Do only the stones remember?

Sylvia Shawcross

We would not make good communists. We of the democratic nations.

Not the proper kind.

Not the disciplined, purified kind.

We would try — briefly — with the awkward sincerity of people wearing borrowed clothes. We would recite the words, mispronounce the vows, trip over the rules. Even if we meant well, we would break it. We always do. We know this about ourselves. Somehow, they do not.

They would attempt the reshaping.

They would ration hunger into virtue, align our homes like teeth in a jaw, file down difference until it passed inspection. They would tax us into gratitude, choreograph our steps, teach our necks the correct angle for obedience. They would borrow our children for “the future,” our voices for morning hymns to the ruler of the week. They would bleach the color from things — walls, words, weather — and send us out masked and careful into their tidy grey little worlds where nothing is far and nothing is free.

They would try.

We might even cooperate.

It would last fifteen minutes.

Soon we would itch for tattoos on our skin — and then everyone would need the same tattoo, because variation is a threat. We would crave stories chosen by accident, music found at the wrong hour, images that do not behave — except most would be sealed away, some thoughts declared unspeakable, some devices never issued.

Some days we would want sweetness instead of sustenance — chocolate instead of bugs — but desire would no longer count as a category. The store would decide. The shelves would be obedient. The shelves would hold bugs.

We would remember the forest.
The ungoverned green.
The place that does not ask permission.

But the forest would require paperwork.
Two days a year.
Weather permitting.

We would last fifteen minutes.

This is not rebellion. It is anatomy. We are not designed for this boundaried shape. We are human. Forgive me for explaining this to the elites — to the Predatory Class — but humans revolt the way lungs breathe. History is a pulse of it. Again and again we have risen for a word that tastes like air: freedom.

Once it has passed the lips, nothing else nourishes. We did not merely sample it. We lived inside it. We grew old beneath it. We buried our dead for it. We expect it now.

We paid in blood.
We paid in sweat.
We paid in names no one remembers except stone.

And war — the old kind, the blunt kind — we are done with it. In this, at least, we have learned. We are more civilized than our rulers believe. The Predatory Class will need a new idea. Humans have changed. They have not. How such wealth can coexist with such primitiveness is a mystery. For all their cleverness, they remain ancient. They do not adapt.

Poor predators.

We are finished being prey.