The Peridot Glow

The doorway to the dining room is etched with scratch marks from where we servants bump the swinging door with our silver plated trays, incoming with filled dishes and outgoing with empty plates and cups crusted with the residue of gluttony. I take a deep breath before I enter. The air is filled with fat, old man burps, burnt mushrooms, and the sour lust of war.

“One” I say to myself and push against the door.

When the door opens, the smell seeps further into the hallway, the house, the recreated villagescapes and fabricated gardens, slowly permeating every part of our hermetically sealed colony. Our own communal cloche where nothing ever got to leave, not even the air that has passed through the lungs of others.

With measured steps, I work my way through their celebration.

“Fifteen” I recite as I reach and grab a soiled napkin. “Sixteen.” I set it on my tray. “Seventeen.” I pivot on my back foot. My own personal dance, enumerating while performing rehearsed movements now deeply imprinted on my muscles, keeping my mind and body moving together so neither would wander to places it should not go.

“Gentleman, as we are,” said the leader of the war commission as he rolls his hands over the table “with the minds of sharp swords and with even sharper convictions. I toast to our impending victory over Dome 79 where our latest campaign will forever end their existence. And how fitting...”

“Twenty two.” Step. “Twenty three.” Step. I weave through the men focusing on the contents of the table, avoiding the crusted mustaches twitching in anticipatory delight over their half gaped maws.

“They will starve” his voice rose and nostrils flared. “Slowly feel the pain of their errors deep in their guts. What better punishment for their attempt to steal” he props his swollen leg on the chair and holds the mushroom high “our source.”

“Twen..” The numbers stop abruptly and the space they held collapses, letting in a rush of memories of outstretched, tear-stained hands and un-keepable promises yelled over the noise of chaos.

“Here, here!” The group of men seated around a table cheer each other and themselves. Tables of silverware rattle, chairs scrape the floor as they rise in toast and revelry.

My mouth wants to open in protest, but it doesn’t. My eyes want to flutter, capturing tears in their rims, but they don’t. My lungs want to exhale the grief, but they don’t. I want to reach my hands into my pocket for reassurance, but I don't.

I start back at “One.” I dodge my way through the continued frenzy of cheering, inebriated singing of wartime anthems, glasses clinking and breaking. I reach for a plate before the contents would be spilt again on the tablecloth by another wayward elbow. Next to the plate, I see the mushroom, partially smashed and completely unattended. I lean in deep and press my thigh against the table so I can feel the heart shaped locket sewn into the bottom of my pocket. I take the napkin, cover the mushroom, put it on the plate, and head out the door with only a half full tray.

---

The UV filtration of the dome is warped and flaking creating the illusion of clouds and sunbeams that play along the sidewalk, evidence of the real war that we were losing while we distracted ourselves with the battles we thought we could win. During my walks I typically imagine what the breeze would feel like against my face, the wind that would have pushed around these imagined clouds and sunbeams, but not today.

Unsure of when, or if, my transgression would be noticed, I fervently march past the above ground houses built to resemble the elegant farm houses from the time when the sun was our ally and we filled our bellies with her crops. A time before she decided to turn on us, staring us down, giving us her full attention. Between the hand-built houses are small garden plots, but we all know they are barren and maintained for posterity. If a garden did ever produce a disfigured tomato or wilted leaf of lettuce it would be the showcase of the evening's menu, praised for its bounty, and eaten by the elite.

My eyes are focused five steps ahead and my mind ten steps even further. I shot off rapid fire snippets of plans and self encouragement that circled in on themselves filling in any gaps as that arose.

“You have access to the maintenance door keycard. Getting out will be easy. You have mastered invisibility.”

The adrenaline slowly built from each prior step, explodes into my veins when I see my building’s entrance. Oh how I want to run. A huge smile crosses my face as I pass by the sign. “The Breezy Basements” painted in cursive letters, yellow, now faded. “Nature's own cooling system” printed neatly underneath a smiling, cartoon boy whose exaggerated thumb points to a diagram of the subterranean apartment complex modeled on the fallout shelters of the 1950s.

“Grab extra tubes of food. This will work. Even with just a few weeks of repeated cultivation, they can start to feed everyone.”

I make my way down the stairwell fitted with tube lights designed to replicate the sun. Over time the bulbs slowly lost their spectrum and now emitted only a faint green, buzzing light, the last stage of decay before permanent extinguishment and silence. The cinder block walls are stained with trails of water drops and puddles from the moisture that had nowhere else to go, so the mildew joins. There are no breezes as promised by the sign.

