The Providence of Rudy Nes: An Edenix Cycle Story
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The Providence of Rudy Nes
An Edenix Cycle Story
S. Rodger Bock
Copyright 2014 S. Roger Bock
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One
Rudy's idea of a nightmare was being forced to have dinner with any family that had more than three people. The Lizardis and their prolific relations were just such a family. Sadly, he now walked behind his older brother on their way to the dreaded encounter. Tragically, he'd exhausted his usual litany of excuses. At seventeen years old and equipped with ferociously large floppy ears and, even worse, a scalp covered in blazing red hair, he felt like an outsider, a freak, a defect. Among mostly darker-haired, more reasonably-colored citizens of the small town by the river, he knew without a tremor of a doubt that he was cursed by the outlandish genetic traits. He almost always wore a hat to mitigate the impact, even if it accentuated his ears' desire to secede from his head entirely.
He wished for something to change. He prayed, but instead of a miraculous midnight metamorphosis, he woke up every morning with the same problems. His affliction was an issue mostly due to the unending teasing he endured at the hands of his fellow townsfolk. They seemed to have waves of untapped creativity when it came to inventing new humiliating names and jokes based solely on the strands that sprouted from the top of his head and now in his beard as well.
He didn't really see a future for himself. He would do the work given to him and live his life one day at a time, but he just felt so stuck and lost. Did he even have a purpose in this life? What was he meant to do? Making things even worse, none of the girls he knew had any interest in him. Those that were his friends plainly told him they would never under any circumstances marry him. He was dejected and just felt each day was a waste of time. He couldn’t imagine ever finding a nice, attractive woman to spend his life with. The best he could probably hope for would be to end up with someone like Brandi Brooks—not much to look at and further improved with a horribly irrational hubris.
He was sick of being mired in the same situation every week, every month. He was hopeless. Rudy was desperate enough to try and make something happen. I wish someone as beautiful as Diella would marry me, he mused and scoffed at his own thought. He’d never even spoken with her.
"I don't even know why we have to go to this stupid dinner. Why can't we just stay home?" Rudy groused to his inhumanely uninterested brother, who had, by mere luck or chance of the way chromosomes lashed together, ended up with brown hair.
"Rudy, it's Survivor's Day." Randy Nes told his younger sibling as if that were sufficient reason for Rudy to endure the ribbing the Lizardi boys or their equally irritating cousins, the Jenkins girls.
"How could I forget? Stupid holiday. I wish Mayor Corben had never come up with this celebration,” Rudy whined. “If you ask me, it's just an excuse to eat more food."
"Quit your complaining, Rudy. Mom wouldn't have wanted you to grow up this way," Randy told him with a brotherly hand on his shoulder.
"You mean cut off from all civilization, on the edge of the Expanse with no communications or connections to another human soul?" he responded dryly. As the words coalesced in his mind, he thought his answer was witty enough to ablate the edge of sarcasm beneath. But as the words slipped past his front teeth, he knew he’d overstepped.
Randy shook his head and countered with disapproval, "No, I mean complaining about everything. You've got to stop doing that."
Rudy shrugged. He supposed his brother was right, he just wished he could find more to be grateful for on days like this one. Survivor's Day was supposed to be a day to reflect on all the amazing things that had happened since the fortunate few had landed rather suddenly and in an almost completely uncontrolled fashion on this world.
As he walked along the narrow dirt path from the home he and his brother shared with the Parker family to the larger residence the Lizardi and Gray families had built, he began to consider a few things he might actually be grateful for.
Rudy was grateful to be alive. He was happy to be one of the few young men who had actually survived the pixie pox outbreak twelve years back. He'd been five at the time and remembered very vividly the fear that had gripped everyone during those terrible two weeks that had decimated the brave ardent few on Edenix. Shortly after the disease had scarred and killed so many of the youth, a large segment of the populace—those who were intrepid enough—set out to find a better place to settle. Everyone else stayed behind. Twelve years later, those who had remained and built the town by the river were still struggling. At least I'm alive to be struggling, Rudy thought.
An odd sensation of being tugged on made him turn. He didn't see anything. "That was weird," he said to himself.
He was grateful for his older brother who had raised him and had been the one to shoulder the burden of continuing the Nes family after Rudy's mother had passed away in childbirth induced by the trauma of the crash. Randy was seven years his senior and was already married with three kids, having also lost a little girl the year before. His wife and girls were at the Lizardis waiting for them.
Rudy was grateful for the simple things too: his burple shirt and leather jacket, his dingy white wool pants, his brown leather hat. They were not splendid or new, but they were his, and they kept him warm even in the cool autumn. Nothing but being inside by a fire kept him warm in the wet rainy winter that was coming soon. He adjusted at his hat and attempted to conceal as much of his hair as he could.
Rudy figured that was a sufficient start to his list of reasons to be thankful as he saw the Lizardi home come into view. Constructed of logs stacked one atop the next and packed with the clay from the river's edge, the construction was typical of the town. Rudy, Randy and his family, and the Parkers all jammed into a similarly built yet smaller structure closer to the middle of the collection of humble homes.
Rudy felt an odd sensation of tingling pass through his body accompanied by a rush of wind through the bare-limbed trees around them. He paused at the stone marker that denoted the Lizardi land. Something stirred in him, and he stopped dead in his tracks.