Silent Eden

To let everyone know: This story is unedited. I am looking for opinions and ideas, rather than focus on obvious spelling/grammatical edits that probably need to be made. 

There were no cries from the first new infant born in nearly a decade. Silence settled throughout the chamber where Divines had gathered around their temporary Queen. Her screams stopped once the baby came, replace with whispers of panic and assumption.

The baby had wide blue eyes, just like her mother. Her skin would be pale when she got older, but for now, it was the wrinkled pink of newborn flesh. There wasn’t a single hair on her head.

She was beautiful and bald, but malformed. A butterfly of purple crossed her chubby cheeks. Her mouth was open, tears were falling, but not even a smile came from betwixt her lips. Her mother may have been a Divine, but the daughter was malformed. She was subhuman.

An apology from the doctor told the Divines that she was not what they had hoped. A bell was rung. Two women entered the room, both visibly deformed in face. They took the babe in their spindly arms, hushing her with breast and blankets.

The Divines gathered around their Queen, hushing her frustrated cries and sobs of failure. She stopped the women before they could leave. The baby was supposed to be their Eden, she said between sobs. She apologized to the baby, then to the Divines around her. The Subhumans who had come to take the baby got no regard from anyone in the room until they were dismissed with a silent wave of the Doctors’ hand.

Eden had been born to the most beautiful and graceful of the Divine women with the status befitting the child of one before birth. But the Divines were just that; Divine. They were perfect in every way, without a flaw to mar their precious skin, or a single mistake in their genetics. Eden had been born without vocal chords… And though that alone may have left her in a higher status of subhuman; the blue birthmark that crossed her cheeks left her of an even lower status. With a visible deformity marring her face, she was considered even more Subhuman.

Subhumans weren’t allowed to learn how to read or write. Since Eden wasn’t even able to speak, she was nearly useless if things didn’t involve manual labor. It wasn’t that Subhumans were allowed to speak to any of the Divines, but it helped when you could report back with that you were supposed to know.

Living in the massive facility that the Divines populated could be a challenge. It was thousands of acres of watered soil, thin, tired looking trees and pale yellow grasses, all topped off with a glass dome. There was a permanent howling on the outskirts of the compound from the sand storms that waged war of the seemingly impenetrable glass. Thousands of acres of sadness, populated by Subhumans and Divines alike… A challenge because the population was slowly, but most assuredly, dwindling.

Sometimes the howling storms of sand and dust would quiet for just a moment. Looking out across a dessert of stone and sand, Eden could sometimes make out structures that looked like twigs and sticks, jutting up from the ground. When she looked out with questioning eyes, Mother Hen would shake her head and tell her that it was nothing. A mirage she would call it.

Mother Hen was called Hen that because of her beaked, pointed face and long, pointed hands. Her deformation was hidden under a number of clothes that covered a hunch in her back and what might have been a pair of chicken legs. Her scaly skin reminded Eden of the skin she would seen on the scrawny chickens they sometimes slaughtered in the kitchens.

Mother because she was just that: Mother. She was so old that she had mothered the entire third generation of Subhumans, taking them from their Divine Mothers and nursing them on her own breasts. She was haggard, old, bent, crotchety and it was a wonder that anyone would find breasts at all through the folds of her clothes. But there was no doubt at all that every Subhuman in the compound respected Mother Hen. Nobody disobeyed her. Her word was law, second only to the word of the Divines.