#708 Small and Bright- Autumn Brown
Like most readers, I love language. Used as mere communication, it becomes utilitarian and replaceable. Used as art, it can inspire, excite, uplift. I am thankful to the authors of the Octavia’s Brood socially conscious sci-fi collection. Nowhere else have I found consistent respect for the power of words. I offer as example, the wonderful opening of Autumn Brown’s story:
“I dream again that I am lost again in the tunnels of our cities. The fire extinguished, but still a cool blue glow lights my way. The faster I run, the higher I ascend in the city toward the surface, and the light becomes brighter and burns my skin. I fill with knowing, knowing the place where I am going. More and more light fills each room. My skin burns and then becomes darker somehow. And then I am there at the door in the surface, and if I climb through, death and freedom await me. I stand there looking up. Up.”
A prisoner awakes from a subterranean cell and gets ready to surface for her punishment. This community under the earth is called “The people who are buried.” Nobody who has surfaced has ever returned. She will be separated from her family, her child, and most probably her life. Surfacing into exile is her punishment.
Before surfacing her mother tells her about blasphemous rumors of survivors still on the surface. They are people that stayed above during earth demise. They are thought to have not lost their color. In this rumor her mother instills hope—hope for her daughter’s life, and hope for the human race.
“My people have never seen the stars. But we sing of them as though they are the last thing we see before sleeping, and the first thing upon waking.”
She is lifted to the unknown, into a world once belonging to all humans. Is there anything left? Can she survive? Can she return to help the people that have exiled her? Can her sins be redeemed?
Notable Passage: “Tears start streaming from my eyes before I even realize I am on the verge of crying. Something inside of me begins to collapse, and I claw for the edge of my sanity.”
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