and thrash against the shackles and chains which hold them captive next to the emergency canned goods and the fuse box, but Prometheus just goes to college up on the mountain, the good college with smooth white pillars, which we all know are a sign of a quality education. He's progressive in ideals and fashion, and distresses the other Smiths with his spiky hair dyed black, his nose ring, his eyeliner, and the strains of rebellion in his words. While trained peacocks bring them mineral water in crystal carafes, the elder Smiths sit on armchairs of ivory and gossip about him, saying he's liberal because he's a college student and he'll grow out of it when he had a family and what the hell's he majoring in at the moment. For now, who knows if he'll take that educated liberalism, however long he has it, and do something world-shattering. All over the mountain he staples flyers, to the telephone poles-- the Smiths have them, whatever they are-- and to the bulletin boards with shiny concert posters. Down with Kronos Smith: End the terror and Support Cranial births and Zeus Smith, want some meat? All the time he staples the flyers, proud in the righteousness of his causes, and it becomes easier to ignore them, because they're coming from the sort of person who says that sort of nonsense. That Prometheus Smith, he's just youth doing what youth does best.
I heard all this from a neighbor who, while we walked our dogs together, outlined the scraps of knowledge she acquired from various people who were rumored to have spoken with Prometheus Smith, or maybe Hermes Smith, who often went jogging through the town. Her friend's nephew went to the community college where Prometheus Smith and his brother Epimetheus Smith had recently given a speech on a very important cause of theirs. "Everyone in that audience whispered to each other, trying to figure out if anyone else had figured out what he was talking about," she told me. "And there was something about the state of affairs in the town, that we should fight for change, but who knew why? He's planning something though."
Two weeks later, we heard noises in the night beyond the usual terrors, and our neighbors went to investigate, and piece together the happenings. In the night Prometheus Smith drove his mighty bulldozer down the mountain where there flowed a wide rocky river, and he dug a canal for the river to rush into, and placed boulders in its original path. Enthralled by low bass crashes, the other Smiths danced in the dark with flickering lights around them and glow sticks around their necks, with no outside noise breaking into their party. Epimetheus Smith hauled cement bricks and supports, placing them to form a small building. Together they mounted delicate gauges and meters, fashioned levers out of recycles pipes, configured, tested, and otherwise fiddled until at last there stood a hydroelectric power plant channeling all the power the Smiths had and we didn't through wires suspended by poles that we had always thought of as bare trees.
Zeus Smith awoke around three in the afternoon the next day with a splitting headache, and after a furious thunderstorm he came to our town with his son Hephaestus Smith and heard the bleeps and rings of many microwaves, ovens, toasters, and telephones. For now all our appliances worked, and thanks to Prometheus we knew how to use them. Hephaestus Smith followed after, watching, he thought, steam hiss through his father's nostrils, and he thought to himself that there was another viable power source. "Pop, can I do anything for you?" he asked?
"Fetch that scrawny, rebellious piece of crap, Prometheus, and I will think of something to do." So it was that Hephaestus chained Prometheus to the side of the mountain naked. Each day at dawn, right after Apollo Smith brewed his coffee, an automaton with the talons of a great bird would wrench out the liver of Prometheus Smith and blend it with mechanically separated chicken parts; every night the liver would grow back and the eagle would repeat the process again. We refused to eat the strange tubes of meat in yellow wrapping that appeared in our convenience store thereafter.
Now we are in a wondrous golden age, named such for the glow emitted by our functional microwaves, and every time I use a hair dryer or cook my fish sticks in the active oven, or pull a cup of yogurt from the refrigerator, not the icebox, I think of Prometheus Smith. We all do, and we are all grateful, but our sons' and daughters' sons and daughters will forget in time what it was like to play RISK by firelight, sipping cold chocolate milk, and our old world will exist in no memory. By the time the eagle automaton's pile of beef snacks becomes large enough to sell on a national level, there will be no one left who remembers not to eat them.