Underneath

Wrecked and broken, whole and sturdy, fear and fearing all go down, down into the hole of a city.  Spiraling round like gutters on the pit walls the roads empty their people in.  None leave, not by that route.  It is somewhat of a pilgrimage for them, soaked in religious fervor mixed with pragmatism.  What little shade and water that hides itself down in the depths draws them in, flowing like water down deep to soak into the tunnels, caves, and cavernous buildings that make it up.  We all abandoned the dying surface, that or died on it, parched in the sun.  What's left of us is darkened, even the hopeful casting their eyes downward, away from the light.  I blend into the crowd, blackish cloak with a thick hood, nothing showing from underneath it.  Anonymity for each man woman or child, though nobody seems to care either way.  Some people take quick glances up, burning the surface into their eyes, a moment of pain to remember humanities moment of pain.  It's a passing thing.  Most are lost in thought of what happens next.  What is life like down there, how do I survive, who can I trust, how did it all happen.  Pointless, most of it.  Life just happens, dwelling over it before you even know anything just muddles the mind.  How it happened is worth something.  It won't help now, not for a few generations.  Think on it enough and it will leave a mark, imprint something in us that might be a little respect.  Some of that down the line will help.  Might not take the ground beneath our feet if we have it, might not end a way of life same as how the sky above our head came crashing down.  Still, we exist, we trickle down into our hastily dug holes to hide.  Hundreds of thousands of them scattered all across the globe.  Plans are to connect them all, form a network between them.  Some of them might, most will have to fall down into chaos before they get up as a society again, if they get up again.  This city might make it, should make it.  I knew these people once, and they were strong, they were brave, they were honest.  Some broke under the sun, withered and shriveled into monstrous shapes, but under the black cloaks there are strong men and women.

Day doesn't fit anymore, even with the lights.  There are periods to sleep and periods to work, periods to play and to congregate, but it is not a day.  A night, perhaps, but everything is night, pillars of scattered through the city like stars, a great round chamber in the center shining like an inside-out moon.  We live in seasons now, life progressing for the person despite being crammed in with so many others once the ceiling was closed off.  We are shut in, closed to the sky, and to each other.  The moon-chamber is our openness.  Our center, our light is always alive with the singing and dancing.  It is sad, it is happy, it is brash and shy.  Ecstatic, somber, ritualistic and brave.  There we share ourselves and our emotions, the tender smiles and the flares of anger.  When we spend ourselves there, enervated with our souls bleeding out, we flow back out into the canvas of the night, to the silence.  The moon our heartbeat and the stars our work, sleep, and thoughts.  All that is left of our sky is the food and our clothes.  The sweet tastes of sun and clouds, grass and rain.  Some of that is in it, vitamins that we produce and mix in, chemicals that flavor it like what we used to eat.  Of our dress, it is of the beaches.  Little bits of color tied and draped on around us in certain key places.  The heat forced us to it, and the fashion of it charmed us.  As we work, tunneling, laboring away in it the fat melts away and the muscle stays.  We walk leaving a trail of it in our sweat.  Even the long days of working the machinery or calculating out rations is bathed in the sweat and movement of life.  We are industrious in this, working like ants in a hive.  When a lack is felt somewhere, a man might step in to fill the position; where we fall short, a woman pushes through our lack.  We live here now, these past ten years are the awakenings of a seed that was planted in the midst of hopeless winter, sprouting in the spring of our new way of life.

Where there is darkness comes tragedy.  We put up lights and it seeps in, hearts and rooms alike filled with shadows.  For twenty-five years, the earth was still.  Small shifts as we settled into her, digging our tendrils into clay-flesh and rocky-bone.  She moved this sleep-cycle, cracking apart and flattening in a swathe.  Just pockets left glimmers of light that I cling to.  I push back, forcing my way towards sounds, other shifts in the rock like my own drill.  Where we had once felt proud in our precise cuts, measured calmly and with deliberation, I stab out again and again, moving with instinct.  Loose stone grinds above, reminding me of my folly.  I must check the panic, harness the fear.  Drive and not be driven.  Breathing lets the explosion that builds within settle.  With a care, a thought to our ways before I head out for the moon-chamber.  A great crack runs through it, the center half buried in grey-brown mess.  There are dead all around, many more than passed in the whole of our time here.  We had grown, expanded, and prospered in our fall.  I see others, recognize the dread, the looks from twenty-eight years ago when the sky began to fall, from twenty-five when we assembled that first day in the moon-chamber.  We forgot that lesson, perhaps.  We feel it again, and curse ourselves for it.  