It was in our retreat to the depths that we found our new source, life born from darkness. Our colony survived on mushrooms boiled, processed to mush and packaged into tubes falsely labeled with flavors like “Red Pepper'' and “Artichoke” even though we all knew those crops were extinct. What else but mycelium could not just grow but thrive in the stagnant pits, dank underground tunnels, fed with waste, recycled air and lukewarm water. Mushrooms, our little fingers of a half dead earth digging its way out from the abyss of the loam.

“He has told you every part of the layout. In detail. You know where the doors are. They can be opened by anyone with a card. You have access to a card.” The plans fortify.

I walk into my room and shut my door causing the lights to sputter on and cast a peridot glow over everything in its short range. I remove the napkin from my pocket. I pull at hand sewn seam releasing the locket that hid in the bottom of my pocket everyday. I gently break apart the mushroom, scrape the spores into the locket and etch the word FOOD into its worn metallic finish with a pin.

“You will make it.”

Quickly, I grab my neighbor's key and head to his bunk. He is my one, true friend. We spent most of our time together not just to reserve our electricity rations, but because we loved to tell stories in the dark after the TV credits expired. We spent hundreds of hours re-telling the details of our days, created thousands of tales of what we wish our days had been, but mostly told the stories of the days of our past just so we could remember them, together.

I open his closet, grab his work clothes and hurriedly change. He worked for the engineering team that repaired the dome’s seal. Tucking my hair into his cap, I grabbed his work bag and his security card that will open the doors to the maintenance tunnel. The tunnel leads to a locker room of outdoor equipment and suits and ends at the double sealed vacuum doors to the outside world.

I leave him a note on the table. “You would have done the same” and sign it with just a heart.

I make my way through the mechanical exoskeleton of the dome as if I traveled it everyday. Suited in outdoor gear designed for short term work, tool bag in hand, locket secured, and brimming with gleeful determination, I arrive at the maintenance exit. I push against the last door into a world of sun, sand, and hot wind. I step into the real world.

“One” I say it out loud and my voice echoes in my helmet.

---

I don’t know how long it has been or how far my feet have moved. The suit’s water supply bladder is empty, the ventilation fan broken. My body is now the only line of defense against the heat that wormed its way inside. I crossed the last set of hills and can now see Dome 79 in the distance. So close and so far.

My mouth opens in protest, and I yell out nonsense syllables that slowly take the shape of sentences. Sentences that morph through every emotion of the past 20 years that were hidden in the body as they unfold incoherently at a rapid pace.

“I hate mushrooms!...I am afraid my body won’t make it.”

The hot wind blasts sand against the suit creating an ever present roaring. I yell louder. My lungs pucker from the unfamiliar effort.

“Why did you let them take me? Are you still alive? Dead? How old would you be?” I think of my parents and sisters, pulling them from the depths of my hungry belly. “Will I see you again…soon?”

My eyes flutter, capturing tears in their rims until they spill over and slide partly down my cheeks before they evaporate.

My feet try to stay in alignment, but they wander and slip. I see the eface of the war commissioner. Anger pushes my feet deeper into the sand anchoring into the earth giving them the resistance they needed to lift again.

“Just keep moving those feet.” I yell. “One. Two. Three.”

The steps came just as they had been trained to do…until they simply just didn't...and I sank to my knees.

I was just a few miles away, but exhaustion pulled on the reserves and found nothing left. My blood had been broken down to water where the remnants of shredded blood cells float purposeless like flotsam and jetsam. My muscles have no more stretch and snap. My lungs are slowly filling with substances other than air.

I try to stand, but my body gives way to the sand. I reach into the bag and pull out a flair.

“They will find me. They will see this” I reassure myself. “I just need to lay down for a bit.”

I open my visor, seeing the unfiltered world for the first time. Sparkling vermilions dance in a frenzy against the golden and blue morphing backdrop. I feel the scorching breeze on my face. I inhale hot air and smell the burning sulfur.

I take off my glove and reach into my bag. Holding the locket in my hand. My body is fuzzy but the scorch of the hot metal cuts right through. It feels just like the time my mother broke free from her captors and squeezed it into my palm just as she was being pulled away.

“They are coming. They saw the flair.”

I try to hold my memories, but they are too weak. The numbers fill the empty space.

“Ten...Nine...eight...seven...”

The numbers fade into the light leaving just the echoes of slowing breath as my lungs deeply exhale the last bit of grief.

In. Out...

In. Out...

In...

Out...

I feel a hand on mine pushing the locket deeper into my palm.

“Mom?”...