In Ash and Dust

She didn’t have a name, a secret to society. Her parents had given birth to her at home, then were discovered and killed when they had her brother. She was lying in a hidden room in their basement, where she had been for 5 years when it happened. No one was allowed to have children anymore; embryos were fertilized in clinics when the need arose. Overpopulation had been far too big a problem for far too long a time. Exterminations were common to anyone breaking a law-jail no longer existed.

She couldn't recall how many years had passed since then. She only knew that the air was toxic from the fumes of those who transgressed - the noxious gasses of both burning flesh and the chemical agent they used for slaughter mixed together to threaten anyone without a mask - and the refineries that kept those in power warm and fed. Gas masks were the only clothing common anymore; no cotton could grow in the poison air and there were too many places to hide illegal items like weapons or books inside a shirt. She wore hers as she walked the streets, long used to avoiding detection from the countless guards that plagued every run down and ramshackle street. She climbed in the window of an abandoned house. Based on the spines of books that did not burn with the rest, she could only guess that the previous tenants were long dead of this particular crime - knowledge, their bodies coating the floor in a mixture of ash and dust. She came to this house often, and though she had never met those who had dwelled here before, she felt she knew them from what they'd left behind.

She dug around one of the side tables, tossing hairbrushes and rings with shaped jewels and green paper with odd faces and various numbers out of the way until she found it- a browned and tarnished locket in an odd shape. Two rounded mounds at the top and a sharp point at the bottom, she didn't quite understand the significance. The word was there, but just beyond her reach. She thought she recalled her mother showing her a picture similar to this locket shape once but didn’t dwell too long on the memory. It was the inside of this necklace she was obsessed with. When she touched the clasp on the side and the necklace opened, she touched the picture of a woman and a man, both holding a smiling and gleeful child. It spoke of days so long passed that the emotions from then no longer had a name, but she understood anyways. Love. And she loved them, though they were probably old enough to be her fourth grandparents if the tarnish of the necklace and the cracking and fading of the picture were any indication.

She so desperately wanted to feel what they felt and understand how anyone could feel that way. So, in the floor covered in ash and grime, she slipped off her mask and fell into an eternal sleep, hoping to wake up to the same picture she held in her hands, a real and tangible version of the family she only so briefly had, and could not remember outside of hazy, dreamlike pictures in her mind. She fell asleep wanting only to feel love in a world that had forgotten the word. As she closed her eyes for the last time, a word popped across her mind, already muddy and unfocused from the gaseous fumes. HEART. That was the odd shape of the necklace in her hand. The old and ancient symbol of love everlasting, and she smiled with the last of her muscle control and squeezed it one last time. Her parents’ voices called her, and she went, hand in hand with them to a world better and more permanent than the one left behind.