Enjoy this fairy-tale inspired short story, which I wrote for Elegant Literature (March 2024). This magazine features upcoming authors in all genres, challenging them with a prompt each month. The story below had to feature a theme of futuristic dystopia. I had already started a story retelling Peter Pan a few months ago, so here’s the next installment!
If you haven’t read the first installment, read it here: Never, Never
When children disappeared from the orphanage, they usually reappeared in the form of gruel.
That was Jimmy’s assessment anyway, for the portion sizes always seemed a little more generous the days following someone’s departure from the institute. He watched the viscous pottage drip off his spoon. High protein, high fat. Whatever it was, the caretakers insisted it had all the nutrients a young man needed to grow.
“Y’think he tested out?” His friend Thomas spoke over a mouthful of pottage.
The other children all looked up at Jimmy, who shrugged. The little ones didn’t need to know, but the older ones should be wiser than to ask such questions, unless they really wanted the answers. He glared at Thomas. “You know testing out is nearly impossible.”
“Maybe he gots adopted,” suggested Milly, her cherubic face bright with hope.
Milly was new, dragged from some impoverished home that couldn’t pay the bills anymore. Her parents were still alive, but working in the resource recovery plant. They wouldn’t return. Milly would have to prove herself like all the others now that she was an orphan.
Jimmy sighed heavily. “No one gets adopted, Mills. You either test out or burn out.” He looked across the filled metal tables of the mess. “Hear me? Study hard, and you can become something. A starship captain, a terraformer, a chemist. . . something useful to society. Then you can leave.”
The other orphans glanced at each other doubtfully. Some of them had potential, but Jimmy suspected most would end up pulverized and homogenized into the daily gruel: their greatest societal contribution. After all, everyone had to contribute something in a world like Earth.
“What do you wanna be?” asked Milly, clutching her headless doll against her chest. They had found it in the garbage outside. Being at the lowest levels of the towering skyscraper, the orphanage received much of the discard from above. Scavenging the seedy piles sometimes yielded treasures like Milly’s antique doll.
Thomas scoffed and thrust his thumb toward Jimmy. “He thinks he can be a captain. Shoot for the stars much?” He always teased, but he also followed Jimmy around like a shadow.
Jimmy glowered as a cruel wave of laughter swept through the mess. “Exactly.” A few children looked at him in awe, but most scorned him. He shoved his empty bowl away and stood, glaring across the tables. “I will become a starship captain, and I’ll lead expeditions to find new planets, as far from here as I can get.”
Milly’s mouth dropped open. “You must be really smart.”
Jimmy scruffed her hair. “Find your aptitude, and you may discover you’re smart too.” No sense in crushing the girl’s hope. Hell, she might be good at something.
Thomas stood to join him. “I’ll be your second-in-command then. Jimmy and Tom, seekers of the new Earth, founders of humanity’s new home on Alpha.” He pumped a fist in the air. “We’ll be heroes.”
“Heroes? For finding another planet to destroy?” Jimmy returned his dish to the kitchen to the tune of shocked murmurs. He shrugged. “Just saying.”
“Then why bother becoming a captain?” When Thomas made that infuriating expression, Jimmy realized just how empty the boy’s head really was. One eyebrow quirked, mouth slack, buck teeth sticking out.
Jimmy took a deep breath through his nose. “A captain decides his own path. A captain gets to explore new places and forge new routes. Plus, he gets to be in charge.”
“So you don’t care about finding Alpha? The colonial mission?”
“I don’t see how we deserve another planet when we ruined this one.”
“But you’ll still go look for it?” Thomas crossed his arms in challenge.
Everyone was listening to their exchange, and Jimmy clenched his jaw in annoyance.
“I just want to find a place that’s green,” he finally answered. “I want to see what it was supposed to be like, a place filled with organic life instead of metal and plastic. A place with fresh air instead of acid rain, with clear flowing streams instead of sludge. Did you know the rivers used to have things called fish in them?”
Thomas didn’t answer, nor did anyone else. Half of them had probably never heard of fish, but Jimmy had read that they once composed almost 50% of vertebrate species diversity. “I’m going to the library to study,” he muttered, rubbing his temples.
“Can I come?” As usual, Thomas tread on his heels.
Every day was the same. Gruel in the morning and afternoon, formal lessons during the day, and hard, urine-stained cots at night. The evenings were unrestricted, and Jimmy spent most of it intensively training his body and mind. Despite the clinical, undecorated nature of most of the orphanage, it did have the facilities to do so. How else would their ivory tower overlords identify children with potential?
Jimmy used it all: the library, the yard, the gymnasium. He practiced mathematics and studied astronomy outside of lecture, and he analyzed leadership and communication strategies from theoretical psychology and history. He ran the stairwells and climbed the ropes and played games with the other children. Everything was to make himself better, stronger, smarter. . . perhaps enough so to merit escape from the institute. If he could only get that chance, that opportunity to prove to society that he was worth something, he would no longer be James Frederick of Hoogeveen Orphanage. He would be Someone. Captain James F., shrewd explorer and admirable figurehead.
Surely he was worth more as a ship captain than a nutrient slurry.
His next testing was three months out. Administered by the headmaster—an aloof woman who only appeared when something truly terrible was announced—the tests involved a series of aptitude challenges. They got harder as he got older too, which almost made him believe the headmaster’s promise that they were merely used to measure progress, and not to identify the next batch of gruel. He had gone through how many, and he hadn’t been discarded yet.
