The Building

Winner of the 1993 Austin-Garner Prose Award at Brunswick College. It is one of the few things I've ever won.

Three children approached a long brick building cautiously. Each whispered to another a suspicion as to what the building contained. One said could be weapons, plastic explosives or missles. Another said she believed it to contain drugs.

"I think it contains political prisoners." a boy named Brian said.

Regardless of what it contained, the children decided it was time they knew the secret held within the building every adult told them to stay away from. They had all sneaked out through a window which led them down the wall to the concrete below. The only thing they could think upon was the contents of "the forbidden building" as it was known to almost every child--but obviously not to these three who trudged onward, aware that someone could catch them at any moment; they were oblivious to this fact, for they took it upon themselves to learn the solution of what the building held.

"Shhhhh. Not a sound is to be made. We must keep ourselves as inconspicuous as possible. No one must know what we are about to do," their leader, Sally, explained.

The threesome crept toward the big iron door which kept the building secure from prowlers, such as the children who stood facing it at that precise moment.

"Who has the skeleton key?" Sally asked.

"I have it," said Tommy.

He handed the key to her, the girl whom he had wanted to marry someday. She extricated the lock quickly; they could waste no time getting inside.

"Hurry!"She commanded, "I need help with this big door."

They pushed, shoved, and heaved, but the door would only open about a foot.

"Can you suck it in and squeeze through?" she asked Tommy, who was fat.

Sally, taking Brian by the hand, went through the hole with ease, but after Brian got through, Tommy tried and got stuck. Hurrying, they pulled while he wriggled and writhed. Finally, he was in. The door abruptly slammed shut on its tracks as if someone had pushed it closed.

"Do you hear anything?" Tommy asked.

"Just the wind," said Brian.

They switched on their flashlights for seeing in the dark. What they immediately saw made their mouths stand agape. They surprisingly viewed within those seconds, miles and miles containing books, movies, and video tapes, all with the machines that usually accompanied most of these items in their normal abodes, but the place was not the normal abode of this equipment.

"Wow!" they all whispered in astonishment."

All three went separate ways in the colossal room. Using their wrist CB's, they all agreed to meet in a vacant spot in a room Sally had found. Tommy carried a portable movie screen with him. Brian had a television set on a cart which also carried a video cassette recorder, and Sally had salvaged an armload of videotapes and movie reels. They all assembled their findings into an organized pile so that they could take inventory and figure out how the objects worked.

"Who knows how to work a video cassette recorder?" Brian inquired of the group. "I know how to work the projector."

"Can you, Tommy?" Sally asked.

"I'm not supposed to know this, but my father had an illegal one before our house was burned, and I was sent away. He taught me how to use it."

"Good," Sally and Brian agreed.

"Let's set it up and get started," Sally said.

The equipment set, they turned it on to watch. This one was a video cassette. A voice roared through the speakers on the RCA color stereo television: "Welcome to Great Moments of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom."

As the voice boomed, continuing the introduction, lions, tigers, monkeys, and an assortment of other animals trotted across the screen.

"What are those?" asked Brian.

"Those are animals. We used to have them here on Earth before the holocaust. And those things in the background are trees and bushes."

"How do you know all this stuff?" Sally asked.

"My dad used to be a Secret Information Society worker. He could get anything he wanted that was related to illegal information through an underground black market. He used to show me these materials. For some reason, he thought it was important that I know about what he showed. He often said he spoke the truth, but how was I to know? Everybody else was saying something different, and I didn't know who to believe. Now I know the truth. . ."

He then trailed off in remembrance of his dad and wept. Each of his friends put a comforting arm around him.

"Relax. You can't help what they did and are still doing to other people." the other two reassured him.

On the screen, Marlin Perkins captured an ibex in a net. The children watched when he tranquilized it and installed a radio transmitter collar for humans to track the beastly mountain goat. Then the dreaded sound they hoped would not come accompanied that of the television set.

"Warning, warning, warning! Intruder alert! Intruder alert! You all have one minute to say your prayers, if you believe in a God or gods. At that moment, you will be terminated."

That sound echoed off the iron walls and tremendous concrete plain. The orphans shrank in fear when they heard it and watched as closed circuit cameras eyed them at the final seconds before their execution. The film would be shown later on the government television station for allowing the public to see an example of dissent and with warning. Automated robots wielding lasers appeared from their dusty corners. No last requests were given before the children were fried to death.