The Divided Line: Leonna [Part 1]

It began slowly—the plague, the greed, the riots. Revolutionaries rose up behind symbols, murals, and songs, while the masses were fed machinery and religion. In the wake of the destruction, politicians deemed art a dangerous thing—a worthless thing—and the masses agreed. They took away the paint, the books, and the instruments. But they could not wholly silence the artists. These are the stories they left behind.

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When Leonna was six, wildfires turned the sky a wrathful shade of red. 

The sun seemed to be the glowing eye of a giant beast veiled within the smoky horizon. She feared it would consume the world. That morning, her mother had soothed her despondent cries and promised it would be all right, but Leonna never quite forgot the dreadful memory of that burning sky. 

Now, for the first time in forty years, the fury of those flames returned.

Wildfire smoke in Oregon

Coleito via Pexels

Red-orange flashes lit every screen in her apartment, each showing different parts of the city. She couldn’t turn them off. They’d flagged it as mandatory viewing. 

In the lower reaches of the city, the Censor shattered windows and set shops aflame. In the upper reaches, the masses paraded through the streets with books and art and all manner of things, tossing them into bonfires which lit the dark streets and filled the sky with hideous smoke.

On one screen, a throng of people carried a beaten man through the city. The mob’s faces were twisted with a mythic rage. At their forefront marched a child who bore a white sign that read, Death to the erudites. 

Leonna watched, ensnared by a morbid curiosity and a wretched horror.

The mob tossed the broken man into the fire, and the roar of the masses carried through her window like the baying of bloodhounds.

The clock ticked onward, a loud and oppressive metronome to this violent theater. 

She knew they would come for her soon. If not for the symbol she’d drawn on the classroom board, then for the symbol the Conformists rallied behind: her all-purifying sun.

Leonna tore her gaze from the screens at last. She would not spend her final moments like this. She would not wait for the devil to come collect while she still had agency over her own life—or how it would end. 

She fished an old key from the false bottom of her desk drawer and unlocked the hidden closet tucked behind her shelf.

Inside, there were boxes upon boxes of art. Old works painted by a version of her she hardly recognized. A life told in brushstrokes: paintings of forests from her youth, shadowed skyscrapers lit like stars against the night, abstracts of people, blurred freeze-frames of the Dahlia Club at four in the morning, flashes of memory through drunken oblivion. 

Illustration by Ethan Lee

She’d boxed all of it up after the accident, unable to face any of it, unable to create when all she could think of were the red and blue lights refracting off broken glass on the black concrete—a small shadow of a body on the pavement.

The child who’d been thrown from the car Leonna had hit, whose dark hair and beautiful eyes looked like Leonna’s daughter’s, had been killed upon impact. Leonna had been sentenced to imprisonment.

In the prison yard, sermons were delivered every day, telling prisoners and officers alike about an omniscient God who could grant them salvation from their sins. As the pastor spoke, Leonna often closed her eyes and stared up at the sun. Her eyelids defused the light so all she saw was red—like the fires long ago. In those moments, the crimson eye in the burning sky seemed not to be some beast’s, but rather the eye of God. And every moment she faced Him, every moment she let the fire in, it ate away at her penitence. Through Him, she could be saved. 

She fell in with the Conformists after her release, picked up a pen instead of a paintbrush, and gave focus to her work. They’d been a humble group back then, meeting in churchyards and parks to talk grand ideals—of purity, simplicity, and truth. Of faith and of the guiding light which freed one from shadow-bound consciousness. 

She drew the sun atop their pamphlets, and it became the new symbol of their God. They brandished it on patches, weaved it into flags, and painted it on buildings. And as all ideas with time and minds to feed it, it gained a life of its own. It became savage and ruthless and godless. The eye became the beast’s once more. 

This time, the wrathful beast truly had come to consume the world, wielded by human hands. And the flames at last would clear her of her sins. Leonna lit a match and set fire to a painting in the nearest box. 

It spread swiftly over the old parchment. It grew large and wrathful and warm. 

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The Divided Line is an original serial updating biweekly.