The Day the Gloves Were Given

Story  ·  Ruvina  ·  Aug 13, 2025

The gloves were gray.

Not the gray of stone or ash — a softer gray, the kind that didn't want to be noticed.
The officer placed them on the table without ceremony.
Standard issue for your condition, he said, and left.

Ruvina sat alone at the table in the reassignment room.
The gloves lay there, slightly too large for her hands.

She had been a digger once.
Not the automated kind — the real kind, who could press a palm flat against raw rock
and feel which vein was worth following.
She'd had a sense for it.
That was what they'd said when they hired her.
A sense for it.

What she had, really, was that she couldn't let go.

She'd known it for a while.
The way a freshly-surfaced dream felt against her bare skin —
warm in a way that moved, that answered, that recognized her —
she had learned to need that.
Not the dream itself. The being-recognized.

She picked up one of the gloves.
Turned it over.
The inside was lined with something dense and quiet, designed to interrupt.

In the old days, she would have felt a dream from three meters away.
With these on, she would feel almost nothing.
That was the point.

She put the first one on.
Then the second.

Flexed her fingers once, slowly.

The room was the same room.
The table was the same table.
But the air had changed the way air changes when something has been decided —
not loudly, not with announcement.
Just: different, now.

She stood up.
Picked up her assignment sheet.

Digger oversight, sublevel four.
Not digger. Not the real kind.

She walked toward the door,
hands at her sides,
the gloves already starting to feel like her own skin.