the first generation

the first generation:
an oral history of the end times

1.
Things had been falling to pieces for centuries, our mothers said. They said not one of them could remember from the tales of their grandmother’s grandmother, a time when the world was not a shambles. Our mothers came of age in a time when we had been lulled into a great sleep, trapped within an illusion of freedom. The world was a shambles, but that was the way of things, and they were forbidden from thinking of a better world. They had the best things in life, they were told. And anything that seemed unjust or cruel, well, that was The Way of Things.

Women had been fighting for time untold, they said. Nothing came of it. They lived and they died, flowers bloomed, women were raped, and children were born. And it continued, this twisted game, women waking up and fighting, only to die and be forgotten. The Curse of the Womyn, they called it.

But during the Last Great War, when men lived openly as animals, and there was not a single woman allowed to speak, even in defense of them, the Avenging Goddess brought the women together. It was not the war that brought them together, but the aftermath, the Burning Times. They rose up and reclaimed the Earth.