Certainty

I saw the shock on my husband’s face before he masked it with feigned confusion. I wordlessly held the clear, heart-shaped locket out to him. For an instant I was suspended inside of a heartbeat; floating in the moment before he touched the necklace and revealed, with absolute certainty, his feelings for me. How the locket worked was incomprehensible at its core, but the way in which it worked was fairly simple: you hand one of these transparent heart lockets to your partner after depositing a small drop of your own blood inside, and the heart changes color to show their true feelings for you. It sounds like a tacky mood ring, but it’s not. It’s real. And it ended the world.

I knew how dangerous the lockets were, but I couldn’t handle the uncertainty for another second. How can you be with someone, and truly be happy with them, if there’s no way for you to be one hundred percent sure about how they feel? Humans are selfish and deceptive; they’re lazy and they’re liars. The evidence is just short of infinite. Historically, we are cheaters, murderers, and thieves. So why am I being handed mountains of evidence showing why it’s insane to trust people, while being asked to trust someone with everything for an entire lifetime? I have to know. I have to know for sure.

Jordan looked cornered, as much as he was trying to hide it. What excuse could he have for not wanting to reveal his true feelings for me? A refusal of the necklace would be just as damning as the lush green color that would slowly fill the locket to publicly showcase his infidelity.

“Where did you find one?” He was trying to keep his tone light and curious, while steering me away from my intended confrontation. After years and years alone with him, trying to survive the new, feral way of the world, it was insulting to me that he thought I didn’t know what he was doing.

“Put it on.” I said simply.

He readjusted a few of the full, reusable grocery bags he was holding. We had been out gathering supplies to take back to our shelter, scavenging at night to give ourselves a better chance of not being seen by gangs or cultists. My husband had dutifully filled his bags full of anything useful he could find, but I had been distracted by one of the legendary necklaces I pulled from underneath an overturned bus on the first stretch of highway north of our shelter.

I had shoved it in my pocket and sprinted back to our meeting place to wait for him to return. I had crouched there for hours.

During the first hour I considered destroying the necklace. If it had never been created and sold, I could be sitting in my living room, reading a book, instead of here, perpetually fighting to simply survive. I remember when the necklace was first advertised and released; it was the first time I’d ever seen a line in front a jewelry store.

At first, like many reasonable people, I thought it was bullshit. I figured it would be a massive hit and then fade away like every other material thing. Then the testimonies started pouring in: cheaters caught, true love found, hearts on the mend. The medical and psychological communities started to run their own tests. It then quickly saturated the media. The locket boasted something no one expected to be deadly… it was never wrong.

Everything then became about the necklace; the one and only true certainty in the world. People were obsessed. Religious cults sprang up, worshipping the lockets for bearing the only completely true knowledge that’s ever existed. People who hated the necklaces for having destroyed their lives formed gangs that broke in and destroyed any heart they could find. The world split and the two sides were too powerful for the planet they lived on. One of the sides, us survivors aren’t sure which, hit the big red button. Now half the planet is dead and nuclear, and the other half is infested with humans with a cause.

So why the hell would I even consider using the necklace?

I don’t know. It was something about the way it felt in my hand. It was delicate and smooth, but not like a gem or metal; it was like the skin of a small amphibian. My heart slowed as I held it, and I felt almost peaceful running my thumb over the little heart. I was holding the answer to every question that had kept me awake at night for so long: had he been having an affair before civilization crumbled? Did he resent me after the miscarriage? Was he still attracted to me? I ran my thumbnail down the locket seam to open it, and pricked my finger with a piece of glass I found lying nearby, before squeezing a droplet onto the necklace and closing it again.

During the last few hours I spent waiting for Jordan, I fantasized about all the different colors that might appear the moment the tiny heart touched his skin. I thought about how amazing it would feel to not have to wonder anymore. The paranoia, the jealousy, the rage…it would either be justified or gone.

And now he was finally here in front of me.

“I don’t want to touch it, baby. Listen…” He said quietly. He looked afraid as he started setting the bags down and I took the opportunity to lunge for him. I pressed the locket into his forearm. He jumped back, dropping the bags and stumbling over spilled oddities, but it was too late. In the center of the locket a small red vortex, my blood, swirled. It moved to touch the two half circles that made up the top of the heart, and then dove downwards to hit the bottom point. The blood vanished and a single color started to bloom from the base. It filled the locket and spread across its face: black.

Black? I looked up at him. He hadn’t bothered to gather up the spilled supplies. He was just standing there, looking panicked.

“Black? As in void of any emotion at all? This is what color pops up when you touch a complete stranger with the necklace.” My lip trembled even though I was actively screaming at myself inside my head to stay calm. My chest felt tight, and it hurt.

“I don’t know why it’s that color,” he stammered, “I love you. But listen—”

“The locket is never wrong, Jordan,” I insisted, “It’s never been wrong once and you’re telling me it’s wrong now? I’m supposed to believe that?” I heard my voice start to rise, and I was shaking.

“You have to stay quiet, please, I snuck past a group of…” He took a step towards me, presumably to grab my arm. I jerked away hard before he touched me. He looked frustrated, anxious, and desperate, “We can talk about it as much as you want at the camp.”

I heard his words, but they didn’t register. My face was hot and I felt sick. I don’t know this person…and I had so many questions. He feels the same way about me as he does about our old mailman, and I never saw it? Who knows what he’s done behind my back if he feels no sense of love or loyalty to me?

“Screw you!” I screamed. I couldn’t help it, I started crying. What had I done to deserve this from him? We’re all each other had left and he betrayed me. The love of my life feels nothing for me; I am completely and utterly alone in a broken world.

“No, please. You have to—“ I heard a gun fire, and Jordan started to fall.

Then I heard a second shot.

——

Two men approached the fallen couple. One was clearly older than the other, and his expression was vacant, haunted, as he pulled the locket from the female’s hand.

“Never seen one that color.” The younger man mused before snatching it out of his hand, throwing it on the ground, and stomping on it. The necklace shattered like glass then dissolved into the scorched earth.

“How do you describe an emotion as complex as love with one color?” The older man said quietly, more to himself, before he bent over and closed the eyelids of the woman.

“It’s just vague enough that you can’t argue with it…Hey, if someone asked you a few years ago how you thought the world would end, I bet you wouldn’t have said deceptive marketing techniques, huh?” The young man chuckled.

They both headed back to the military compound their gang had recently taken over, carrying the supplies the couple would no longer need.