“James Frederick!” A strident voice shattered his musings, accompanied by a slap on his desk. His physics teacher glared down at him. “Answer.”
He glanced at the projection at the front of the room, which displayed a problem of force calculation, and rattled off the answer.
His teacher frowned, although not because he was wrong. “What were you dreaming about?”
“Food, madam,” he answered.
She scowled. “You are named after Saint James, Bishop of Catania, a man focused on works, not food. Your contributions matter, James, not your full stomach.”
“Yes, madam.” He stared at his desk. There was no arguing with her. He had been named James to remind him of the value of asceticism, and when he forgot, the lesson was emphasized through enforced fasting. Some might call it neglect or deprivation, but at Hoogeveen Institute, it was called enforced fasting.
He had chosen his second name, Frederick, and he had vowed never to tell anyone why. A long time ago, back when coal was still burned and there was wilderness left in the world, a man named Frederick had written an analysis of the absurdity of colonialism. Even then, the more powerful members of society believed in their right to appropriate resources without limitation, and they had spoon-fed the idea to the masses like pasty pottage. Such propaganda fed the decimation of the natural places and native peoples, which was exactly what Earth’s leadership still pursued.
Jimmy feigned attention for the rest of the lesson, but that night, he tossed on the flattened cot.
The ceiling above was gray with shadow, the only source of the light the monitoring camera’s indicator in the high corner. The bedrooms had no windows, making it deliciously dark at night. Light polluted the world beyond, and Jimmy suspected he’d never fall asleep with the constant erratic flickering of billboards and headlights.
Hell, I’m not asleep now.
He sat up, alerted by some subtle notion of disturbance. His cot creaked, and he stilled, listening. The other boys were fast asleep, with Thomas snuffling next to him. He’d probably wake himself up soon, especially if he realized through bleary eyes that Jimmy was gone.
There, flashing.
Jimmy straightened. Beyond the open door, a glimmer of light like the glare of an ad. He absconded the boys’ room and tiptoed through the cold, white halls, following the glow into the cafeteria. He stopped at the entrance. Was this a test? He pushed forward.
The glowing thing rifled through the cupboards, tossing plates and cups aside with a clatter, then froze. Jimmy got the distinct feeling it was looking at him, and then it zoomed toward him, alighting on the table in front of him. Its aura dimmed, revealing its shape.
It was a woman. A gorgeous, winged woman about 2.5 decimeters tall, in a tattered outfit. She cocked her head and twinkled at him.
“Food?”
Jimmy blinked. “I’m sorry, madam, but they don’t dispense food at this hour. However…” He searched the drawers for the treasures retrieved from the tower’s discard. High above, on top of the skyscraper, there was a drinking establishment, and occasionally, its patrons dropped things from their drinks. “Ah, here it is.” He revealed a tiny umbrella.
The creature stared at it until he demonstrated it opening and closing, and then her face brightened. She threw it over her shoulder and paraded across the table. Then she simpered at him. “What else?”
Jimmy’s heart fluttered. “I’ll be back with something.” He rushed to the girls’ room, sneaking to Milly’s bed and waking her. “I need your doll,” he whispered.
When Milly protested, he dragged her with him.
The woman still danced on the table with her new umbrella, but she paused when Milly entered. She looked the little girl up and down with contempt.
Jimmy took the doll from Milly’s clutches. “Looks, Mills, it’s perfect for her.” He removed the doll’s dress, a flowing green ballgown that reminded him of the flower images he studied in botany.
With growing enthusiasm, Milly agreed.
The woman snatched the dress from Jimmy’s fingers, and before he could speak, she stripped. Milly giggled, but then the creature yanked the dress on. She glowed with delight.
“May I?” Jimmy latched the back of the dress, and the woman beamed at him before spinning with a flourish, flaring the layers outward.
Grabbing her umbrella, she leapt back in the air and grabbed his hand. “I choose you,” she twinkled. “Follow me.”
She led them to the boys’ room, where everyone seemed to be awake. Excited chatter overlapped to a nonsensical uproar, all revolving around a strange boy in the center. In the tiny woman’s glow, Jimmy spied crimson hair.
The boy wore a cocky grin. “Ready, Tink?”
“I want this one,” she declared.
His expression stiffened as he eyed Jimmy. “No.”
She twinkled loudly. “I wanna pick one.”
“No.” The boy turned, pointing at several others. “You seem fun. What about you? You. You…”
Thomas stood eagerly, but at Jimmy’s irate look, he faltered.
“Is he your friend?” the redhead demanded suddenly.
Thomas goggled at Jimmy with that stupid open mouth for a long moment, then shook his head.
“Good! Hold hands. Tink, get over here.”
With that, the tiny woman gave Jimmy a mournful look, then flew over the circle of boys. With a bell-like jingle, the entire group flashed into nothing.
The confusion settled eventually, but Milly disappeared the day before Jimmy’s test, her bed vacant except for a naked doll.
The headmaster watched Jimmy eat in the private testing room. “Do you understand why not all may graduate, James?”
“Yes, madam.”
“And you accept that?” She watched him slurping the generous portion of pottage and nodded with satisfaction. “Mental fortitude is the most challenging and final test. You cannot contribute to society without bearing the weight of our flawed history, nor without facing decisions with unmentionable tradeoffs. Congratulations, James. You’ve passed.”
“Thank you, madam.”
It was time to grow up.