(This is possibly my final draft of my short story- if you want, please let me know what you think! if it sounds too mythic, is too hard to read, is too unclear, etc, etc.- and if you do read it, thank you so much for taking the time to read my work!)
“Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!”
In the day, all through the blue light, I would pick through the jungles and clearings with the children and mothers; we would walk among the trees whose gnarled roots kneaded broken buildings like dough, and come back with skirts full of berries and salvage. In the golden light, when our mothers had gone below to cook and sing, we would sort through our treasures and wonder what they were. We created outlandish uses for their glassy surfaces and myriad buttons, hung them from trees in gleaming waterfalls, opened them up and found miniscule civilizations; we traded and bartered and raced about the surface. But when the sky’s spectrum deepened from red into purple, we ran to the doors that led below, and there, waiting for us, would be a battered, sacred lawn chair, a warm fire, and a kind face.
Grandfather told us many stories, but the ones we hungered for most were the stories of Before; of men who slept above the ground and each only did one thing their whole life, specialized to the point of crippled individuality, efficient as a cog in a whole but completely dysfunctional as a single being. He told us of vast structures upon the face of the earth like hives of men, and of the land being sucked dry with the same calculated efficiency, like a starving animal sucking the marrow from a bone. He told us of their abstract lives; food without effort, stagnant with convenience, their soft faces and harsh voices made flat, compact, and portable. And then he told us of how they doubted. We listened with the fire dancing in our wide eyes to stories of their disbelief and denial, of how they lived in the isolation of the masses and did not see the signs, and instead scorned those who did, calling the guns and stored food of our fathers paranoid, the bunkers insane.
And he would tell us stories of the early Now, how at first we shrunk, diminished by winters and weak bodies used to lives of convenience, but then grew and stabilized, steady and small upon the earth. He would even tell us what he saw, the first of his family to break the surface and gaze upon the remade world. But no matter how much we wondered and probed and prompted, when the topic turned to Before becoming Now, faces turned to stone. Despite our parent’s pride in survival and their scorn towards the above ground men, the fall was never boasted over, and their triumph was always wary and glazed with fear. It wasn’t something we could ask for, not even something we could whisper about in the limbo of our space blankets, in which we huddled hushed and warm when day turned black.
But twice, we came close, the peripheries of our present and our grandparents’ shrouded past intersecting in a split second purity of light, an eclipse of two worlds embedded in one land.
The first time, it was snowing. It had been for days, and the surface doors were shut with the weight; it was the pit of every winter. Each year the tunnels that we ignored in the warm months would come alive with the light and the sound of exploration for the few weeks before the doors opened and we exploded upward once again. The soft dirt floors and earthen walls were so familiar as to be unseen, like the insides of blinking eyelids. But as my sister and I were pushed deeper and deeper by the stagnant breath of winter, they began to fade back into our sight as we realized we’d gone farther than we ever had before. It was the first time I had ever wondered how deep they went and what else they held. And then there was a door, and behind that door there was a room, and in that room were creatures of Before.
They were eyeless and unnaturally posed, the original purposes of their strange and somehow still graceful bodies made unclear by the unreal postures of the dead and preserved. Their downy fur was like fog upon a landscape, but matted around their empty sockets. The plants were opaque and impossibly thin, their leaves and petals clouded like sea glass. The room was lit brightly with bulbs like insect eyes, and the bodies cast stale, unmoving shadows. They were perched on platforms sealed in cases of flawless glass, so that the smell of once-living tissue gone dry and barren, the feeling of those husks against our skin, was not contained; it simply leaked in through our eyes instead of our hands and noses.
We could not stop from jumping at every sound our shifting feet made, for fear of the invisible hands that had arranged this sterile and contained world. Was this the work of a creature of Before, or of one of the withered ancients in their rocking chairs who hadn’t uttered a word since Before became Now? Or maybe something entirely separate, a presence that we had disturbed in our burrowing, a reality we had invaded unaware, and this as only one of many sealed and staring realms, hidden like pockets of air in these tunnels? But this did not keep us from staring, and from absorbing every shape and shadow, and when we were once again set free upon the surface, their strange forms danced in my peripheral vision, filling spaces in the landscape that I had not known were blank.
