I nervously look over my shoulder, scanning behind me. My muscles tighten from the stress, but my heart races from the thrill. I listen for mama, calling me back.
“Tim!” she’d holler. “Haul your butt back here!”
I run, the soft, wet ground dampening my footsteps. Cornstalks whip against my arms; sometimes stinging, sometimes tickling. I break through the wall of corn and stare at the mountainous pile of rusting, discarded treasures. Everything here is from the Old World. I wriggle under the old fence, into the junkyard.
I’m an explorer; discovering, searching and playing. I clamber up the mountain, breathing in the smell of oil. It reminds me of papa, who took me to explore the junkyard, against mama’s wishes. He would place me on his shoulders and walk through the snaking maze of metal and plastic. “Do you see that?” he’d say. “You wouldn’t believe the story about it!”. I blink away tears..
I was never sure how to take these stories. I knew they were kinda true , but I could never figure out how true.

I continue to climb upwards; the hot metal digs into my hands, stinging and burning. I begin to feel my shirt dampen and I wipe away a bead of sweat that tickles my forehead. The rising sun casts a red glow. Papa told me it wasn’t always red. Something called “nuclear” made it like that.
I sit down and pick up a relic that lays beside me. It’s circular, with a glass face that’s covered with a spiderweb of cracks. I recognize it as one of the relics that papa told me about. I begin to pry the cover off.
This relic was used to worship a God, a God whose name escapes me. I think about papa’s soothing voice.

“Everybody worshipped this God. There wasn’t a single person who didn’t devote everything to him.
The God determined their work, their sleep, their downtime: everything.
The God was the first thing they thought about when they woke up, and the last thing they thought about when they fell asleep. People tried to fight against it, but they never won.
There was only one thing that could defeat this God: another God named War. War arrived and consumed everything. It took over and became the only thing people cared about. The Old God was now forgotten.
War eventually died, and people no longer had a God.”

The cover pops off and I yelp, having forgotten what I was doing. Numbers are etched into the outside of the circle. Two arrows stick out from the middle at different angles.
Oh, I remember the name of The Forgotten God now.
It was Time.