Abstract: An unhappy fate awaits the outcasts of the city. The “men of fire” come to steal away the weird, the crazy, and the fool, determined to purify society from its deviations. The ones who manage to escape meet in the forest and share their fears on a night that is just the beginning of a long quest for survival. As meerkats live in packs, they form a community united by the weirdness that characterizes them all.

Details: The stump of a marching army breaks the city’s silence in the middle of the night, and the streets rapidly fall into chaos. It is succeeded by the piercing, frantic cries of individuals fleeing in terror. They are escaping from the “men of fire,” an army coming to catch the ones considered weird, abnormal, and crazy to uproot them from their lives and take them to some unknown place far away from society. Six of them run away towards the dark forest outside the city. When they meet, still in a panic, they exchange about the horror they just experienced, trying to make sense of it. One suggests that they are detaining the fools; another tells how he left a suffering stranger there because he had to run away and save himself. Abruptly, a hush envelops their surroundings, and they come to the awareness that they must provide companionship to one another throughout the night in the forest. Little did they know that this was just the beginning of their shared days and nights. They had to establish an organized group to meet their fundamental requirements and endure. They establish a community built upon task allocation: by day, they forage for sustenance and construct shelter, while by night, they rotate shifts to keep watch over each other.

With each passing day, the physical separation between their residence and the city becomes less noticeable to them. Instead, they start to feel like they belong out there altogether. They say they are like meerkats, who wake up at sunset and stand under the sun together to keep warm and divide the tasks for the pack’s survival. One of the survivors is a discoverer: he wears magnifying goggles, and when the men of fires came, he was about to discover time travel. He can also run very fast and is usually responsible for hunting animals during the day. One day, after a moment of panic in which they fear the return of the men of fire, another group member has a meltdown and starts crying and screaming against the injustice they live in. He is furious at people mandating on other people’s lives, telling others how to live. People usually think he is a fool, that he does not understand what happens around him because he smiles even if they mock him, or because he doesn’t talk much when he understands everything. He has a wife and a baby at home, whom he misses very much. He points out his companions’ uniqueness, the characteristics that make them weird in the eyes of others. He reflects on how everybody is somehow crazy and weird, even the “men of fire,” who look for an abnormality in others even though they have not realized their own. The third survivor is a girl who laughs with no control, even when she wants to cry. Because of that, her uncle would think she was crazy and tie her up with her dog. Now that she is free, she says, she somehow misses being tied, but she despises her uncle for trying to prevent her from expressing her feelings. Finally, the fourth one cannot talk; she expresses herself through sounds and hands; she does not stand straight and walks with the back half bent instead. At night, while the others sleep, the night watcher, the fifth survivor, wonders about the meaning of “normality.” He says everybody pretends to be “normal” because society asks them to, but someone just cannot. Some people manage to act their whole life and then suddenly lose their minds. At first, they feel ridiculous, ashamed, and vulnerable. However, the key is to accept this vulnerability, the new unpredictable self, and set yourself free of others’ judgment and your own. He tells how he felt hate towards the men who were haunting them the night of the escape and got scared of his hate. He feels guilty because he left a stranger in need behind and cannot forgive himself. So, he wants to go back to the city and look for him. His companions decide to go with him. They call it “the meerkat mission.” To do that, they will need to look normal, so they try to disguise their weirdness but make a mockery of normality. After a night of sleep, they wake up and silently start their day, realizing that it is their last night in the community. The sixth survivor is picking up peanuts when she is suddenly stopped by the joyous, proud screams of her friends, who found out they were talking about them in the city and the weird community they had formed. The observer had made a small paper ball out of his notes and threw it so far away that it had reached the city. They start dancing around and celebrating their weirdness as their most proud quality.