Flash Fiction: Teeth in the Fog

1 - The Merchant

Supply and demand. The fog has been great for business because . . . supply and demand. Before, a man trying to make a living at the square had a market bloated with glitter and frivolity.

Food couldn't be just food, it had to be nurtured in the cleanest of farms, the animals serenaded by the sweetest of virgins every morning. A coat couldn't just shield a body from the cold, it had to be the perfect cut and color so the body looked slimmer, younger, richer. And the brands . . . no one of consequence would use anything that didn't bear a proper insignia.

The fog purified the system to its simplest form. Food, never mind its history, helped your hollow ache in your belly. The coat was a barrier between your skin and the teeth in the air. Younger people don't seem much significance in a brand anymore; they sort through piles of hand-me-downs for something that fits them without a thought for letters, prints, or stripes.

2 - The Parent

Not smart to have kids no more, so of course people want more. It gets lonely in the dark--lonely, cold, and dangerous. You have a kid because even if the teeth don't get you, hunger and sickness will hobble your back and squash your lungs. Maybe your kid will go hunt for you then, though the odds for that aren't good.

It's a bad investment either way. Kids die more often than not, their little noses clog with the sooty leftover of oily scales and fragments of insect limbs. A sleek, hunter dog would be a better bet. They don't need more than crumbling concrete, empty pipes, and what little meat you can't scrape off the bones of things they kill for you.

People keep trying for kids anyway. There's some instincts the fog can't kill.

3 - The Technician

They write in a language that once ruled the world. The commands flowed through a contained logic born from the abstract envisionings of a class of people with no skills to fight the fog. Their poems now live in sheets of paper dyed black with soot, the words painted in white wrung from the bellies of vanquished teeth.

Eventually, disciples will string together commands without understanding what they mean. The old technicians can't explain their meaning without their old tools any more than they could teach what 'sunny' means to someone blind from birth.

Or after the fog.

4 - The Hunter

There's a craft to growing old in the fog.

Without the comforts from before, no one can get much mileage out of a human body. Bones don't get as strong as the once did, a person's reach remains stunted, and deep restful sleep is suicidal when no one can predict when the wind will take a nasty turn. There isn't a human left that never huddles under their bed as storms slam teeth against their windows, teeth hitting glass, wood, cloth, or cardboard. Only the mournful rumbling of a hungry belly is worse.

It's easier, for the belly at least, to be alone. It takes hours of patience and focus to kill a single, skinny, rabid deer scurrying from building to building, obscured in the smog. The loneliness that eats at your every thought is an ally every time you don't have to hand over a piece of game, longing for every strip of stringy muscle you'll not rip off the twiggy bones.

5 - The Child

Orphans scurry from tower to tower, eyes glued to the ground for scraps. They fear the fog, but not as much as they trust their ears and noses. They're the ones that stay out longest when the bell signaling incoming storms ring, then come fastest when the wind subsides.

So they're the ones who find the carcasses left behind by the smog, and they're the ones who dig appreciate how the teeth in the fog have stripped away the skin and cooked the meat. They might look feral to those who retain the sensitivities of days past.

But they're not. They've just never seen the sun.  
I went to Massachusetts via Amtrak this weekend and, like a tourist, I took some pictures of the sunset. My selfie filter did wonders for them, as you can see in this shot:

New York sunset + amtrak luggage at upper right corner

I bet people had to work quite hard to get a shot like that once. Gotta love technology. 

Perhaps because near-perfect looking pictures are so common nowadays, the picture that most grabbed my attention was the messed up one above. The train shook just as I took that picture, and I moved at the perfect time to ruin it. Then I looked at it and thought 'what if there's something alive in that virtual smudge?' And this short piece was born.