Current Date: June 1, 2024
Character: Dominique Travis
Race: Human
Age: 38
Current residence: Brent, Ontario
If you were to ask me how I got into race car driving before the Silencers came, I don’t know that I’d really be able to give you a detailed explanation. It was just one of those things. I’d always been comfortable driving and I had a knack for speed. It took a whole lot of training, certainly, but I wouldn’t change a single thing. It did lead me to where I was in life, after all.
It led me to Ainsley. When the world ended as we knew it with the Silencers, it was through Ains that I survived for that first while and then London came into our lives and that was another beautiful addition. I don’t really think either one of us was prepared for him to be an addition to our lives, I mean, we’d talked about that sort of thing a little before the Silencers but it hadn’t been on the subject at all since and when things first got interesting between the three of us, we learned to be even quieter, of course. Even now with our lives that have resumed something as normal as it might ever be, we’re still quiet. Not as quiet as we used to be, but we’re still quiet.
All of that is sort of beside the point, as is.
The laughter of children is what makes all of this survival and maybe thriving thing worth it, in a way. I was never one for kids, with the type of, let’s admit it, fairly dangerous life I lived, raising kids of my own wasn’t an option and with my sexuality as it was, unless I adopted, that wasn’t an option either and I’d never even given that one thought.
Not that there are a lot of kids around, though there are a few and we’ve seen two more come to be in the last year alone. Our community might not be small, but it amuses me to think that our population is regrowing. Our population growing isn’t what amuses me so much as I’ve heard some of the slightly older ones that linger around the area that serves as our little market talking about the young couples hard at work repopulating our area. I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s not why, but if you want to believe that people are having sex so our population can grow back up a little, that’s your choice.
During the winter, the kids will make hills out of the snow. They’ll make mountains, as far as their eyes are concerned, but they’re good sliding hills and surprisingly, some of them are pretty tall, even to me, they’re tall. That, in itself, it’s not such a bad thing, it gives the kids a place to climb and slide down from and we get enough snow that piling that up in a general area when we shovel certain places just makes sense.
What amuses me, though, is that some of the slightly older kids—the ten and twelve-year-olds respectively—have been taunting the younger ones about going up on that hill to slide right down. To the older kids, it might not seem like a big deal, but to the younger ones who might still be getting into the idea of bigger things, it seems like it could be a little frightening.
The kids are talking about it as though it’s something that’s both fun and dangerous, fun, yes, dangerous? I don’t know that I’d call it that. It’s wide enough that even if the kids slide off to the side, they’d tumble down into more snow, most of it fairly packed, but the whole snow hill, when it’s up in the winter, is in an area that’s kept empty of everything else for that reason. Sure, there are trees way down that way and all the way around, and there’s the river and lake not too far off, but that body of water is on the backside of the slide and the trees are far. There are snow stoppers everywhere and, well, kids will be kids.
They’ve been rediscovering the joys of winter—though the younger ones probably have very few memories of the Silencers—and their squeals of laughter when they slide down are just one of those things. It brings a little bit of extra life out and about and it keeps the kids entertained while their parents might be busy with something else. Not that they’re ever alone, I’ve noticed that and it’s a good thing, really, but no one ever really tries to stop them. We have to learn from our mistakes, and I think this is one of the safer alternatives to a lot of options out there.
In the warmer months, the kids mostly just run around the beach, they chase balls, they help their parents with this task or that one but, all in all, I don’t know that anyone has really talked about the time before the Silencers recently, it’s not such a bad thing. We’re just living in the moment.
Works of JD Beckett 