Here is the beginning. You can be certain that the beginning will always be the hardest part. Whether in stories or in life,the start will always be embodied in a giant question mark. Quite often, when a story begins, you have no idea that it has begun; your life has changed in some drastic, inalterable way and yet, you continue along —  oblivious to the fact that, now, nothing will ever be the same.

Here is our beginning. Kait and Jasmine, our protagonists, are embroiled in political and familial turmoil. Which is to say, both of their parent have just been drafted. Which is to say, they are alone. Now, this may seem  like an extreme over-dramatization without the worldly context that makes you understand the necessity of these political actions. I feel it is my responsibility, as narrator, to give you some backstory.

The year is 2025 and the United States of America is entangled in the beginnings of a third world war. Russia, North Korea, and China have pitted themselves against the United States. As per the traditional alliance, The European Union, along with the United Kingdom, have sided with the US. As tensions rise, for the first time in history, the conflict is beginning to focus on the United States. Bombings are beginning to occur at an increasingly alarming and unprecedented rate.

The US, unused to dealing with such blatantly catastrophic occurrences is scrambling to adjust to this new reality. With no programs set up to deal with this new level of modern dystopia, the downward spiral of chaos begins to seem more and more inevitable. This is our story’s start. This is our beginning.

Kait 5.16.25

Breakfast was strange today, in that it was the first day since Mom deployed. Dad had been gone for about three months now, and we had almost gotten used to the idea of him being in a war zone. We had almost gotten used to the idea of having no real clue where he was. But now Mom was gone. Now I was in charge. Now, at the ripe age of nineteen, I am straddling the line between sister and parent.

Mom had always been busy, I’ve been picking up the parenting slack since I was twelve. It’s fairly inevitable when you have a mom  who is a military doctor and a dad in the navy seals. But now, I was without back up. If Jasmine screwed up or got hurt, it was on me.

I barely slept last night, I couldn’t get to sleep until almost midnight, tossing and turning, imagining my mom on the plane to some unknown country. My room was bathed in blue light when I awoke. The sky was clear, the stars breathed in rhythm with each other.  For awhile I sat, wrapped in my blanket. I entwined my arms around my legs and gazed into the cosmos for a fraction of eternity. Eventually the rhythmic twinkling lulled me to sleep.

I awoke to a house blanketed in sullen silence. Our house was filled with a pure white light that generally made waking up a luxurious, blissful affair. Today, the pale light felt cold.

Jasmine kept her eyes downcast, as she ate her cereal in silence. Her hair fell in unbrushed corkscrews framing a sullen face spattered with freckles. I opened my mouth to say something about her state of dishevelment. My throat seemed to constrict. I swallowed my tongue. My voice fell into my lower intestine.

“Are you ready to go?” I said instead. She shrugged, still silent and slipped off her chair to pour her cereal into the compost bin. I bit my lip. But again, I said nothing.

Life’s changed in our town since the war started.  We are lucky. We have still remained safe from bombings. Our town is still intact. But hands white knuckle steering wheels a bit more often. If you look, you can see the whites of people’s eyes.

I climb into Mom’s sleek, black sedan and feel a strange sense of dysphoria. A couple months ago, I was riding that graduation high. Fresh out of high school, my main objective had been to experience every facet of human existence.

I craved new experiences like you crave sleep after a long day’s work. A soft, pulsing curiosity always thrumming under the surface of my skin. My life had been on the verge of a crescendo. I had felt the swell, pulsing in the corners of my smile, in my arms, in my ribs, streaming out through my eyes. But in the midst of that crescendo a dissonant, staccato note had throw me off balance.

I had barely begun to grow into myself before I assumed the role of mother. Sisters are possibly one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child. You are born into a support network. A life long bond, that insures, no matter how hard you fall, you’ll always have a hand reaching down to pull you back up. There is always someone to help pull your hair back when you puke.

I could never resent my sister, but you can be damned sure I resent the situation.

All the sensory aspects of my being were embroiled within my contemplation of my current reality. Amidst my perceived horror, I felt long fingers slide into mine.

She’s still not talking to me. Her moth-wing eyelashes hide her gaze from me. Her other hand is fiddling with the zipper of her backpack. It’s yellow, resting in her lap, casting a bright reflection on her chin like a little sun. I squeeze her hand. I see her lip quiver.

Jasmine 5.16.25

She didn’t sleep the night mom left. She lay on her back. Hair spread across the detritus of sleep.  Her eyes, glass orbs counting plastic stars. With the wheels of her brain growing frantic for some sort of stimuli, her ears stretched taut for any noises. The crickets gossiping in the back yard. The occasional disruption of a car.  Kait getting a glass of water around three am. Kait getting up to mill about the house around four. Kait going back to bed around five thirty. Kait practicing yoga around six. All night long Jasmine lay counting seconds in silence.

It was the first time she had watched the sunrise and she thought that perhaps it was almost worth getting up this early to watch the quiet light turn the city to gold. For a moment, the peaceful moment made her forget the singed and smoldering battlefields that filled her heart.

Kait made no effort to get her up, Jasmine had a feeling that if she chose to sleep in, Kait would do nothing as an act of sympathetic charity towards their shared trauma. She walked down the maple stairs around seven thirty.

When she came into the kitchen she could taste Kait’s fear and she loved her all the more for it. She knew that, as they sat in silence,  Kait’s throat was constricting out of her. Kait’s fear silenced her, in the same way that Jasmine’s whispered to her to swallow her tongue. However, she knew that Kait’s fear was all the more, because her fear was most primarily for the sake of Jasmine, while the majority of Jasmine’s fear rested staunchly in the air around their parents.

Jasmine was furious with their parents for leaving them. Who the fuck leaves their young daughters in the middle of a war-zone to be bombed? Jasmine had recently started working the word ‘fuck’ into her vocabulary. It made her feel powerful. Kait always said that being afraid to use words gave them more power than they deserved. Their mom did not seem to agree.

As they walked over to their mom’s Toyota, Jasmine decided that if Kait was driving, she would sit in the front seat. She climbed in and was immediately overwhelmed by the lavender smell of their mother’s perfume. The smell instantly took her back to soft memories of arms and pillow shaped people. Her throat suddenly felt cramped. She’d never been away from her mother longer than three weeks. By the end of those three weeks, she’d been so desperate to be back home, that she started crying when she finally saw her mother.

Her eyes were burning and she glanced up at Kait to see if she noticed. She was staring out of the windshield with her brows knit together. They turned the landscape of her face mountainous. Feeling they both must be experiencing simultaneous horrific nostalgia, Jasmine slipped her hand into Kait’s to achieve some modicum of comfort. She felt the corners of her eyes prick, but still she felt better.