Sometimes a lost gold mine offers up more than just gold.

And sometimes a secret should remain a secret.

A science fiction short story that ranges from early Idaho to the future, telling the story of family and a lost gold mine.

A version of this story first appeared in The Secret Prophecies of Nostradamus, edited by Cynthia Sternau and Martin H. Greenberg.

 

 

 

PLAYING IN THE STREET

 

 

ONE

 

 

Moscow, Idaho

July, 2030

 

A fine layer of gray dust covered everything. Old cars, rusted, tires flat, lined the street like a huge metal fence. Every car coated with the dust. No animal footprints, not even that of a cat crawling on the hood and sleeping in the sun. Nothing since the gray dust fell.

Litter had spilled out of a garbage can in front of one house and was now glued in place by the dust. The trees were dead, black skeletons, making the street appear to be in the grip of winter all year long. A stop light at the street’s end, three dark round eyes in the sky, watched the complete lack of movement on the quiet suburban scene. It watched the mailboxes and the child’s bike. It watched the basketball hoop above the garage door of the split-level and the bare areas that had once been green yards.

Before. The evidence of before was all along the street. It lined the street. It was the street. There had been a time of life here before the dust had settled over it. The dust had fallen at night, then it had rained and the dust had become hard, like a child’s clay exposed to the air too long. It still looked mostly like a layer of gray dust, but it never altered. Not even the winter snows and spring melts could move or change it. And there was nothing anyone could do to clean it up. The dust was there to stay for centuries to come, of that there was no doubt.

The unblinking glass eyes of the old, rusted cars watched silently as the dust held its stranglehold on the neighborhood.

Now there was only silence.

Now there was only now.

And dust.

I am always careful to walk in my own footsteps. The boots of my protective suit leave large, patterned prints in the top thin layer of dust and I am careful on this street to match those prints step for step. Not doing so would feel as if I was tearing up a piece of my own history.

I always park my government van near the old grocery store and start down the street under the stoplight, keeping to the inside of the sidewalk. Seven houses down from the light is a light blue, two-story house, with a two-car garage. An average house for this neighborhood and this part of the little city.

But this house is special.

Through the door is an open wood foyer. Beyond that a plush living room and then beyond that a dining room with oak tables, dishes in glass cabinets, and an empty fruit bowl in the middle of the table. Everything looks so dated, yet so familiar, as if I have just stepped into a time machine and gone back twenty years.

The rugs are rotted, the drapes hang partially ripped from the hooks by age and their own weight, and the normal dust of the years gives everything a washed out look. But the living room is still a beautiful sight to me; comfortable and yet elegant.

There is a brick fireplace against the wall opposite the front door. On the mantel of that fireplace is a picture, faded slightly, but still clear under the glass of its frame.

It is a picture of three children playing in the street in front of the house. Playing a game of catch with a football between the rows of parked cars and in the small green front yards. In the background beyond the stoplight a car is caught in the frozen motion of the now of the picture. There is no dust, so the colors of the picture are bright, vibrant in their life.

The three children are smiling and the cars are mostly clean. It is a picture of a street that feels like home. The children feel comfortable playing there. I remember, since I am in that picture. I am the one with the football. I was twelve. I was comfortable and happy and alive, even though at the time I never thought of it in those terms.

The picture was taken many summers before Grandpa died and everything changed.

But I remember the time when the picture was taken, everything about life seemed enjoyable along that street. I give the street far more good times than bad. But that too may be nothing more than my memory coloring and adding to the scene in the picture. Sometimes I wonder.

Beside that picture on the fireplace mantel is another picture. This picture is an older one, more faded, of a young couple standing on the steps in front of the same house. She is dressed as a bride. He a groom.

Both are smiling and his arm is around her waist, holding her while she holds a large bouquet of flowers. In the reflection of the picture window behind and to the right of them is a clear picture of the street. People are standing in the driveway and on the sidewalk beside the unplanted yard. There are two empty fields across the street where houses are not yet built. The street and the neighborhood are both very young, almost as young as the smiling couple.

They are my parents. They used to live in this home.

They are still here, in bed upstairs, two skeletons covered with the dust of years. The real dust outside caught them while they slept, as it did most of this city. They died not knowing that death was floating down on them.

I consider them lucky. But it is still hard standing at the foot of that bed, looking at their skeletons. I have done so a hundred times and will probably do so another hundred.

My mother, Mrs. Richard Gilet, Dot to her friends, was still a slim woman at fifty when she died. Her arm was draped across my father’s chest. I find that to be a sign that they were happy the night they died. Richard Gilet, Rich to his friends, was sleeping on his back, one arm raised over his head above the pillow. The bone of that arm holds what is left of his hair in place. What is left of Mother’s dark brown hair has dropped in a bunch around the top of her pillow. The sheets and quilt were pulled up to mid chest level and their remains make very little dent under the quilt.

I am glad I did not come in here until many years after the dust. I do not think I could have stood in this room, imagining that I could smell them rotting in the summer heat through my protective suit. I am glad that the air has already taken their eyes and their skin and left the bones and hair. It is better that way.

With them as only skeletons I can still sometimes retrieve the memories of bouncing on the bed to wake them on Christmas morning. I can still remember them that morning; sleepy, smiling, the smell of them filling the room. Sometimes the memory is so strong I want to jump on the bed again to wake them.

But I do not. I need the reality of them sleeping here after death much more than I need the quick release of jumping on the bed and messing up their last scene.

At least so far. But at times that urge to jump into bed with them is very strong. Someday I may fail to resist it.

I am now older than my father was. I find life interesting that with the dust and everything since the dust, I am still here. I really don’t understand what brings me to this room time after time. I have yet to visit my own room, just down the hall. I loved my own room. It was always a safe place for me.

Yet I always just visit here, in my parents’ bedroom, always careful to remain in my own footprints and not move fast enough to mess anything up.

It seems odd that I have access to this small city, this frozen museum of a life twenty years past. This is a city of death. In my lifetime, and for many lifetimes to follow, no human or animal will be able to live here or walk here unprotected. But since I am the one who told the world, who gave the history of it all, who knows the most about what happened, the government sees fit to let me in.

I suppose they understand that someday I will open the protective suit and stay with my parents. But that is never talked about and for the moment they are happy to let me in and have me report back on what little I see. I am one of the very few crazy enough to even want to be here.

Yet because of my father and his father, I know what happened to this small city. And I know I feel responsible. Somehow I should have tried to stop them. I knew we didn’t know enough. I knew we should have reported our findings to the government and gotten help. But I was still fairly young and just out of graduate school and my voice and my worries were not enough to stop them. My father and the others had been so sure of themselves. So sure they understood. So sure that the understanding would take them places they never imagined.

I looked at the skeletons of my sleeping parents. Maybe this trip down the street was the right time to open up my protective suit and join them.

I stood there in the same exact spot where I always stood, staring at their last embrace.

Not yet. Maybe next time.