A troop of children marched through the fields that encircled the town. Their voices echoed as they quarreled, and their little heads burned from the heat of argument.

“Listen here!” Tomlin, a twelve-year-old, pinched off a head of renegade wheat. “The function of the state is to mitigate the unruly nature of man. Free will is a facilitation of nature, and so the state will always oppose it. It must!”

Suzie wiped the sweat from under her cap. “You’re so clever, Tomlin.” She smiled, and her eyes beamed bright with a youthful glow, but he didn’t look.

“You’ve got it backwards.” Samantha quickened her pace and interposed herself between the two. “Free will is self-expression.” She stated plainly. “It originates, not from the drudges of human existence, but as an expression of our inner spirit. It’s what keeps us alive and beautiful even as the weight of organized power grows tighter.” She shot a haughty glance at Suzie, then anchored her hand to her hip. “It exists to rebel against top-down oppression.”

Tomlin spat a grain into the tall flanking grass and looked back at Samantha. “Human will isn’t beautiful. It’s like broken glass flung across the floor. The hazard must be swept up to avoid injury. But some decry the action. They point to the angles—the way light catches the edges—and say, ‘It’s art! It needs to be cultivated.’ But when the lights go out, the dazzle fades, and only danger remains.” He spun and walked backward, with arms spread like rays of the sun. “Yet, if it weren’t for the state, there would be no light at all!”

The children marveled. Suzie clapped and moved her mouth to speak, but Samantha was quicker.

“Tomlin,” she said with a combative smile, “you’ve inadvertently ruined your argument. Take this fallow field beside us. Does the abundance of flora exist thanks to external power structures? Did they choose, from some primitive sense of self-actualization, to root themselves here and rebel against the farmer? No!”

The rest murmured, and Tomlin squinted. Suzie tried hard to follow, but lagged one word behind.

“They came into being because the power structure, the harvest, no longer applies. The plants grow as they have always grown.” She reached out and caressed a long purple stem. “This hyssop is deemed ‘good’ because it doesn’t interfere. But a year ago, the plant would have been a weed among the wheat. But it hasn’t changed; only the conditions have. No farmer nurses the land, and so the predictable result is a wilding. But wild is only wild because it lacks a definable structure.

“Now look at people.” She continued. “Without structure, do we grow? Yes! We cultivate the space we inhabit and make no trouble. But when outside conventions are thrust upon us, we resist! And only then is free will first observed, then chastised.”

“Are you mad?” Tomlin started to walk again. “When left without convention, we convert to our basest forms. Just look at Ruritania, anarchy masquerades as law!”

The kids nodded gravely, as was the convention of scholars whenever anyone mentioned the war-torn failure of a country.

“Murder, rape, robbery!” Tamlin continued. “It’s all simmering beneath the surface of tranquil civility. Isn’t it obvious? The state curbs our innate bloodlust and provides a way forward. Enlightenment from savagery.”

“So, you’d kill me just like that?” Suzie’s words flew out short and rapid before anyone else could speak. But she shrank as their attention turned, and her speech softened. “I mean—if not for laws, this convention you speak of—you’d hurt us?”

“No,” Tomlin rolled his eyes. “I only meant—”

“Perhaps we have it twisted.” A boy called Andray pushed between his fellows. He often went unnoticed among the troop on account of his shorter stature and shallow face, but on this occasion, he drew immediate attention. Suzie’s shoulders sank, and her face grew red now that no one bothered to notice her. “It’s true that convention and law exist as a safeguard against man’s will.”

Tomlin stiffened as self-righteous egotism toughened his spine.

“But,” Andray continued, “what if they are symptoms of each other?”

Tomlin deflated, and the others remained silent as Andrey watched the tracks his bare feet made in the soil.

“How can top-down power function without free will?” He turned and stared at one of the silent children.

The child’s face screwed into the shape of a question mark as he fidgeted under Andray’s gaze. “It can’t?”

“Tomlin speaks of centralized authority,” Andray went on, satisfied with the response, “as if it were man’s saving grace. But, just as Cane struck his brother without concern before even the code of Ur was chiseled, so too has centralized authority perpetrated unspeakable atrocities without hesitation or care for its own law.” Andray paused, and everyone nodded as the collective recalled the carnage perpetrated by the crumbling Ruritanian regime.

“However,” his voice sank deeper, and he strutted as if in a lecture hall, “faith in the neutrality of the human soul is childish.”

Samantha’s cheeks flushed. “It’s not childish to think we are good. Circumstance is the executioner of us all, and without convention, brought on by circumstance, we would be free!”

Andray ignored the rebuttal. “Never in history has humanity, unguided and ungoverned, formed more than a detestable parody of culture and civilization. Ancient Israel begged the God of the old testament for a king, so he gave them the tyrant Saul. We crave shackles! The weight of free will is too much to bear alone, and so we march on together, under the guise of law because who we are is too terrifying to face alone.”

His words struck a sick chord in their hearts. They looked at each other and only saw the fear of things known.

“Maybe a Darwinian approach is needed.” Tomlin drew their minds to him and his classic manor of reason.

