Flash Fiction #1

Underground

I read once that it takes a thousand generations in the dark for a species to lose their eyes.

We were all built for lives that are long gone. I’m sitting on the ground at the street market, pieces of jewelry laid out for sale on the quilt in front of me, the tunnel ceiling dripping water on my head. Lots of people stop to look, I can feel their hush as they crouch to examine my wares, and I know they are looking at me too, wondering if I know they are there.

“You can touch, if you like,” I say, “as long as your hands are clean.”

I know every piece, their heft and texture. My favorite is at my neck, a smooth orb of moonstone, small silver branches framing it. It swings against my breasts, which are almost exposed. I’m not one to shirk any advantage. It’s a fetish for certain people, blindness, and I sold myself many times when we were first forced underground. I didn’t have time to take anything with me, so I had nothing else to sell or trade. Men cried when they came, those first days, collapsed sobbing on top of me, even as others worked tirelessly, building the city, trying to create an approximation of our former lives. Even with mandatory sun lamp sessions for every citizen, the suicide rates are impossibly high. The authorities have made it a crime, but you only go to jail if you don’t succeed.

“Beautiful,” a woman whispers, very close to me.

“Which piece do you like?”

“The gold necklace. The angel. It so bright, full of light. It reminds me of….when I was a little girl,” she says, voice breaking. “The angel on the altar at my church.”

“I’m sorry,” she sniffs.

“I have carrots,” she whispers, “From the new gardens. To trade.”

She presses a canvas bag into my hand. She is trembling. I reach in and feel the carrots, their skins cool and knobby, greens poking from the tops. I want to tell her that these are worth many times the price of the necklace, but instead I reach out and stroke her arm. It’s cold and damp.

“It’s okay,” I whisper, and she calms. I can tell when I touch people who will make it and who won’t, and I try to be kind to the doomed ones.

“Did you make the necklace?” she asks.

“I made all of them.”

It was one of my clients, a government man, who first recognized my talent. He was gentler than most, and he used obsolete words, like love, which made me feel sorry for him, so I told him true things about myself, the shop I used to have on the surface. When people commit suicide, the government seizes control of their property, and he can get me access. Maybe I should feel guilty, but I’m giving the jewels a new life. What good would they be doing stored in some bunker, or buried with their owners, sparkling forlornly in the darkness, a fire that no can see? Not that people are buried much anymore, there’s no space for it. There are crematoriums throughout the city, business booming. It’s been rumored that bodies go missing, or slide into the ovens absent organs. But people have bigger concerns than the fates of the dead.

“Please take the carrots,” the woman says. “May they bring you joy.”

I stick my head into the bag, breathe in deeply. I can smell the dirt. I remember my own little garden. Tomatoes lolling heavy on the vine. The soft velvet of lamb’s ear. Sun burning my neck. Mira giggling in my ear. She loved to make things grow. I’d find seeds she hid all over the house: under the dresser, in the knife drawer, in the pockets of my plush robe that she liked to wear. Convinced that things could grow anywhere, if you believed in them. She would be eight years old. With her father, on the other side of the country, when it happened.

I run my hands over the necklaces, find the angel, her wings sharp, and put her in the woman’s open palm, close her fingers over the cool metal. I stroke her wrist. Her veins are pronounced, pulse quick.

“May she bring you peace,” I say.

“Thank you,” the woman says. “Thank you so much.” She smells like grease and ginger, sweat and garlic. She must work in one of the food stalls. Or one of the restaurants. I’ve heard that there are some with cloth napkins, real silverware, candles on every table, crystals sparkling on the cave ceilings. It must be beautiful.

The woman walks away, her footsteps receding into the cacophony of the market. Vendors harassing passersby, oil sizzling, children screaming, people sifting through racks of clothing, haggling over the price of rugs, televisions, spices, DVDs, t-shirts, tarot readings, blow jobs, paperbacks, shoes, medicine, pedicures, wigs, rice, dogs, computers, drugs, scarves, knives. A whole new world. Everything up for grabs. I still listen for Mira’s voice among the noise. There may be other settlements, other surviving colonies. I’ve heard that the ground above us is still on fire, that the sky’s been snuffed out and nothing alive remains, only smoke. But I would know it if she was gone.

People say that I’m lucky. They think that I don’t miss the sun, just because I’ve never seen it. I know, in a few generations, if we survive, the surface will be a myth, a distant memory. I touch my stomach, the place where Mira sprouted. I can still feel the dirt in my palms, warmth on my skin, the wind telling me that I am strong. That I will endure, no matter what.