Dust and Ash

The Peddler told her to bring him more Valuables. A child not yet ten, Hanna was born into this broken world with one purpose: to dig—dig through the tons of trash scattered throughout the deserted land. The children were small. They had small everything: hands to dig through the waste, bodies to burrow deeper into the heaps, bellies to fill with less food. This is what they were relegated to, and Hanna was the best at it.

She could spot Valuables quicker than other children, and so she was rewarded. The more Valuables one returned to the Peddler, the more food one would get. Most times it was just stale bread and old fruit, but they filled her belly and she was satisfied enough, for this was her life and she knew nothing more and nothing less. She was a garbage child—a digger—and she worked hard.

"We are low on silver. Bring me silver today and I will give you two pieces of bread, little girl," The Peddler said. He was big and ugly and had one eye covered by a black patch. Sometimes he would lift it up and show Hanna the thick scar where his other eye should be. One time she touched it and the skin was hard and angry. He smelled like fire and grease and old vegetables.

Hanna nodded because she was not a girl of many words. She was a listener, her mother had told her, and good at it. Listening is important and talking is for people who have nothing good to say anyway, she would say.

Hanna walked from the Peddler's shop to the outskirts where the dumps were. Far along the golden dunes were mounds of trash from the world before hers, the remnants of things that do not belong to people any longer, but the earth. That's why she lived in the Boiler District. Closest to the outskirts, the Boiler District pumps out all the energy used for the other districts. Hanna does not know much about them, but she knows that without her—without Valuables—the world she knows would cease to exist. The workers in the Boiler District burn the trash that lies in the outskirts for energy, scattering white ash across the sky like snow. Without the children picking the Valuables from the heaps, they would just get lost in the fires, and the Peddler needs Valuables, and Hanna needs food. The cycle goes on like this as it has.

The sun was ripe with heat and white like a pearl in the blank sky and Hanna's feet blistered from the scalding ground beneath her. The Boiler District was always hot, from the sun and the furnaces. Workers sweat through their garments and the children’s skin flushed bright pink and red and sometimes small white bubbles speckled their arms and necks. A boy whose name she did not know fell beside a heap while he was digging. When she grabbed his skin it fell off like wet paper in her hands. The smell made her sick for it was much worse than the smell of the trash. She was used to that.

When she first began digging some time ago, the piles of trash smelled so bad she wanted to retch. Some days she did and the other children would stare and hold their noses. The idea that her throw up smelled worse than garbage was shocking to her. Most piles contained rotting things, old, soft wood that crumbled in her hands, broken glass screens, and clothes. Lots of clothes, tattered and stained and falling apart. If there was food, it was filled with squirming bugs and covered in fuzzy green and blue spots that smelled sour. Liquids became solids and solids became liquid. Finding food was the worst part because it was such a waste. It made her sad.

Now, Hanna was used to the smells and the heat and all the digging. It was part of her now. On this day she had found small things: tiny old spoons that were bent and broken, shiny disks that reflected colors in the sun, metal things with twisted arms that curled on the sides. It took some time before it appeared. Usually Hanna finds the Valuables, but this one found her. Gleaming bright and dangling from a piece of splintered wood from the mound of trash was a silver chain, attached to it a little silver heart. She knew the shape because her mother had drawn it for her many times when she was younger. She said it was the symbol of love.

She had one too, deep inside her chest, and it was filled with love and light that pumped throughout her entire body, her mother had told her. The chain was heavy in her tiny fingers, slinking through her grasp as it slid off her skin. It felt cold and good on her skin. She rubbed the film of grime off of the heart and cleaned it on her tattered shirt. It glistened even more. Scraped into the shape was a word. MOM. She thought of her own mother again. This must have been important to someone. Hanna lost her mother some time ago, if time were to be counted in this world.

Hanna rolled the necklace around in her hands, its smoothness kissing her calloused skin. It felt heavier than it should have. She had found necklaces of this sort before, some with colored gemstones or lowercase Ts dangling from the chain, but this one felt different. When she shook it around there was a faint, soft jostling from the inside of the heart. There was something hiding in there. Hanna's curiosity began stirring. She examined the piece, rotating it and feeling all around its edges with her fingernails, grit stuck beneath them. There was a small latch on one side of the heart and a small lock on the other where a tiny key would fit. She didn't find a key anywhere, and finding it in the large piles of trash would be near impossible, but there had to be someway to open it. If she took it to the Peddler he would just keep it, though she would be rewarded greatly. Maybe with some charred meat alongside her two pieces of bread. This was a rare find, she knew!

