Flash Fiction: No Cares

Flash Fiction piece inspired by an image:

The swing was too high. They’d done that deliberately. But it was still hers, and she’d learned that the only way to get on it was to get a running start and then jump.

She backed up across the cave and dashed toward the hole in the cave wall. She was surefooted on the uneven floor. She jumped at just the right moment with hands extended.

For an uncertain, wild moment, she was flying. And then her arms wrapped around the wooden seat, and she clamped down with all her might as her legs swung beneath her. She climbed up while the seat and chains were still rattling and settled down in the seat with a motion she’d done countless times before.

Mama gasped. “Get the hell down from there!”

She twisted in the seat and stuck her tongue out at the hologram of her mother. “Make me.”

“Don’t think I won’t remember this on Visiting Day! Get down from there right now!”

She growled in frustration. For a moment, she thought about disobeying. It was so easy to rile up Mama, and it could be fun. But Mama wasn’t above spanking, and the city people let Mama do it on Visiting Days.

Mama was in another cave in the mountain. Once a week, the balloons came, gathered them both, and set them down in a third cave for visitation hours. It was the only time she ever saw living people, instead of as holograms.

She pulled herself up to standing on the swing and turned around, facing away from the view of the metropolis that was always out of reach, even by hot-air balloon. “I have to swing to get down,” she said, which was sort of true. She could jump right now and she’d probably be fine. But it was safer if the swing was moving and swinging inward, into the cave. So, she pumped her knees and got the swing going, ignoring her mama’s grumbling and then gasps as the swing swung inward, then outward, inward, then outward, farther and farther, until her back was to the sky and her view below was of the hazardous rockface of the mountain.

She could scale down that mountain. She’d climbed the inner waves of the cave plenty of times that she knew how to do it with ease. But climbing around outside the cave was the One Rule the city people had been very clear she wasn’t allowed to bend.

One day, Daddy would finish his political prison sentence, and they would all get to go free. In the meantime, she and Mama were Examples to him and to everyone else down in the city, who had a perfect view of the cave mouths. And then she’d climb down the mountain and enter the city she’d seen from afar for her whole life.

Maybe she’d burn it to the ground. She thought about it, sometimes, when she was lighting a fire in the fire pit to cook the raw meat and raw vegetables the hot-air balloon people brought every week. Or maybe she’d join the resistance, like in the stories Mama had told her about Daddy. Maybe she’d find Daddy, and they’d do it together.

But in the meantime, she would swing and jump and land on the rough cave floor, like she had no cares in the world.

**

Image Source: jd_art_x