After the Long War, several centuries went by before they discovered it. The first items pulled out were a few silver discs with names on them: Bach, Madonna, Nirvana. One of the children, Kushim, remembered his mother singing hymns to him that she said were written by someone named Bach, and the other two discs also seemed to be connected to ancient religions. A stuffed animal came out next, wrapped in clear plastic, with blue-button eyes and a red felt tongue. It looked like a dog, except the brown fur was fluffy and clean.

cave art

Now one of the elders held something that looked like a thin book. She opened it to a page titled “August” that was divided into numbered boxes. The opposite page displayed a picture of a seagull swooping through cloudless sky, back when the sky was still blue. “Why do the little squares have numbers in them?” Kushim asked, and one elder said that was how days were once counted. They all wondered about the strange, cursive lines in each box—it was English, but in a style they had never seen. “Dinner @ Wildes” in the number 8 box. “PTO Concert 7:30 p.m. Pick up Jones” squeezed into number 12. “Little Edward’s B-day” in number 23.

my shadow filled

“Why did Edward have a day devoted to B?” Kushim asked. Everyone laughed, but no one answered. Other artifacts emerged—photos, a book with a broken lock that contained more of the funny writing, some coins that the elders called “currency,” even though there was nothing current about them. After the last of the artifacts had been revealed, the news crews uploaded images to the holoflashes, and the crowd scattered away. But for the rest of the day, Kushim could think only of Little Edward and his B-day. Maybe, like Kushim, he was just starting to learn the alphabet and had formed an attachment to the letter B. If Edward were still here, they could have learned together. They would have sat in the same boring class for hours until the diode flashed, and then they’d go to the holoroom, if it were working, or outside to play games. Maybe they’d meet up with Kushim’s best friends, Rhayn and Bodhi, and play kickball. He wondered if Edward had best friends; if he did, they could have all played together, the ball passing from one to another, back and forth, as if they were all connected.

with handprints

Rich Youmans

is the editor-in-chief of contemporary haibun online, and lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Alice. He has been writing haiku, haibun, and related essays for 35 years. His books include Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), co-written with Roberta Beary and Lew Watts; All the Windows Lit (Snapshot Press, 2017); and Head-On: Haibun Stories (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018), the latter of which received an honorable mention in the Haibun category of the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡Plaiting Poem & Prose: The Art of Braided Haibun, an essay by Rich Youmans in contemporary haibun online (Issue 18:2, August 2022)

⚡ Three haibun stories by Rich Youmans in MacQ: Living Color and Redline (Issue 6, January 2021); and Through the Looking Glass (Issue 9, August 2021), the latter of which was nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon anthologies and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022)

⚡After the Dream, the Dream Remains, haibun story in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019) which was nominated for The Best Small Fictions 2020; piece was among 128 winners selected for publication in the anthology

⚡What’s Left Unsaid: Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory & Harriot West’s “Empty Spaces” in contemporary haibun online (16:3, December 2020)