Strong Forever

Hot. Heavy.

Difficult to breathe.

The body sprawled into a portrait of weakness, eyes glazed over in boredom.

What did this remind her of? Where did her battered mind escape to, when she was left defeated?

But of course.

There exists only one facility on this Earth worse than an amusement park.

A girl was passing out corrected assignments. As the named pages in her hands slowly dwindled, she held only one remaining once she’d returned all the others to their matching students.

“Uh… are you “Frankie?”

It was halfway through the year, but she understood. She didn’t know any of their names either. The student nodded as she took her graded worksheet.

All but one of the answers was wrong.

“Today we’ll be talking about how the world ended.”

6th grade. Frankie Pop sat in the front row of class, not by choice. The teacher was young- his name she can’t remember. He drew a shoddy globe on the touchscreen, and added simply-drawn fire to it, just to be direct.

“The final years BNG were an unlivable chaos. Poverty crushed the world until it was nothing but a junk-filled wasteland. Total destruction!”

He scribbled all over the burning planet, in a way that felt almost sacrilegious for a reason Frankie couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“Worst of all- no theme parks. Hardly any, really. Well- a few, as we’ve seen from the few companies that survived the apocalyptic recession. Those unyielding companies- they’re the only reason we’re still here to learn about this. And they’re the only ones who remember.”

He drew a caricature of the one man everybody in the world knew.

“Walter Kidney, of course, being the root cause of how we survived so threatening a situation.”

With all the soundproofing to keep the noise of the park outside to a minimum, the classroom would’ve been one of the quietest places in existence. Frankie’s classmates made sure that wasn't the case. Everyone was talking about Kidneyland or some stupid animated movie.

“Hey. Quiet now. Yes, he and the foundation under his name are responsible for our lives- how else would he have gone on to keep his park running, and make even more of those films? Kidney puts it like this:“  The man leaned into his desk like he was telling a scary story. “The strong will last forever, and the weak will disappear- that’s the way of the world. It just so happens that the old world was pretty gosh-darn weak.”

Frankie tried her best to pay attention, looking for things to hate.

“He took our apocalyptic wasteland of a planet- and turned it into a world of delight. It’s as simple as that.”

She couldn’t find much when she already hated everything to begin with.

“Frankie?”

She wished the bell would ring…

“Frankie? Come on, get up.”

She wished that someday this would all end forever.

“Frankie!”

The weak tourist laid exhausted on the floor of the camel-racing booth. Above her, Katie was watching. She wasn’t crying anymore, and neither was she.

“We won. We won!”

She finally managed to smile.