If everyone holds up the sky by Roma Robinson
“Nothing is predictable except that every single thing we do, every breath we take, every act of goodwill, every time we reaffirm ourselves in service to life makes a difference” - Manda Scott, Thrutopia website
“Help! Help! The sky is falling!” - Chicken Little
~
There was a strange heat in the air the day that the sky fell.
What we had once imagined as an endless stretch up up up until up stopped having any meaning flattened and fell in a strange humid heat.
Popular accounts stated that the heat disrupted the convection currents, destabilising the top layers of the atmosphere, and suddenly the contents of a year 6 geography lesson came crashing around everyone’s ears. Fields of crops were destroyed, completely flattened, people were crushed and trapped, and penthouses were shattered.
The learned men and women of the era tried a million things to return the sky to the sky.
Around the world communities had to adjust to the new reality as one by one the scientists’ attempted solutions failed.
The scaffolding didn’t work: beams of galvanised steel buckled under the weight and fell to the floor with a noise almost like screaming. With massive scissors and knives they tried to cut their way out of the suffocating sky but no matter how sharp it would not be ripped. Those with the enough funds and delusion to do so tried to build domes of bulletproof glass over their houses, which worked for a little while. Then one by one they bowed and collapsed.
There was only one solution that worked reliably. Reams of people pausing in their attempts to live, struggling to the hills and mountains and shrugging the sky onto their shoulders. They could pull it up and away from the towns, villages and cities, creating just enough space that people below could go about their days.
In the early days the strongest men around would march to the hills and brag that they alone could hold the weight and protect the women and children living below. It was a bit of a nightmare for the paramedics to get to them when they inevitably collapsed with exhaustion and the sky came tumbling down again.
While they were recovering, everyone else decided that it was probably much more sensible to do a few hours at a time each and to design a rota - something the strong men probably should have thought about first.
Atlas’ grandmother swore that, despite common wisdom, in the seconds before it fell it got cold like the rush of air to a hole in a balloon. And Atlas? Well Atlas didn’t know. She’d only ever known a world where the sky was strung taut above her.
She didn’t care much either. Tales about the sky were about as interesting to her as her grandfather’s obsession with trading cards: not very. But like the world often did when one was trying not to care, it forced Altas into a situation where she had to.
As it was, the sky was currently resting on her neck in a very uncomfortable fashion.
"Could you just-" she gestured to Suzy, who stood next to her on blustery Selsley hill, looking over the treeline that clung to the sheer drop down to Kings Stanley.
"Yep, just give me..." Suzy shuffled closer and with a groan, lifted her arms a bit higher.
The weight lessened for a moment and Atlas shrugged the sky from one shoulder to another. She adjusted her feet where they were starting to get sore. "Cheers."
"You've gotta get better technique if you're already uncomfy."
She nodded stiffly, shuffled back and they lapsed back into silence, the two of them and a man who’d arrived late and hadn’t said a word since. The rhythmic yup yup yup of a chaffinch floated up the side of the hill.
“Honestly it always seems heavier after a day at the orchard.”
She loved Suzy but her tendency to always need to be talking did get tiring when all Atlas wanted was to pretend she was somewhere else.
“What on earth is there to do at the orchard in November? The apples can’t still be growing?” The ones on her neighbour's tree were all stripped by the end of September.
“We’re collecting the windfall to turn into scrumpy cider - or compost. But it’s a lot of carrying heavy boxes.”
Atlas gave a half hearted laugh and said nothing.
She looked at her feet, planted firmly apart and caked with mud from the walk up in the softly falling rain.
She looked at Suzy's feet in her brand new brown boots.
She looked down at the valley below and was struck by sudden vertigo. Her head spun, getting worse as she stared at the miniature houses all lined up. A wayward thought entered her head: if she became dizzy and ill, she might be able to leave her shift early. She could cram in a few hours of revision for the upcoming conservation college entrance exam before she had to go and get her grandmother her dinner, ease her old bones up the stairs in the house she refused to leave, and into bed. And then she’d have the evening all to herself.
