The Cave – A Halloween Short Story
By Chongchen Saelee

There is much debate about the color of man in the modern age. With a man’s skin color implies his social status, education, influence. And right now, as history has shown, the white man is the dominate force. But it hasn’t always been. The first man was black.

Long ago, in much simpler times, before buildings and electricity, before fishbowl wars, black men had to toil the earth, hunt by hand, and conquered only what they could control in their sights. They lived in peaceful villages, had a social familial structure, and unique customs and culture.

Until the grand punishment by the gods came, everything was bliss.

The Grand Punishment was a cataclysmic thunderstorm and it split the earth into two. This powerful force of nature flooded many lands, frozen some overnight, put ablaze many others. Without a reliable land to live on, there was a great migration. The survivors moved into the ice mountains, high away from flooding, but also had to adapt to the cold by wearing heavy animal skins to protect their skin.

The survivors moved into a massive cave in the side of the icy mountain. And they would live there for the next tens of thousands of years, only emerging at night to hunt or gather resources.

The women were ordered to stay deep inside the cave, as they were the bearers of children, the most precious resource to the people. They had learned to cultivate the natural plant life inside the caves. Over the course of their stay, they had grown a vast garden in the cave, it’s life sustained only by a small opening at the top of the cave which sunlight came through. They could possibly live in the cave indefinitely and never leave.

Eventually, the earth’s fury calmed. The Grand Punishment had subsided. And the elders decided they could yet again live in the low lands. So they organized a small team to go on an expedition looking for a new land to live in.

They scoured the new world, now looking much different than what their elders have told them. And when they encountered others who had been already living outside the cave, they were shocked. How did they survive out here?

The others were a savage, unkempt breed. They attacked the cave-dwellers on sight. They bound the expedition team and prepared to sacrifice them to the gods. After that, they would be killed and eaten.

A young other asks his older brother why they have to kill and eat these strangers.

“Because they are not like us. Their skin is white and pale like that of the dead and ghosts, not dark like ours, like the earth that nourishes us. They are an omen or harbinger of bad things to come.”

However, they spare a young cave-dweller girl, whose pale skin, white hair, and eyes blue like the sky, they find to be quite beautiful. After they do away with the adult white people, they would force the young white girl to lead them back to where she came from.

The white girl points to the icy white mountains in the distant horizon.