I really like this piece and the emotions that you convey in it. Very nicely done.

I read this and also the original, which won the Hugo Award for short stories in 1974 (why do I always come back to this year...?), in which the name "Omelas" was inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin's seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon in a car mirror.

Interesting premise. And Le Guin's description is appropriately "hippie" (festivities in the nude, nude "free-love" religious devotees who have sex with parishoners on a whim), only five years after Woodstock.

In this story and hers, no explanation is given for how or why the child's suffering maintains the city's good fortune; it's just an accepted fact--by both the people who stay there and leave, knowing there's nothing to stop the practice. Yet the dilemma remains: do "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one?" to quote Spock from earlier Star Trek films.

William James also described such a condition almost a century earlier: "...millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

It could also be a metaphor for the world--the five percent of the world with nearly all the wealth at the expense of the misery and suffering of the majority who live financial dire straits or even worse poverty.

Thing is, it's more expositional than narrative.

What if--what if a story with a more active, dramatic purpose were constructed around it? Certainly rich fodder for any writer, allowing him or her show how--and why--the child's suffering is necessary to maintain the utopia. Could be anything. Also--the requirements of showing the child to adolescents who come of age and are better able to accept the truth--what's the rationale behind that? And what kind of ostracism would they face if they oppose the practice? Guilt for having a conscience in the first place? As much a paradox as the practice itself.

People who left Omelas for other villages might get together, look at their lives outside their birth village, and decide it would be better to invade it and end this insanity. Then again, is it truly insanity? How can they be sure their own convictions are any more right than those who chose to stay?

Still, it's pretty clear that the Omelasian's culture is not a viable one; given their happiness is superficial, there not really living, just existing. Without hardship, without challenges, without obstacles, they don't grow or develop. They stagnate.

A whole slew of action is possible in such a story--the conflict between Omelasians who want to maintain the status quo and exiles who see them as harming themselves as much as the child. A veritable holy war of sorts.

Anyway, that's where my thoughts were leaning when I read this. Though it may be short on action, you've captured the essence of the looming injustice.

I love it and I fucking love you. XDD You're amazing.