She looked harder.
"Oh, Atlas," Suzy pulled her from her thoughts, "are you about tonight?"
When she confirmed no, Suzy sighed. "Shame. I want someone to help me block out my new jumper. You know the one I've been working on for, I don't know, at least half a year at this point?"
Atlas did know the one. She asked anyway, because Suzy loved talking about it and because she was bored enough.
She let Suzy chatter at her about the jumper, about her Dad's new obsession with dying wool and about the cramp she'd gotten in her hands.
And she looked out at the view again and tried to feel vertigo. Disappointingly nothing.
She then looked around her and wondered if the other man would ever speak. He was unknown to her and a bit older, she thought, than her and Suzy, and sporting a pair of strangely dyed blotchy yellow corduroy trousers. Despite his odd fashion choices, his hair was fluffy and his glasses rested low on his nose, and Atlas found she thought he was quite beautiful. He stood casually with one hand up at the sky, while he scrutinised his nails on the other.
Suzy, ever friendly and sometimes overfriendly, had apparently followed her gaze because she decided to talk to him. "What's wrong with your hand?"
He looked up sharply in surprise and appeared to bump his head on the sky. "Me?"
"Yeah, with the brave trousers. You're looking at your hand a lot?"
"Just checking for dried paint." He paused, and then, deliberately and slow, reorientated his whole body. "I'm an artist, I've got a little studio down near Woodchester. You can call me Reverend"
"Reverend?" Suzy repeated.
"Oh I'm not ordained,” he laughed but neither of them quite got the joke, “but I really feel like I channel God when I paint."
"What do you paint?" Atlas asked, enjoying the way his chest swelled as he turned his attention towards her.
As he answered, Suzy made eye contact with her and rolled her eyes. Atlas tried not to laugh. With his over-grandised words and plummy laugh, he was exactly the kind of person she expected Suzy to find irritating. But something in the way he reached out in front of him when he described the canvases he was working on only further appealed to her.
He finished his explanation, and then sighed. "Really I don't understand why I'm here."
Suzy snorted "like, right now or what's your purpose? Because that's so real, but I think that’s just what being in your early 20s is."
"Oh I know my purpose, I must produce beautiful things. I want my works to be so popular that people fight over them and will pay extravagant amounts just to own one. People must think about the world and their place in it when they see the things I have created. But spending several hours freezing to death on a hill doesn't produce anything beautiful."
Atlas felt Suzy bristle next to her.
"What, doing the job of literally stopping the sky from falling on everyone?"
He laughed and Atlas wanted to hear more of his laughter.
"No! This," he squelched his leather soled feet in the mud, "isn't beautiful! And nothing is more important than producing beauty." He turned to Suzy, "do you produce beautiful things?"
"I don't paint, if that's what you're asking?"
"So try as you might you would not understand!" He grasped his hands in front of him like a man despairing and turned to Atlas. "What about you? Do you use your hands as God gave you to produce beauty so that others can marvel at its form?"
She couldn't say she did. "But I do see what you mean. I have to be here, but if I wasn't I would be able to fit in some revision before going to look after Gran."
"Well you might understand a bit then. Ultimately it's coercive, asking us to be here when our lives are full enough."
"If we're not here then the sky would fall." Suzy sounded absolutely dumbfounded and Atlas struggled to stop herself from chuckling. "Everyone has to help."
Reverend smiled widely, "see you say that. But notice how not everyone helps. They sit around all day and don't lift a finger, making beautiful things or otherwise, and expect everyone to hold up the sky for them. Why should I?"
Atlas did think this was quite stupid. "People aren't just like not coming for fun, like they literally can't because they're too sick or too old or too young."
Suzy, who Atlas could tell was very strongly regretting opening this conversation but was too committed to back out now, opened her mouth. Reverend got there first.
"If they won't, why should I? I should leave right now really, my back hurts."
Atlas became once again aware of the crick in her neck.
"But unlike some, you can. Even if it hurts a bit you're still capable." Suzy was almost pleading now, and her tone irritated Atlas.
