Finders Keepers by Annalisa Gulbrandsen

  Raise our children above ground and let them marry human girls and boys and raise normal families.”
     
    She knew her eyebrows were probably jumping right off of her face, but that’s how unexpected those words were to her.   First of all, someone had actually said it, and not just in jest.   Goblins.   Goblins!   Actual goblins.   The information swam in front of her eyes, drowning her with a million thoughts, situations, scenarios, implications.   She snapped back to the physical present when Flora spoke up again.
     
    “Not all of us could do it, though.   You can’t pass if you are only three feet tall with six fingers on each hand, or your skin is blue and speckled like lapis.   Our family was chosen.   There were a few others too.   The men took jobs in the mines, which did more than enough to hide our dissimilarities, and we lived quite happily.”   Her eyes were glassy and wet with tears.   “But our children didn’t fare through the childhood illnesses as we’d hoped.   Our immune systems weren’t prepared for even simple things like roseola or the chickenpox.   Gibbs was the first.   He became so ill that we had to do something or watch him die.   I took him to the pediatrician, just as any mother would have done.”   Her eyes were far away and her voice defensive as if she were once again reliving the moment where she had to rationalize her actions.
     
    “It was strep throat and they treated him with antibiotics, just like any other child.”   She stopped speaking and touched the photograph with the tip of her finger.   “But he wasn’t every other child.   The doctor called us in a few days later and said his blood work showed something-- antibodies that he shouldn’t have, unusual clotting characteristics, gene differences and extra chromosomes that had never been documented or discovered.   Sky got sick next and they tested his blood as well, to see if it was genetic.”   She dropped her hand.   “I told the doctor the blood work was wrong, lab error, but agreed we would take him to a specialist for further testing.”   She looked into Ellie’s hazel eyes with her own bright green ones.   “Our time was up.   I had to bring him back under or risk being discovered.”
     
                The next photo was taken in the front room she and Gibbs walked into when she first arrived.   She recognized the wooden bench they were all sitting on under the “Home is Where the Heart Is” plaque above them.   Now it was just Gibbs’ mother and two preteen boys.   A black haired, blue-eyed face looked out at her cheerfully, the other green-eyed child scowled at the camera.  
     
                “That was after the accident.   With my husband killed, Sky was forced to return as well.”   Her fist closed and she waved it in the air.   “We were so close! Sky was our hope!   His blood passed through all the tests completely normal.   He could be raised above ground, go to college, on to medical school, and then he would come back and help the rest of us.”   Her head drooped.   “And then the mine accident happened, and it was over for all of us.   There were a few wives left and some children, but without husbands, everyone returned.”
     
                “What happened after that?”   The hurt in Sky’s eyes when he’d mentioned his father was fresh in her mind.   It was the same hurt she could see in a very angry green-eyed child.   Her chest tightened.  
     
                Flora shrugged her hunched shoulders.   “We are here.   We will stay here in this fallen, broken city, and crumble into dust and die just as it does.   At one point our city had electricity and running water and a few modern conveniences.”
     
    Maybe “stole” was a better word.   “Almost everything the goblins have is taken from above ground,” Flora told her.  
     
    “When I was a child, the city was almost self-sufficient, but