The Heart Shaped Locket

That Day

June lay witness to the whole thing. To the room full of people who had left the planet’s future on a knife’s edge.

The all clear had been given. The initial strike had been fired; they’d already sent the order regarding what the country would do in the event of a retaliation. If anything aerial were to be detected coming towards their land, they would send the same things back with an even greater fury. And then, as they all knew, that would be it.

For those very powerful people sitting in that room, the decisions had already been made, the job had already been done, now all there was left to do was wait and hope.

The absurdity and the severity and the horror of the situation was lost on no one. A few laughed, a few cried, most were silent.

June fingered the heart shaped locket around her neck. She looked to the man who’d made the final call, the leader of the free world. He sat back in an aloof awe of the divine power he’d been pushed to invoke. His jaw was clenched, his red eyes averted any gaze, his body lightly tremored.

The leaders and generals ignored usual security protocols as phones were pulled from pockets. More base instincts had taken over. Family numbers were dialed. Everybody found their own corner of the room. One by one each person broke in to sobs as they embarked on the farcical and futile task of communicating the being-defining force of their familial love through the front facing 7-megapixel cameras of their smart phones.

June fingered her locket. It had been her mother’s locket before she had passed. She looked to the room’s exit. She didn’t know how much time she might have left. She knew that if she lived she would be reprimanded for leaving her post. But her thoughts couldn’t escape her little boy Sonny, the thought that she may never be able to hold him again. She watched the other parents around the room having to say goodbye to their children through their screens.

She squeezed the locket hard, turned her back on her colleagues and her duty and walked out the door. She didn’t care anymore. She just wanted to hold her Sonny. Maybe if she made it just in time she could get them somewhere, somewhere far away. Maybe, somehow, they would make it through.

Those in that room waited in agonizing suspense. Those in a similar room on the other side of the world grappled with a near identical decision. The rest of the world kept moving, ignorant to the two diametrically different tomorrows that had the potential to lay ahead of them. A humanity flourishing or a humanity rapidly decaying. A utopia or a dystopia.

30 Years After That Day of Destruction

Sonny cowered in the corner of the storeroom with a pistol in one hand and a collection of colored pencils in the other. The room’s shelves had decades ago been thrown to the ground and ransacked. The darkness was punctured only by thin beams of light shining through bullet holes in the tin roof. The remnants of who-knows-how-many conflicts fought over food or insulin or toilet paper.

Behind Sonny, and shielded by his body, lay little June, named for her grandmother who’s heart shaped locket she wore around her neck. Elsewhere in the room wandered the scavengers, their torches shining and their rifles drawn. They were unaware of Sonny and June’s presence, nor their existence, but were entirely clear on what they would do if they spotted them.

Sonny felt every slight groove and crevice on his pistol’s trigger. His heartbeat pulsated through his body with such force that June could feel it.

‘See anything?’ called one scavenger.

‘Nah, it doesn’t look like there’s anything good left.’

‘Alright, let’s roll out then. If we don’t catch something by nightfall we’re not eating.’

Sonny heard them exit. He put the safety back on his gun.

For dinner, Sonny burnt the leftovers of yesterday’s possum over a fire. June ate without complaint. She’d never known anything different.

Sonny watched the grease of the flesh drip down her chin. She wiped it off with her sleeve. She met his gaze, they smiled together.

The firelight reflected off of her eyes, her meat jammed teeth, and the silver heart shaped locket.

‘How’s the book going?’ He asked her.

‘Good. I haven’t thought of an ending yet, but the pencils mean I can finish the pictures of the parts I have done. Its lots more colorful now.’

‘Good, I’m glad. It was all worth it then.’

He looked in an aloof awe at the divine creature he’d created.

‘Come over here.’

He wiped the rest of the grease from her chin. He tussled her hair. He pulled her body in to his. They both enjoyed each other’s warmth as they felt the heart shaped locket pressed between their chests.

30 Years After That Day of Salvation

Sonny sat in his dark room, comfortably cocooned by his bed and blanket. The room was partially illuminated by the blue light of his laptop on the bed next to him and by the blue light of the phone screen he held even more immediately in front of him. Near every other resident of every other room of the high-rise apartment he occupied lay in a near identical fashion.

On the laptop he watched as celebrities ate gross things for money. On the phone he drafted a message to his daughter. Her name was Louanne.

Messaging had been about the extent of their relationship since the divorce. He’d send her a message full of love heart emojis, she’d reply with a few words back.

She didn’t live too far away, but visiting her never seemed to align with his plans or desires.

He loved his daughter, but he hated wasting time, and every second that he wasn’t either working or consuming some form of content, every moment his mind was left unoccupied and free to wander, felt like an agonizing time waste. Whenever his phone wasn’t with him he would feel tremendously and uncomfortably aware of his pocket’s weightlessness. When she was a baby he’d replied to emails as he fed her bottles. When he’d pushed her on her first playground swing his headphones had been in and his mind had been elsewhere.

Laying in his bed he read over the message to her. He edited in a few exclamation marks while holding a facial expression presenting nothing but boredom. He added a final ‘love you’, pressed send, then he noticed his phone was low on charge despite being plugged in. The cord was fraying. He forced himself out of bed to search the room for another one.

If there is any draw more powerful than a parent’s love, than their desire to hold their child, then Silicon Valley’s conglomeration of the world’s greatest human and artificial minds had found it, had manufactured it, and Sonny, like everyone else, was paralytically and all consumingly addicted to it. He needed his phone. He didn’t feel complete without it. He craved it with his entire being. He loved his daughter, but what he felt for her wasn’t what he felt for it. Amongst parents of Sonny’s generation, he was far from unique in feeling that way.

He needed that charger cord before his battery hit zero. He opened his desk draw, the junk draw. He pushed papers and old things around and tried to look for a white cord. His hand passed something metallic. He took note, he looked to it. A heart shaped locket. The one his mother had had given him before she’d passed. The one she had received from her mother before her.

He picked it up, held it in his palm. Momentarily he looked at it, remembered it, thought about the history of that family heirloom. Then he put it back in that junk draw with all the other trinkets and remnants of a past time and forgot about it again almost instantly.