Children of Tomorrow by J.R. Burgmann

Author:J.R. Burgmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

The words echo and carom off buildings above the thunder of the crowd. They yearn for change and justice. It only makes sense. They have come up helpless beneath a legacy of infinite wrongs. Increased growth, ceaseless living, boundless being, running its course on a finite planet—a star, once an island of refuge in the empty sea of space.

Harper slams her hands over her ears, wincing. Ava rolls her eyes and teases her. It’s not that bad; she could do with a bit more noise in her life. Jasmine cuts in between them and links arms. Their blazers—particularly Harper’s—are enviously soft against her skin. She could sleep squished there between them. Wake to a better world after all this has settled. But she has rebelling to do, and the world cannot wait.

Somehow Jasmine manages to remain linked with Harper and Ava in the roiling crowd, dragging them through a field of jutting hips and elbows, and up the parliamentary steps, coming to a halt just metres from the stage. She asks Harper to lift her up.

‘What?’ Harpers yells in confusion.

Ava chimes in. ‘Lift her up, ya big dumb sexy bitch!’

Harper looks at them and shrugs, Okay. She gets down to her knees and raises Jasmine onto her shoulders, lifting her up above the height of the protest. The scale of the surging crowd makes Jasmine dizzy. A multitude with no edge, proceeding forever. She steadies herself, breathes through the vertiginous feeling, then commands Harper to move up one or two steps. Harper lurches forward, forcing Jazz into an unstable tilt until she manages to plant her feet on the plinth of one of the elaborate lampposts that line Parliament House.

‘What the are you doing?’ Harper shrieks, struggling in a near-horizontal bend from the waist up, but laughing deep within her ribcage as Jasmine reaches out and wraps her arms around the thick stem of the lamppost, alighting there. Ava is losing her shit, capturing all of this.

Jasmine begins to ascend.

‘You’re a mad woman!’ yells Ava, cupping her hands around her mouth. ‘But that’s why I love you!’ She then turns to Harper, who is trying to collect herself. ‘Look at her go. Do you think she knows we can see up her skirt?’

‘Don’t think she cares,’ Harper says, still catching her breath. ‘She’s possessed.’

Jasmine now dangles from the top of the lamppost, wedged monkey-like into one of the ornate structure’s two thin, curved arms that extend sideways, each housing a large, clear lightbulb at their end, distinct from the whitened bulb at the top and centre of the post. From this vantage, the strike takes on a different form: it is a single, powerful entity made up of school students, but also, in greater number than in years before, the entire city. There are all manner of people here, thudding and unwavering, more regiment than rally. So much could go right and wrong from this moment—a great transformation or the beginning of the end. Or something in between, an earthly limbo.

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