The Locket

It was a grey day, the usual, dressed in smog and crumbling ash. I left our little shack behind as I do most mornings, picking my way through the piles of refuse down to the dark river. Its oily waters twined and slithered their way toward the sea, a dull strip far on the horizon that sometimes flashed whitecaps when the winds picked up.

My favorite piece of concrete was still there, entrenched in the bitter soil like a proud monolith. It was too heavy for most people to carry away, so despite its pristine wholeness it had remained here at the bottom of the hill. I shuffled over to it, pulling my jacket a little closer around my ears and watching my breath billow out before me in the January air.

As I sat there on my makeshift chair, breathing smoke both into and out of me, I thought about the newscast we’d seen the night before. The storm had raged farther up the coast than anyone predicted, wasting everything in its path like an enraged beast. They got worse every year. For the most part anybody with money had long since moved away from the sea.

The news had gone on to talk about other things, like the expected increase in crop yield after scientists had discovered yet another gene they could tweak in their dying plants, or the usual bullets and drugs that so often painted the landscape of the poorer districts. But the news of the storm had stuck with me.

I closed my eyes, imagining the feel of the horrible winds as though they would tear the skin from my face. I pictured objects flying all around me, things that never should have left the ground. I threw my piece of concrete in there for good measure. I let those winds lift me, carry me into the sky where I spread my arms like the wings we’d seen on those creatures they’d called birds. Perhaps somewhere up there, above all the fog, there was a sky as blue as the sickeningly bright packaging on old canned food.

Bits and pieces of the past still floated around, stuck in piles of garbage or buried in rotting ruins. Few people went looking for them. It took a foolish, vain sort of hope to look backwards in this world - despair was a fast friend for those who too often went looking for the way things used to be.

Yet there was a charm to those old pictures, those toys of strange animals that looked more mythical than real, those books whose disintegrating pages still held words that described a civilization grander than the grey majesty of the sea. I guess I had my own foolish, vain sort of hope.

The weak rays of the sun were growing stronger through the morning mists, and sighing, I rose to make my way back to the hut. There was work to do. I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my thin jacket and began to walk up the hill.

Something flashed golden fire.

I paused, startled, then took a few steps backward to see if I could get whatever object it was to flash again. There. Something metallic, buried in the half-frozen mud. I dove at it eagerly, stiff fingers scraping it out of the ground like a starving child who’d found a can of food. But food was not what I was hoping for.

Food it was not. My giddy efforts were rewarded with a small golden locket, long since deprived of whatever chain had held it. It was shaped like a heart, smooth edges curving beneath my fingers as I wiped away the grime. There was a small clasp on the side, complete with a little keyhole for some infinitesimally tiny key. A small loop near the lock told me the key had likely hung from the locket itself, but was now long gone. The locket, however, had kept its faith and remained stubbornly shut.

I looked around for a rock. It was a beautiful locket, probably worth a lot of food credits, but more important to me was what it might contain. The gold would still sell when the locket was broken. I found something hefty and hurried back to my piece of concrete, positioning the locket carefully between finger and thumb.

With a sharp crack that echoed out over the black water and into the distance I slammed the rock down. The locket popped open, its edges bruised. I threw the rock away and peeled open the dented gold.

She was beautiful, smiling through lush auburn curls at the camera. They didn’t make those for the citizenry anymore, so photographs like this one were always sort of surreal to me. Her eyes were bright blue. Behind her rose mountains in shades of green and red and yellow, draped with flora more luscious and rich than the celebrity dress we’d been so enamored with on tv last night.

I tried to imagine a world like that, where colors popped so painfully they could blind you. A world with a sky so pale and clear, with sunlight that burned and clouds white as bone. A world where plants were still green. I laughed, a rush of excitement tinged with longing running through me.

I must have stared at that picture far longer than I’d realized. Voices from the top of the hill floated down to me, shouts for me to return to the sad grey world around me. I started when I heard them, closing the locket as though it contained something contraband. Which, I supposed, it sort of did. What good did it do to dream of things that were long gone? Things that were probably never coming back. I wrapped the locket in my fist and rushed to make my way back up the hill. There was work to be done.