Green-Excerpt

We hear the stories at service. Rumors are uttered about them amongst the people, but very few are still alive today that truly know the tale. I myself can only think of one who boasts he has a first hand account, and he is worn with age. His mind is not right.

But first I shall talk about the services, I think. The stories they weave are disturbing ones. The Speaker preaches in high, warbling tones, so that sometimes you have to strain to understand him. He says that this is because we are diseased. He calls us out of the crowd to make example, to point to and rebuke our pale-blue skin. Then he will wave his arms and gesticulate at various parts of his own person, even opening his shirt to expose the tanner, more proper condition of his own skin.

"Healthy," he says, wagging his head with a sorrowful expression. "I don't have the rotting. That only touches those who are too weak to resist."

He continues to explain. He provides us with evidence, calls forth another worker and puts a comforting arm around them. With drooping, fat lips, he commands: "Speak."

And they try. They always try to speak like he does, mouth moving, tongue fumbling and lolling. Not a sound comes out from them, and sometimes when he selects the younger ones, tears roll down their gaunt cheeks as they are reminded of their deficiencies through the demonstration. He allows them to sit down, disapproval making his head wag again, as though he had hoped by some miracle we would rise above our base level and manage to communicate, despite the fact that he knows we are incapable of it.

He will continue and tell us it's because of the rotting. Our brains are weak. We cannot function like normal people. That is why we are here, for our own protection. If they let us out, then we could spread the plague. They must protect us from their fear, and shield the Blessed ones from our sickness. The ones that had escaped the rotting, and even more fantastic, those like the Speaker and the Keeper and the overseers, who were immune to it. Akin to gods.

The service lasts an hour a day, and then it ends. We are allowed to leave, and given food, piles of tasteless grub that sits in the belly like dirt. I grew weary of eating the stuff a long time ago. Sometimes I consider giving all of my portion, instead of just half of it, to little Halli, with her gape-toothed grin and her sandy hair. She's six now, and they use her to crawl into the tiny places the older workers cannot reach. She was born with three fingers missing on her left hand, the tiny nubs stopping just after her first knuckle. She seems even scrawnier than the rest, but there is almost always a smile on her grubby face.

"Jesa!" She'll say, tagging along after me, tugging on the sleeve of my tattered shirt. She bounces around as though she's been given a full portion of food every day and the world is filled with rays of sunshine.

She doesn't know that they removed her from the List months ago, that she is not considered important enough to feed. Her voice is low and smooth, soft, many times below the tones of the Speaker. I can hear her, the other workers can hear her. But the overseers cannot; our words are not like theirs. When we speak near them they talk of strange whistling whispers, and they glare and wrinkle their noses in disgust at us.

We cannot actually tell them how much we understand, of course, and I do not think they would want to hear it. It is enough that we follow as a good flock should and bob our heads agreeably when we are bidden. But that does not matter. I can hear Halli and I feel her love, and I toss her in the air and I smile and sometimes things seem alright.

At night, after I tuck her into her corner where she will not be noticed, in the dark place of my cell where the Keeper is too busy to look closely, I go to visit the old man. I can flip the lock on my door, it is rusted off on the inside where the bar should hold it steady. I use a piece of sharpened rock and I pick it open so that I can move out into the long, narrow hall. Down I creep, past the doors where sometimes people will stick out their hands from the bars and ask me where it is I am going. I hush them. Even though their sounds pose no threat to me, I'm always afraid of the Watchers noticing my actions and sneaking up behind me to drag me off to be punished. Thankfully, they are only good with their eyes, and are as deaf as any of the other Blessed.

I come to his door and I push it open, shutting it behind me, crouching in the darkness with my eyes all scrunched up tight to see. Usually he sits scribbling on the wall, occasionally chuckling to himself as though his life were an amusing joke. He writes long words, ones he has yet to teach me. They're black scribblings, made with charcoal. From the beginning, when I first found him, when they still made him work down in the mines, he used to tell me fantastic stories from long ago. I did not believe them, of course, though I was no more than ten and still oblivious to many things. I am still not sure that I believe him now, though his tales often set my mind to questioning.

"Ah, ah, there is my favorite pupil!" He'll wheeze, and beckon me closer with his finger, his nails long and dirty. "Come, come, let us have another lesson, shall we?"

