The Hourglass Culture

Some of us say the problem is this:
The people above, the sky dwellers, have weaponized gravity, and we down here don’t have any sort of anti-gravity propulsion device strong enough to throw trash at them like they throw at us. We think the technology existed at some point; we can’t really be sure. If it did, they took it with them when they left, every last lick of vertical progress. Some of us say they set us back centuries.
Some of us are happy to receive these gifts. Some of us live for what only they can offer: Nice things. New things. Manufactured things, strong and durable and able to be put to work. Entertainment, too, with generators to keep the electronic stuff going.
Some of us say that these aren’t gifts, but are in fact worn-out garbage they slough over the sides of their cloud empire.
Some of us point out that the sky-dwellers aren’t obligated to give us anything, yet they choose to out of kindness. And if the stuff is broken and old and messy, well, it was probably just the fall that broke, aged, and dirtied it. Their supply elevators are for food, after all. That’s a little more important than a phone.
Some of us strongly disagree.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle, quiet and mumbling and looking at our feet whenever the subject is broached. We don’t know how to feel about it, but we can’t change it, can we? So let’s just move on and go for a walk. It’s nice out. Go grab an umbrella.
Many of us think that we talk about it far too often. They say that we’ve got our own stuff going on too, it’s just that it’s sometimes punctuated by TVs smashing into our houses. We’re our own culture.
Many of us have talked about cutting off their supply lines, the elevators, but they’re all wired up to fry us golden if our hands meander away from the produce chute.
Accidentally. Through an engineering oversight.
Intentionally. Through thorough engineering.
That’s been our excuse, anyway. The real reason has to do with the fact that we all rely on their garbage-gifts. That’s how we get our movies, textbooks, fairy tales. After our worlds split, ours was built on cultural hand-me-downs. They were more interesting, more enticing, more colorful and hopeful than anything we could come up with, so we gravitated toward them, adopted them. We’ve never met, but we share fashion tastes, musical inclinations, and even holidays. We’re not sure what half of them are supposed to celebrate, but the streamers and tiny sparkles of confetti like flames raining down are hard to resist.
We have one original tale, and it’s not half as good as the worst one to ever crater our yards.
It’s oral, so naturally each of us knows a different version, but most agree on this: one day the sky dwellers just waved goodbye to the ground, climbed into the elevators, and flew up, up, up. We weren’t allowed to come.
We needed to stay put for our own protection in case something happened to them up there.
We needed to stay put so they could measure how far they’d risen.
They already had a name for us when they were just inches off the ground: bottom feeders. As if their food came from different dirt.
Some of us wonder how any of us could possibly know what nicknames we’ve been given when none of the sky dwellers have ever returned.
While the sky dwellers mastered up, we struggled to make use of nought. They left us a used-up little township with a postage stamp of fertile land that we spent the next hundred years spreading to the horizon.
Yes, we were abandoned with a postage stamp of farmland that just happened to be the right pH, the right climate, with thousands of seeds at our disposal, not to mention corrals of healthy livestock….
It’s not just their stories. Their art is better than ours, too. In their illustrations, the sky dwellers are such beautiful people. It can be hard to resist a bit of infatuation, especially when we’re young.
Decades ago a flurry of promotional film posters fluttered down featuring a gorgeously gold-skinned sky dweller. Many of us laughed and assured the younger folks that the sky dwellers were all the same earth tones we were; after all, they were derived from it. Then came the day an anatomy textbook spun down at an angle and crashed through the diner window and we all gathered around to look at the shimmering gold skin on the cover, and we were not so sure anymore.
And all of us, whether we admit it or not, have made wishes to the sky dwellers.
There’s no shame in it. We’ve all been desperate before, all taken our carts to the elevators before the township at one point or another. We’ve all fed the crop chutes our own daily portion, with a silent prayer to the gold-fleshed miracle workers above for a new pair of thick rubber shoes, or another one of those red candies, or something more effective than a wet rag and rest to fall from the sky. And if once in your lifetime the miracle happens, you’ll be ripping every carrot you can find from the ground until all of your wishes have come true.
Some of us go so far as to hate the sky dwellers. Some of us want to fire back. Some of us have been looking into ways of launching garbage back at them, but it’s a tall order. The factories are gone. The quarries are gone. The physics is gone. They were all used up creating elevators to the clouds, then erased from the landscape. Some of us say it was because they weren’t going to risk a bottom feeder elevator.
But, a few of us point out, the knowledge couldn’t have disappeared overnight. Those of us alive back then probably tried to put into writing all we knew, but over the generations, the papers disintegrated. The younger folks didn’t want to be custodians of trivia. Whatever knowledge we’ve lost has not been the fault of the sky dwellers. We allowed our own decay.
Some of us think we should just stop feeding them. If we stop sending up our harvests, they’ll get desperate enough to offer us a little respect. Whenever this is brought up, everyone nods and hums in agreement. It’s never acted on because rotten, smashed fruits we’d never seen before began falling from the sky a few decades ago, and the trees that grew from their decay were unlike anything we’ve ever planted.
None of us talk about that.
Some of us want change, but the revolution only ever comes in our teenagers’ poems, brief flickers in near-empty classrooms, the periods when the sun is blotted out for days.
But, it doesn’t matter much either way. The means of retaliation are gone. The means of worship are gone. The sky dwellers flew up beyond where we could climb, could throw, could shout, and annihilated any way of following.
Some of us miss them dearly, miss the phantoms of them and us together insinuated by history. But they are still here. They haven’t left us. We share so much. Even the sternest anti-sky dwellers among us still have prints of beautiful golden skin hidden somewhere in their houses.
Some of us hope to build the propulsion device to send up things we’ve made, things we’re proud of, so we can add to the culture, too.
For example, the other day some of our children were playing in the tall grass at the edge of the township and came back with a glossy, vibrant catalog of youth dress-up costumes—the sky dwellers love their dress-up holiday. We call it Holiday Six. We were all in a good mood following the day’s yield so we decided to regale the children with a story or two about the costumes—we know all about goblins, mummies, astronauts, what have you.
We opened the pretty catalog and flipped until finding a page that caught their eyes, a grisly collection of undead figures contrasted against colorful magic animals. We summoned our best monster voices and began the tale, and just as soon as we started we slammed the catalog shut with tight lips and hot cheeks, and urged the children to return to their play.
We adults set it back down and rapidly whispered to each other, our eyes boring into the page, widening at what looked back at us. When we could not stand to see it any longer, we shut the catalog, tossed it aside, and sat rigidly in the growing dusk, strained and sick-feeling.
What was this horrible, ragged costume listed among the make-believe griffins and Bigfoots, and why on earth, we all asked, was it called an Underperson?