If she took it to anyone else in the district they would steal it. Her mother told her not to trust anyone here, though that was difficult because Hanna had such a big heart for such a tiny body. But she knows better now, ever since what they did to her mother.

They came into the house, the men with the goggles and the sharp blades at their waists. They came yelling, shattering the windows. Her mother ushered her into the back room and into the crawlspace behind the tiny shelf where they kept things that were not Valuables, but valuable to them. Hanna, being so small, was able to slip in with ease. She waited for her mother to follow, but instead she knelt down and blew her a kiss and made the shape of a heart with her fingers before moving the shelf back over the open space. It was dark and Hanna knew what to do if this day came. She crawled through the space, dust and dirt scraping her knees and painting her hands black. It smelled sour and wrong and it made her belly tumble but she had to keep moving. Behind her, farther down the tunnel, she heard screaming of bad words and the breaking of things. She wanted to cry but she didn't. As she made her way to the end of the crawlspace, tiny slivers of white light dripped into the darkness from above. A metal grate just barely held in place was the only thing between her and the outside. With a tiny hand, she pushed it upward and climbed out.

She walked through the district, the bottoms of her feet melting in the tar, her heart trembling inside her chest. It was not long before the Peddler found her wandering. He gave her torn shoes and one piece of bread. After a moment he shared a charred piece of meat from his skewer. It was burnt and fatty but the grease left stains on her lips. She left it there so she could taste it later. Since then, she had been a digging child. A Scavenger selling anything she could for things to fill her belly with. This Valuable could get her food for the next three days, but something was keeping her attached to this necklace. She dug through the heap for something to pry this heart open with. But she was not so lucky. Instead, she rummaged through her greasy hair for a tiny pin in the shape of something with wings, one she had for as long as she could remember. One end was sharp so she fiddled it into the lock, hoping some mechanism would click and the heart would burst open, revealing something pretty or magical, but the small pin bent and snapped and got itself stuck inside the space.

At first she did not want to damage the heart, but the burning curiosity inside her took over. Whatever was inside could be more valuable than the Valuable itself, so she could keep the heart shape and give the Peddler whatever lived inside! She thought this was a pretty smart idea. But she was running out of time. The sun was falling but still beat strong against her skin, and the old shirt dunked in water she kept around her neck was soon to be dry. She had to hurry before the Peddler closed his shop. Her stomach groaned in pain. She found a brick, not too crumbly, and began hammering away at the silver heart. It made a tinny sound that sounded like a whimper, like it was crying. Sweat beaded up around her lip and down her arms and on her fingers, yet still she pounded away. The heart began to lose its shape, become gnarled and dented in places, the letters nearly scratched and scrubbed away.

As she was about to give up, she used both hands and slammed one last time onto it. The tiny latch broke open and plinked onto the ground. Hanna grinned so wide it made her cheeks ache. She couldn't remember the last time she smiled like this. When she opened the heart her smile disappeared like smoke in hot wind.

It was ash. Grey and soft like powder. Why would someone put something as useless as ash in a necklace? In the shape of a heart! She wondered if she were to split open her own heart if only dust and ash would spill out too. Hanna's stomach twisted and turned and anger built up like fire in her chest. Now the necklace was ruined! The Peddler probably wouldn't give her meat like she had hoped. She wanted to scream bad words but her mother would not like if she did that. So instead she cried, but only for a moment and silently into her filthy hands.

Hanna dumped the ash onto the ground and scraped any remaining out with her finger and the cloth from her shirt, making sure it was as clean as possible and no remnants remained. As she walked back to the Boiler District she could hear the pounding and hissing of the furnaces as ash rained down from the sky, and the white light of the sun fell behind the mounds of trash and sand in the distance. She clutched the necklace tightly against her chest, wondering how many pieces of bread she would get for a broken heart.