Flowers In The Dark S.A. Barton In the beginning, my memories are all of hunger. I am the youngest; when I was growing up the food was stretched the thinnest. In addition to hunger, my memories are all of the basement. Four walls, cement vainly decorated with a feeble patchwork of pages printed from zines: pictures of the cities and the parkland between them, of the ancient wilds long lost to the needs of thirty billion people and their agriculture, of green things and their bright flowers, of the sun that I could never see. To see the sun would be a danger. The buildings, satellites far above, drones too small to tell from insects: all have eyes always watching. Always. To avoid the sight of the eyes and to please God, father and mother told us, we must remain hidden. All things outside, or even in the presence of windows, are watched by inhuman eyes. Even what is bought and sold is watched; that, I understood as I grew older, was why we were hungry. The food they bought must be in amounts that they could plausibly eat. Otherwise, an alert would be raised, and a machine would come to the door to see what—who—they were hiding. A machine arm of the Adversary, father said. We four children lived in the dark, hidden away from the eyes of this Adversary, who would prevent the faithful from fulfilling their promise, their duty to multiply, who approved and disapproved of babies and rarely gave more than two to a couple in a whole lifetime, and perhaps only one, or even none (like father and mother)—a lifetime, that for servants of the Adversary, might span an unnatural two hundred years: another thing to be avoided, but father and mother said that the Adversary, because it liked to see us die, would grant us to choose to live only the threescore and ten our Creator allotted us. After I was born, so soon that I only remember most dimly—I was perhaps two years old, no more than three—there was a time that mother cried and father held her, trying to hide from her that he was weeping too. Every day, every meal, every schooltime when they came to draw the letters and numbers for us on a whiteboard (they could not do it with a tablet, show us lessons in video, because lessons were for children and the Adversary would wonder why they viewed them), they wept. It was because they could not circumvent the required birth control any longer, I learned later. Because there were no others after me. That they had no more children was not because they lacked the means to defeat the birth control any longer. It was because they could feed no more children without purchasing more food, and giving the Adversary his excuse to come. My stomach growled when I woke, it growled after lunch, it growled after dinner, and it growled when I lay me down to sleep. All of our stomachs growled, and we grew up spindly and pale, flowers in the dark denied the sun, roots grasping at thin sand, only dreaming of fertile loam. And after my breasts grew and my menses began, so I heard, listening to my parents whisper, that I was to be smuggled to the basement of another of the faith, and their daughter smuggled to our basement, and perhaps other trades and arrangements made for my other brothers, so that they could breed more of us flowers in the dark, more and more flowers, pale, starved, feeding them somehow—how did they plan to do it? I had no answer, because I dared not ask, dared not arouse their suspicion. Instead, I crawled to my three brothers in the dark and asked them, and they too did not know. We whispered in each others' ears, because mother and father had eyes and ears in the basement, too. We whispered of this mystery, and of others, whispered because, we slowly woke to the reality, they were Adversaries too, had become Adversaries of ours, meaning to serve one God, we thought, and come to serve a different God entirely. And so, the day came that we plotted, and one dinnertime my oldest brother defeated the latch on the basement door, and when it came time for sleep we instead lay awake until we thought it was half between bedtime and time to rise, and we went up and out into the house. It was a small house, and strange, filled with small and poor furnishings, but we did not know that then. It seemed enormous, and rich, because we knew only our little basement, our dark hothouse. And we parted the doors, and we parted the gate that opened from the little space of gravel—a 'yard'—and into the street. And we ran. We ran down the street, shouting the name of the Adversary. And soon were were picked up by a machine in a vehicle, and he took us to another strange place, with its own strange restrictions and rules. But there was enough to eat. And there were more people than only us and father and mother, many more. And we could see the sun, when it was out, whenever we desired. And the choice was ours, as much as circumstances allowed, to choose who we served in our own hearts.