"Do you not think he makes a point that we're quite busy? And surely there's others that would?"
Suzy turned to her with a look of betrayal on her face. "Are you out of your mind? If we don't do this, the sky will quite literally, and I'm not joking, fall and crush people? To death?"
"So is your purpose to do this then?"
"Shut up about purpose!"
Atlas looked down at the ground and wished Suzy wouldn't get so het up.
Reverend turned to her, and Atlas did enjoy his lopsided smile and dimples. "See this is why me and you shouldn't be here. We have a greater purpose, and your friend here will convince us to stay, but we should be out there. Being, rather than slogging at this"
"Well we should stay anyway, for today. You don’t have to come back, but Suzy is right. We have a responsibility right now." She didn’t like the way the conversation had started to freeze Suzy out.
"Don't be silly," and he actually laughed, loudly, like he wasn't trying to convince her to do something she didn't really think was right, "there are people at Rodborough and Haresfield. No one's gonna be crushed. Someone else will always hold up the sky."
Suzy regained her voice. "You just don't think it should be you?"
"Exactly!"
"So who do you think should?"
"The people who want to. Like you. You very clearly want to. You've got nothing else going on by the sound of it, to spend over a year making one item of clothing, and you seem to quite like it up here. And some people have lives that are better suited to this kind of work."
"Like who? I don't think the people looking after children and growing food and making the things we need exactly have a whole lot of free time, but someone has to do this job. That's why we have a schedule. So no one does too much and everyone who can contributes."
Atlas really didn't want to get too involved, Suzy's flushed face was always a warning sign and she was struggling to think very well with the weight of the sky pressing on the hump of her neck. She stayed silent and let them get on with it.
"If I don't want to, I shouldn't have to."
"Do you want the sky to be held up?"
"Of course I do! But I don't need to be the one to hold it up."
He'd fully let go even with the cursory hand he was using but the weight on Atlas' back had not changed much. Maybe if he just left it would be fine.
He folded his arms definitively. "Why force everyone to?"
" 'Cause counter to what you think, this isn't a super fun job for anyone."
"So what, humans are selfish, no one will do it just out of the goodness of their hearts? They have to be forced to do it?"
Suzy was furious. "I don't think humans are anything in particular. But maybe we are selfish. We need some organisation and discipline to overcome all of the selfish bits. All this, holding up the sky is a duty not a pleasure, and it's really necessary. We're here to look after everyone. Tomorrow a different set of three people will be here. There's people on Haresfield, on Sugar Loaf, on Cam peak, on the Knoll, on Yr Wyddfa. Fuck it, on everest. Everywhere! And everyday it's different people. "
“I don’t think anyone’s on Everest.” Atlas tried. Suzy rolled her eyes so hard she was surprised they didn’t get stuck.
Reverend held up his arms in a sort of surrender. "So maybe it's fine if it's not me, if every day three new people are up for doing the job. And maybe it's also fine if it isn't Atlas who also has important things to do and clearly wants to leave."
She willed the earth to swallow her up. It was unobliging, so she decided she might as well defend herself. "I probably would leave if I could. But Suzy is on the nose, we have to be here."
"But you can leave! You just won't free yourself from the idea that you can't."
"Why in hell are you trying to convince me to leave?"
"Because Suzy will stay here and so we don't need to. You clearly want to leave - so do I - and we can. I’ve got more important things to do.”
“Fine.” Suzy snapped, her expression like a cliff face , “I’ll hold it all. You two can leave and go and do whatever it is that is so ‘important’ and I’ll just like, stay here all night or something.” She paused, and then looked Atlas dead in the eye, “ You can't both want the sky held up and not do anything to keep it there.”
Atlas went to go and say something, but Reverend gestured back towards the town and Suzy wouldn’t look at her.
She looked down at the little line of houses, so small you could hardly tell that they were all different colours. Her head buzzed and swirled. She probably just wasn’t well. It was probably for the best that she left, she clearly wasn’t well.
Slowly, and hoping no one would notice, she slipped out from under the sky.