And once, in the maze of fractured, tilting buildings that stuck up like shattered teeth from the all-enveloping roots which I pillaged and explored daily with the mothers and children, a scuttling crept through the undergrowth, like a thousand needles dragged against a stone. First a slight skittering at the back of my mind, it gradually faded into the foreground, until it seemed to fill the earthen air. The mothers seemed uncomfortable, and the children were confused but silent, the way our chickens go so still at sounds they’ve never heard before. As I went on combing through the ivy and the dandelions, it continued to grow until it didn’t just fill the air, it filmed over my eyes and gathered in my shaking fingertips.
As the sound reached its jagged peak, I found the nexus- a small black rectangle, half submerged in dirt. I pried it from the grips of the ivy, and its weight in my hands filled me with an uneasy pride. But before I could offer my finding, the static broke into something else, and the fact that it was human sent such a violent tremor through me that it fell from my hands. I collapsed upon it before the prying, searching hands had reached me, and as they pulled and cried out and became immersed in their frenzy, I tried to turn the sounds from the box into words. But they were the same again and again, rhythmic and obsessive, like the automatic speech of one asleep.
It must have been only minutes before the mothers pulled the other children from me, but I felt like I sat in the eye of the whirlwind for much longer, my forehead pressed against my knees, and when I stood, the rectangle was imprinted upon my chest. I felt flimsy, uncomfortably light, and the black box I held was still speaking. The oldest mother took it from me before I could move, and as I watched her neat hands broke it against a boulder, messy with rage, until her knuckles were split and her face was purple. I screamed, and she slapped me, my face smeared red as the deepening sky. I expected to see something- viscera, bone, blood- leaking from the mutilated black form, but nothing was exposed but the wires and plates I found daily among the rubble. I tore away from the mothers and the children, and as I ran, something gnawed at the edges of my mind, worming its way in like the flurried scratching of the black box. I saw a glow upon the horizon that was not the sun, and ran until I stood before it; it was a house of light.
I had left the sounds of their frenzied, angry voices far behind, but as I climbed the crumbling steps the mumblings of the box echoed in my head. Are you there? I entered. I felt as if I had found the room where the earth and the sun’s surfaces just barely overlap- the prism through which the twins of color and time are born. The spectrum was so intensified I felt that I was at its origin- and upon these high and arching walls of undiluted color were stories.
There were many, and they wove and swam across the wall’s landscapes in interlocking patterns. There were fires sprung from fallen stars and many-headed beasts, there were wheels made of eyes and strange winged creatures, but mostly there were humans, scattered like anxieties upon a dreamscape, killing or eating or gesturing madly, dancing or smiling serenely or writhing in agony. But above the men of Before, in the great domed ceiling that hung over me, loomed a deep and fathomless world of ringed stars and dark stained skies. Are you there? I wanted to taste that color, to rub it on my skin and let it seep into me.
I had never seen the sky that way; I was always stowed away below, wrapped tight in the crinkled comfort of my space blanket, when the dark rolled down out of the hills. That night, I broke the seals into the clear cold of night for the first time in my life, and lay outstretched and vulnerable upon the surface. I had thought I would be scared, and fire stories of shifting shadows with mouths for eyes and scythes for hands roamed my mind, alongside the faces of my family, wet with horror and grief, huddled beside my empty bunk. Through all this, though, my hands kept pulling me up ladders and through doors, with actions as broken and determined as the voice in the black box.
But when I reached the surface, my aloneness thinned the membrane between the world and myself, and the color soaked in through my pores, and the stars pierced the palms of my upturned hands. As I faded into dreams of the limbo between Before and Now, the forms of the men of Before joined the dry and eyeless creatures at the edge of my vision, cooing and mumbling, are you there? Saturated in the darkest blue, they swam and looped and wove new stories upon the landscape that cradled me. And when the sun rose in the morning, those stories clung to the edges of my eyes as I started out into the soft green morning.
