They would like to do something for the child. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs its belly protrudes it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The door is always locked and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-the child has no understanding of time or interval-sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there and the door is locked and nobody will come. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
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