He taught me the letters as I grew. It took long nights and I had to strain my eyes, use the little bits of hay he'd strike at between the coal and stone to see the letters clearly. When I knew them all and began to form words with them, he pulled a book from his shirt, where it had hidden strapped against his chest for a very long time, warped and curved to the shape of his ribs. It was beautiful, the smooth binding supple against my fingers. I was sixteen when he gave it to me, and my eyes stung with tears as I watched them roll down his face. He took my hand between his leathery palms and patted it gently, and the feeling of his sadness and his pride in me hit that place in my chest where I usually felt Halli's love.

"A smart girl you are," he told me, cracked lips moving and voice echoing in husky rasps off the walls. "You know their words now, you see, they'll be scared of you for that. Don't you ever tell them what you know, Jesa, don't you tell them. Then they'll keep you all locked up tight like me." He laughed after the statement, but there was a solemness in his expression.

He tells me a different story than does the Speaker. He scoffs at the mention of sickness, at the condition of my skin. "Just as bad they'd be, if they were trapped down here without the sun and the grass and the trees!" He says. The fact that they don't understand us makes him cackle aloud, so hysterically that sometimes he cannot speak a word for minutes, only stopping when coughing rattles in his lungs like the sound of metal against stone. He'll jerk his head to the side, spit out phlegm, and fix me with a dull blue eye, clouded over with age.

"Just proves they're the stupid ones," he insists. "We understand what they're saying, even though we can't talk like 'em!" He scowls, his face twisting into an expression of disgust. "Bah, if they're too deaf to listen then that's their own damn fault, I say. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid."

And then he'd laugh again.

He explains to me that they are afraid of us. I look at my skinny arms and my sticks-for-legs and I almost giggle, but he always watches me to make sure I'm being very serious, so I keep my composure. He says that what we feel inside us when we're together, when we feel each other's sadness and anger and pain and, infrequently, joy, that it's a very special thing. Gives us power. Makes us stronger.

"They don't feel that," he says with a look of pity. "They don't know what that's like. Cold, they are, they can't connect with us and we can't connect with them, not with all that fear they got in them. They'll never understand it, and that's why they put us down here, because they were afraid."

He showed me once. Tried to tell me what it was like before they trapped us down here. He built a small fire in the corner of the room and blew on the flames till they grew higher.

"We were like this," he said, pointing to the steady blaze. "We had power, good power. We could feel and we could reciprocate. We could touch them, tried to talk to them with our emotion. Some of us could even manipulate it, change what they were feeling, though that's not considered the good kind of thing to do and we were told not to try." He shakes his head here, and his eyes glaze. His voice gets lower and scratches at my ears as a rage fills it, more anger in it now than when he speaks of the overseer's cruelty. "But there was this one. A one of us, a bad one. He took their feelings and he made them angry. Made 'em attack one another. Destroyed their towns and made the blood flow in them, bodies upon bodies, stacked up high."

A tear fell from his eye and it quivered on his skin before it dropped with a soft splatter upon the ground. He turned to me and he pointed one finger at my chest, at that place where the weak feelings flicker sometimes, and he gave me a warning.

"Don't you ever grow bitter, Jesa," he said. "He was bitter. Grew angry and let that anger make him a monster. It's his fault, really, it was his doing. We didn't deserve to all be corralled like this, but he was the one who made them get infected with the fear, and now we can't reach them anymore."

I only nodded. I still thought he was mad. It was no power that I felt, it was only a little thing, nothing that was special or profound. I told him that, and he only smiled in his knowing way and looked back to the fire. With a fistful of dirt he layered it over, making trails and dimming portions so that it flickered faintly now in separate sections, incapable of putting off more light.

"That shield," he said. "The one you dig for, see, the rocks you get that they feed it. It tears it up. You can't feel much of it anymore. Now you just get hints of it. You've been put out like a light. You can barely feel it because it makes it disperse, doesn't let it concentrate. Jams it all up and makes it confused."

He's tried to explain it better before, but I did not understand the terms he used, and soon enough he just gave up and shrugged his bony shoulders. He'd talk on a while, rambling about things I do not comprehend. About horses and the moon and lakes of clear mountain water. I cannot picture it, but he gets that dreamy look when he talks, so I just let him ramble and I feel his contentment, and it is enough.

After the exchange is over I leave him. I wander back to my room and I get my book out from inside my mattress and I write. Sometimes I don't, if I stay too long and need to sleep before I have to start the working again.

No matter what I do though, I always dream of the shield. Imagine what it looks like, and what maybe I could do if it weren't there anymore.

I wake up and dismiss it all as the words of a madman, of course. And at the end of the next day I listen to the Speaker again, and I know it's all mere fantasy.