Suzie’s eyes traced his face as his brow tightened around the difficult thought at hand. She loved the way his mind cultivated words, like a florist constructing an arrangement.

“Free will creates structure,” Tomlin said, more to himself than the rest, though everyone nodded in agreement. “This field has only grown wild because the farmer is absent.” He looked up, but only met the eyes of a select few, those whom he knew would understand his next point. Suzie felt a hot rod of jealousy twist between the chambers of her heart as his gaze settled on Samantha and Andray.

“How does structure, and therefore one’s will, dominate the will of others? Through natural selection!” Samantha and Andray nodded their heads very low. “In the wild, only an organism equipped for survival spreads its genes. Could it be true for human thought? Perhaps the ideas and actions best equipped for natural selection disseminate through the masses until they can no longer guarantee survival. What’s wrong isn’t consistent, and right changes like a hare’s coat in winter.”

“Why then,” Andray scratched the peach fuzz above his lip, “do men by the thousands, independent and free, bind themselves to the authority of a single figure? If someone told me to kill, why would I listen?”

“Would you?” Samantha asked.

“We’re all capable of it,” said Tomlin. “Just look at Ruritania.”

Together, the group exited the tractor path between the neglected fields and walked along the bank of the old mill stream. The cool air, sheltered by trees, brought momentary relief from the heat. They hesitated at the water’s edge and enjoyed the glen’s tranquility, though their minds wandered without pause.

At last, Andray broke the silence. “When did we stop being children?”

Tomlin spat into the stream. “Were we ever?”

With pant legs rolled, Samantha stood in the cold current as a cloud of minnows swirled around her feet. “We were once, right?”

“When I was born,” Andray mused. “I had to be. Couldn’t choose otherwise.”

“There is always a choice,” Tomlin said.

Andray sighed and walked parallel with the bank. “That’s it!” He spun on his heels with a raised finger. “A man dominates another by convincing them there is no option! He crafts a reality in which there is only Hobson’s choice, that is, this or nothing. Futility and all that!”

Tomlin and Samantha clapped, and the rest marveled at Andrey’s clarity.

Suzie sat on the mill wall, through which the creek gurgled. She squinted her face as a thought, rather foreign in its elegance, sprang to mind. “It’s Plato’s allegory of the cave.”

“Please,” Samantha waved her away.

But Suzie continued unabated: “The prisoners couldn’t conceive of a world beyond the shadows on the rock.”

“You’re embarrassing yourself.” Samantha stepped out of the stream and approached. “Plato’s intention with that thought experiment was to examine belief and experience. It shows how fragile our view of reality can be.”

“That applies to this!” Suzie jumped down. “If you don’t know you have a choice, how can you choose? Those men in the cave didn’t know about the outside, and so they couldn’t understand what their friend said after he’d returned. Same here. If choice is absent, how can someone pick?” The light in her eyes irrevocably dimmed. “And the other man,” she said. “What about him and his innocents? He can’t choose to unsee the world. Once you know, you can’t go back without living a lie.”

Each child recalled when they lost their innocence. After a news broadcast? Overhearing adults whisper in troubled tones? Or maybe some firsthand experience stripped childhood away like a magician’s trick, revealing the knowledge of good and evil and the infinite sea between. None could rightly say when, but they all knew the cave was long behind them.

“Sometimes,” Samantha whispered, “you have no choice but to live the lie.”

Just as she spoke, the hot atmosphere mourned, and a great thunderclap split the air and rattled the trees. Wind swept through the glen and roared like a crashing wave. The children thought no more of morality and scattered like rabbits in search of shelter. Andray, Smantha, and Suzie dashed back along the tractor path and between the hedges. Andray turned onto a gravel road and hid in his uncle’s shed before the rain fell in silver sheets.

Samantha and Suzie went hand in hand as the sky unburdened itself. The wind drove them on, and they tumbled together under the shelter of their parents’ front porch.

Tomlin scurried over the mill wall and through the adjacent field. The earth was black, and the gentle, pockmarked hill sloped away from the glen. At its crest, an old barn stood, its long shadow bleeding over everything as clouds swallowed the sun. Tomlin slipped under the crooked door.

Trickles of water, muddled by decades of dust, dropped from the rafters. The boy walked to the farthest corner, where a blanket lay under mildewed hay. Tomlin pulled the straw aside and sat on the piled cloth. The mantle of rain poured down the barn’s rotten doors, and he sobbed as the weight of knowledge drowned out the thunder.

Andray sat in his uncle’s shed. He leaned against a tractor, and his thin face rested on his palm. Outside, the water gathered in pools and flowed away, softening the cracked, reddened earth. In the storm’s din, a silent reprieve overcame his mind, and he took solace in sleepless rest.

On the porch, Samantha and Suzie held each other tightly and looked out across meadows and thickets. Behind them, in the obliterated, bombed-out frame of the house, the rain quelled the stench of buried corpses, and burgundy rivers ran from the rubble and onto the street.

Across the landscape, fountains of smoke sputtered, then died, as the storm rolled across the ravaged Ruritanian countryside.

Editor: Shannon Hensley