We few reach out to the rest of the city, stretch our power to regain what we had.  Enough to live.  In the tunnels we find the dead.  I know them, the blank faces.  Excavating more room in the graveyard takes as much time as finding them.  It had been left untouched somehow, the peace of the past dead at least left undisturbed.  These are still the strong men and women that walked down here, but we stand hunched and worn down.  With us all the moon-chamber is still left with room for more and more.  The great crack is still there, cracked around us, into us, and between us.  In the large emptiness we create sparks, words like rocks smashing against each other to argue our path.  Some leave, tunneling off into the darkness even beyond the flickering stars of our home.  Most of us stay to rebuild.  We have known other ways, the sun and the sky, and we could change again, but running away just reminds us of what we lost.

A monument of sorts has been erected into the moon-chamber.  The names of the lost, dead and departed, we carved them into the cracks, the opened fissures that run through the dome and the sloped floor.  It seems short of what we should do, but it gives us some peace.  In the months past the collapse, we have been quieter.  Loneliness is less present, most travelling in groups, coming together for the presence of others to lessen the emptiness of the halls.  Then and in the moon-chamber we speak less, sing less, dance less.  Noise will spring up, continue on, and then die with a glance at a remembered name or the slope of a wall that reminds us.  Sometimes it just takes the echo of space to give us pause.  I see the wound as much in the stone as in the hearts.  We heal slowly, and our scars remain.

The face is done, one of them.  They are to be sisters, both scarred and weathered.  A stone pillar I found holding up the center of an unused chamber.  It was once a church, I think.  The earth comes first, as she is the older.  Her face is soft in the hard stone, a smile for her sister wrapped within her arms.  As mankind's features emerge, cycle after cycle into the carving,  I am driven to longer hours.  Her face upturned towards earth's, a wonder in her smooth eyes.  Every so often somebody passes by, drawn by the sound of stonework.  I am not done, I have no time to see them, to look to the door.  I eat quickly, sleep what hours I can in the room, and build up a stench of sweat.  Perhaps it drives away some of the visitors, I am not sure, they never say anything.

Toes complete, and now the base, thirty feet in circumference.  I have reached the place where some inscription must go, yet nothing appears to me.  Each fold of their short dresses, each scar scattered across their bodies cried out to me its shape and form, but this blank loop whispers only of its emptiness, its unfinished blankness.  I sleep, bathe, eat, each time returning to an enigma of my own creation.  It is not done, I cannot move on.  Some days I sit and stare at it, circling it in impatience before sitting again, back against the door-frame.  Other days I wander in the tunnels, reinforced now against a quake of greater magnitude than our collapse.  I have cut myself off from the rest, and I begin to feel it.  Even when I step inside the moon-chamber I stay at the wall, staring out into the people.  I wait, for what, I don't know anymore.

Night gives way to day as day moves ever onward towards the night.  This is what it shall say.  I looked down at the white emptiness for so long I had begin to forget up existed.  Above us there is a sky, past the deep layers of stone there pounds down sun's rays, harsh and blinding.  I looked up, finally.  Water dripping on my nose did it, reminded me of the rain.  I want to see it again, long to in this long night.  So much of it all I have forgotten in the name of remembrance.  Where there are grave lessons of the past, tragedy and pain there were also happy things.  We have forgotten that, somewhat.  It seems to me that it is part of our humanity to forget.  This is why the stone, the earth, is our other half.  Carve out our memories in stone and they last where in flesh they soon disappear.  One day, when I'm old, I will go back to the surface, see the sun with my dying breath.  Now I live in the night, carving out our history for the ones who follow.  First of many, the sisters were the easiest to put into concept, far harder tasks of folly or vivacity will follow.  When I pass them, glancing in, there is often light, one or two figures staring up at the faces or down at the letters.  Perhaps they will gain something from it as I have.