The Earth Below

Recently I took a trip to NYC to study the Performing Arts for a few weeks.  On the flight in, we had an early flight.  The one beautiful thing about the early flight is that the plane was flying east into the sunrise.  I decided it was a good time to write a short story, and here it is.

Darkness is broken by pink, orange, yellow light.  The explosion is so abrupt, but unnoticed by so many.

“Why do you think it does that?” asked Simon, after the sky had recovered from its morning thrills.

“I heard from grandpa that it’s the People Below who shoot the color into our skies every morning.” Peter said, peeking over the edge of their cloud.

“Don’t be ridiculous.  There are no People Below.  Nothing could live under us here; the pressure would squeeze them to death.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.  You know those lights we see sometimes?  They move around so fast, and stop so suddenly.  There almost has to be something living down there.”

“You remember as well as I do what we learned in Terra ecosystems.  There’s this stuff called magma that glows like the stars and bubbles up from the Earth Below.  They showed us those things called ‘cities’ that were full of the stuff.”

“I don’t know…  That just doesn’t seem right.” Peter pulled himself upright and glided over to a thicker patch of cloud.  “Maybe we have it all wrong.  Maybe there’s something living down there, but we just don’t know how to look for it.”

“We track every sign of sentient water formations that we can.  Every time we spot a mist formation, our scientists use all of their best tools to monitor it.  I’m telling you, if something was living down there, we would know.”

A small, dark cloud drifted in between the two.  They reached out and drank from the richness of it until it was gone.  As they looked on, the clouds thinned near them, revealing a wide expanse of mixed brown and green, capped in white.

“And what about that?”

“Hmm?” replied Simon, still in a stupor from the meal they had just shared.

“Why do we leave behind what we don’t need anymore?  Why can we just throw it down there?”

“Like I said, must be ‘cause there’s no life down there for it to hurt.”

“I still think there is.”

Simon looked over at Peter and smirked.  “If you want to believe that, then go for it.  I prefer to focus on things that have solid facts behind them.”

Peter mirrored the expression.  “Well, whatever you say.”