Clarence the 4,000,000th, Founder of Civilization: The Beginning of the Kingdom (Writing Prompt 9-14-09)

Chapter 4

It was almost 7 AM on the east coast; the sun was not so much as kissing the sea as it was slobbering all over it, and the light lit upon die-hard joggers trotting along the shoreline as they kicked up dust clouds and dripped perspiration off their noses; it would have been a peaceful scene, with its gleaming seashells and seagulls (who would have been pretty if only they weren’t seagulls0, but for the atomic bomb that went off at 7:01 AM.
The mushroom cloud was quite a sight. The black dust and smoke at its feet chocked the air, and the glowing top of the mushroom outshone the sun with its evil red glare. Millions were incinerated, but a few survived…
And two days later, Clarence the 4,000,000th was born.
He was small for a newborn, and he certainly had a few odd traits that most babies definitely did not have. His mother put it down as an effect of The Bomb, though she didn’t really understand how radiation and that sort of thing worked. The fact of the matter was that Clarence was weird, and he was probably weird because of whatever effect the bomb had on him before he was born, so Clarence’s mother left it at that.
The family, led by Clarence the 399,999,999th, Clarence’s father, foraged for food in those days after the bomb. Of course, they had always been self-professed dumpster-divers, but now even finding a dumpster was a struggle, what with all the radioactive ash and debris strewn about the place.
It was in this kind of atmosphere and danger that Clarence was forced to grow up in.
Early on, Clarence knew he wasn’t like his brothers and sisters. First of all, one of his legs was small and under-grown—it couldn’t support his weight, so it simply dragged along uselessly. Second of all, he asked questions—questions like, “Why am I Clarence the 4,000,000th?”
And third of all, though perhaps the most important, was that he was…well, smart. By the age of four days, he could read simple sentences. After two weeks, he could read Paradise Lost and give a verbal dissertation. He couldn’t write, but that was more of a physical problem than a mental one—had he been gifted with the body parts necessary for writing (i.e., hands and fingers), he would have excelled at it.
As it was, he had six legs, and one of those didn’t even work, so he often didn’t count it and thought of himself as Clarence of the Five Legs.
Clarence’s mother had no idea what to do with her son. He…well, he kept thinking about things. And he’d solve problems that the family had dealt with for years in their roundabout but traditional ways. And he would read random pieces of paper left over from the bomb and soak it all in and think some more. So she did her best and tried not to worry about him, which was actually quite a simple task, since she had 7 million other children to mind and couldn’t spare her thoughts on one oddball of a child.
Clarence didn’t mind, really—he just wanted to be left alone to mull things over. He had found a half-burnt encyclopedia in the rubble, and while he had flipped aimlessly through the pages (a difficult task for one so small and hand-less, but he managed by thrusting his thin limbs between the pages and wriggling them over until they turned), he had discovered a picture.
It was a great discovery. He stared at it, and then read the entry that went with the picture. Then he went to go find his mother.
“Mother, we are cockroaches, according to that book over there. A type of insect. And apparently we—”
But his mother cut him off with a stern wave of her antennas. Then she scuttled away to do whatever it was she felt she had to do.
Clarence stood for a moment, staring after her. He made a sudden decision.
It was time to leave home.
He wasn’t terribly sad—after all, he had only known his family for three weeks, and it wasn’t as though they made it easy to get attached to them—but he felt a twinge of a regret as he skittered away from the only home he had ever known.
After he left home, details of Clarence the 4,000,000th’s life are largely cloaked in mystery. His travels around the world and as the first cockroach to circumnavigate the Earth are, of course, legend, and the particulars of those travels are covered in the next chapter.
Before he left on those travels, however, he met the love of his life, Conchita the 339,221,451st. Together, they had over 900,000,000 children, and they and their children began the Period of Enlightenment.
So, two hundred years later, we pay tribute to Clarence the 4,000,000th with the Founder’s Day celebration. Without him, the Cockroach Kingdom we live in today would never have begun.

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