No sooner was she free, Suzy groaned and tried to adjust her grip. She clearly couldn’t, and grimaced. The sky rippled and bowed above them. “Why are you leaving? What could possibly be more important than stopping the sky from falling?”
“You know I wouldn’t leave if I thought it would actually fall.”,
“If you’re both so comfortable leaving now, how do you know the others won’t leave?” She panted, the effort colouring her face bright red.
Atlas felt very small.
“Because it’s important. I need to look after my grandmother. I wouldn’t leave if it wasn’t important.”
The lie made her feel smaller.
Suzy huffed in pain as she tried to adjust again and failed.
“Are you alright?”
All she got back was a deadly glare. Fine. She knew that Suzy was probably right, that it wasn’t right to leave. But if she was going to be like that.
She turned to Reverend. “What will you do now?”
“Oh I’ll return to my studio. There’s a piece I’ve been working on for the last few weeks.”
“What’s the piece?”
“It’s a still life. You want to know something funny? I’ve already replaced the apples several times, they just keep rotting.”
She looked back to Suzy, who was now bent double and ignoring her. The sky hung lower, brushing the top of the trees below.
Reverend saw her looking, and did not follow her eye but said “don’t worry about her. You have things you need to do, she’ll be able to handle it.”
Part of her wanted to follow Reverend down the hill. That part currently controlled her legs as she stepped forward. But part of her whispered that if she left, that she was as selfish as Reverend. And then a third part: a deep hot curling shame. She didn’t think she had it in her to face Suzy again, even if she might want to return.
“My current painting, it’s going to be a masterpiece. I’ve procured a new shade of yellow from-”
“This is stupid. I’m not leaving.” She cut him off. That whisper has rapidly grown louder and louder and her legs decided, planting her firmly beside Suzy.
He laughed at her.
“I just don’t think it’s right to leave! I can't expect someone else to do it without also being the person someone else will expect to do it.”
“Fine, you go back to her, but I’m leaving. I hope that while you’re cold on this damned hill you think of me, alone with my canvas and my brushes. Painting something beautiful.”
“Well I hope you enjoy it.”
He walked off.
The wind whipped around them and for a moment the shame returned. What if Suzy never forgave her? What if she had proven herself to be the exact kind of selfish that Suzy thought everyone else to be? The possibilities swirled in her head like a boiling pot. She contemplated Suzy.
Her face was contorted from the effort and her arms were shaking, but she held on tight. She frowned deeply at Atlas, opened her mouth in an attempt to say something, but gave up when she didn’t have the breath.
Atlas didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. Instead she reached above her and pulled the sky back onto her shoulders. It felt heavier than before but she held firmly onto it. How she’d ever thought that Suzy could stand her for the next few hours of their shift and not collapse, she couldn’t fathom.
The weight lessened and after a moment Suzy regained the power of speech.
“What the hell.”
“I’m sorry I realised it wasn’t fair.”
“Oh did you?”
“Yes!”
“Oh but your life is so important. Weren’t you gonna go and be important with Reverend or whatever his truly stupid name was.”
“No, I’m not. I realised that you were right, every day of my life I walk around like that only because of the sacrifice and time that people willingly give to hold up the sky. Who am I to believe I shouldn’t contribute?” The shame bubbled hot in her but she continued. “And I have to say, I know you think so, but I don’t want to believe that everyone is selfish and only doing it because they have to.”
“So why are you doing it?”
“I’m doing it so that you’re not doing it on your own.”
Suzy didn’t respond, taking a moment to adjust.
“Well I’m glad you’re back.” She said, glumly. “And I’m still upset.”
“We’ve got a couple hours to sort it out.”
“I’m never letting you forget this.”
“Probably for the best. It’ll keep me away from irritating, up themselves, pretty boys. Did you hear him say he’s gone off to paint something beautiful”
Suzy snorted in the way she often did. “What a prick”
Atlas nodded sagely in agreement, looking down at the houses below, the leafy canopy waving in the wind and the mud that stuck to her boots. “What a prick.”
