Note from Steph: This flash fiction is late getting to you, and I apologize! Claude was overloaded all this morning and the rest of my day was just bonkers. But here we go! I enjoyed this little story. :)
“Jules! You need to see this!” Marcus’s voice echoes through the limestone passage, bouncing off walls that haven’t heard human sounds in… well, maybe ever.
I duck under a broken stalactite, my headlamp casting jumping shadows. Last week’s earthquake opened up this entire system, and we’re the first ones in. The air tastes like wet stone and possibility.
“If you’ve found another fossil, I swear —” I round the corner and stop dead. My light joins Marcus’s, both beams fixed on what can’t possibly be here. Not at this depth. Not at this age.
A face emerges from the cave wall, as perfect as a Renaissance sculpture but weathered like it’s been here for millions of years. The eyes seem to catch our light and hold it, turning it to something older than illumination.
A wave of coldness flows over me as I sift through the various true or false statements in my head… and come up with nothing.
“That’s not possible,” I whisper, already reaching for my sample kit. “The surrounding rock formation is Pre-Cambrian. There weren’t even plants when these caves formed, let alone —”
“Artists?” Marcus finishes. He runs a trembling hand through his grey-streaked hair. “Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But look at the mineral composition. It’s not carved, Jules. It’s grown.”
I press my gloved hand against the cheek of the face, feeling the subtle layers of sediment. Like tree rings, but in reverse.
“Marcus,” I say slowly, “have you ever seen anything like this?”
“No?”
“I think —”
The face opens its eyes.
I stumble backwards, my sample kit clattering to the cave floor. The eyes — grey as the stone they’re made from — track my movement.
“Jules?” Marcus’s voice seems to come from very far away. “Tell me you’re seeing this too.”
“Witnessing,” the face says, except it doesn’t speak so much as vibrate, sending ripples through the limestone. The word tastes like dust and ages. “You are witnessing.”
My scientific mind catalogs details even as the rest of me screams to run. The face’s features are shifting, rearranging like sediment in a current. Male to female to neither to both. Young to old to ageless.
“Witnessing what?” My voice catches in my throat.
“The moments that changed you. Changed your kind. We remember them all.”
More faces are emerging from the walls now. A woman discovering fire. A child planting the first seed. A painter pressing their hand against a cave wall, making art for the first time.
“The earth remembers,” Marcus whispers, and the faces ripple in response. “It’s been recording our history in stone.”
“Not recording.” The first face’s eyes are kind now, ancient and new at once. “Becoming. We are what happens when a planet falls in love with its inhabitants.”
The faces begin to fade, melting back into stone, but not before I see one last image forming: two scientists in a cave, looking up in wonder.
Witnessing.
Image made with Midjourney.
Prompt provided by NoGENver, GoOnWrite.
Flash Fiction written by S. J. Pajonas with assistance from Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Listen to this story on YouTube at https://youtu.be/D7RJKSx5L50
