The Place by Flying Monkey
The following is an orphan’s memory chip as found in the hall of records.
I stare at the blank white ceiling, bored. It’s 6:00 and nothing has started. At 7:00, we get up and eat breakfast until 7:30, when we go to the cages. But for now, lying on my blankets is a solitary task. I wish that the blankets were just a little bit thicker. Then maybe I wouldn’t be able to feel the floor beneath me so much.
I didn’t used to have to sleep on blankets, I remember having a bed at one point. Last time I had a bed I was about five, I think.
I drift away into my memory, as if it’s happening again now.
I lie in bed, staring at the merry-go-round hanging from my ceiling. Why can’t I enlarge and ride it now? Mom says I have to wait until morning. I’m about to enlarge it anyway, when this huge noise erupts from outside.
A wave crashes against my window. But how can that be? The ocean is six house lengths away from our house. I know because I measured it with my virtu-tape. A huge rumble interrupts my thoughts, and I fall out of bed. Richard and Maggie, my fluffy friends, fall on my head.
I try to stand up, but I can’t; the house is shaking too much. I crawl out of my room into the hallway to see Mom and Dad on the ground too. I almost laugh. We look like dogs. But then the rumbling stops, and Mom runs over, picks me up, and runs out the door with Dad right behind us.
Just as we dash outside a huge wave towers over us and drags us almost one bed length closer to our house and the sea. Mom runs further away, carrying me. We almost get away, but then the next wave comes.
It rises up, up, up, into the air. The previous wave looked miniscule next to this greater form. The air smells of fish, and salt. Cries of horror mingle with the roaring water.
I close my eyes and hold my breath. I bend down into a ball and curl up as much as I can while still holding mom and dad’s hands.
The water slams against me, easily penetrating my thin sleepwear and chilling me quickly. The water pulls us unwillingly closer to our house. We are swept over sharp rocks, pebbles grating above us from the wave. We smash into the house and stay there. Waiting for the water to leave.
And it does. The water leaves. I open my eyes. What is happening? Mom and Dad uncurl from their positions and we all lean against the house, breathing. Everything seems so calm. And wet. And cold. Very cold.
“Ahhhhhhhh!”
“Oh my god!”
“What is that!?”
People all around are pointing behind us, screaming and yelling. I scramble up and run to the side of the house. I stare, transfixed. What is that? A mass of dirt, and sand, and, I guess it’s land, is smashing into our backyard. And it keeps going. The land hurtles towards us, coming closer every minute.
“Mom, Dad, something’s happening. I don’t know what. I think it’s bad!” I run, screaming away from my house. I stumble over my feet but keep going until I fall to the ground.
Mom and dad leap up, but it’s too late. The villainous, monstrous mass of land, and water, and darkness rolls over the horizon, rumbling over my house. Mom and Dad scream, they try to run, they fall, and then, they die.
The house crumbles under the force of the torrent. A mix of water, land, glass, wood, and bricks fall on top of my family. My whole family. Gone.
I start to cry then, my little eyes mimicking the ocean, with it’s stinging hug, wrapping around you and crushing you. Killing you quickly, easily.
My shoulders shake, my breath comes out in gasps. It hurts me. Deep inside me, I could feel something exploding. Something shattering, bursting, dying.
I suppose that’s why I’m here, at The Place, where all the children who have no parents go. Now, eight years later, I stare at the pale white ceiling, wishing I could fly up and melt into the ceiling, and be gone forever. But nothing happens. The pale white wall stares back down at me, daring me to cry.
I’ve never taken dares. I turn on my side and wait, wishing I could fall asleep. I don’t ever fall asleep though, I didn’t really expect to. The bell rings and reverberates through my brain like a cat, being repeatedly and cruelly thrown against the ground.
Everyone in my room jumps out of bed and runs to their port quickly. If we’re late, we disappear for a week. I don’t know what happens when you disappear, the kids who have wouldn’t talk about it. Nobody’s ever been late twice.
So I don’t ever dawdle while getting into my port. I close my eyes as I’m spun around briskly, and step out of the faux-stone cubicle, now merged into my everyday outfit.
We all troop downstairs to the dining hall, and sit at the table designated, GIRLS AGES 12-14.
The Styrofoam cups and bowls rise out of the table and zoom towards us. I gulp down my broth, drink my water, and get up to go to the cages. Sometimes we get something besides broth to eat. Once we even got fake strawberries. I heard they used to have real ones, but they died out centuries ago. But the food shortages limit those occasions to once every two months.
Well, actually, there isn’t a huge food shortage. The mills provide enough, but almost all the food goes to the army, as they’ll run out of energy without enough food, meaning we lose the war.
It’s been like this ever since that day mom and dad died. I’ve since figured out what happened. The land wasn’t attacking us; all the continents formed together and created one super-continent. I happened to live right at the edge of one of the connecting points.
Now all the countries are fighting for control. I think about eight countries have been wiped out, and fourteen have joined forces, creating seven countries.
I reach the cages and reluctantly climb into one, closing the door behind me. I wouldn’t, but the guards wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me. I sit down and wait for my assignment.
“Cage number 14,” that’s me, “you will not leave your cage until you have formed 21 bullet-proof helmets. You are welcome for your invitation. Enjoy yourself.” I can hear two women giggling as the intercom shuts off.
Invitation? Enjoy myself? I would roll my eyes, but the guards might take me away for a week, like the people who sleep in late. I begin to work. And work. And work.
Finally I fall onto my blankets as my informer tells me it’s 12:32 p.m., then shuts off as I fall asleep.
A vague ringing penetrates my blanket of sleep. I should get up. I will, just a moment though. I’m tired. I fall back asleep.
I wake to a guard, heaving me up and dumping me into a cart. Inside my head I ask my informer the time. It says it’s 8:05.
The air reeks of rotten eggs and manure, and the walls shudder with every gust of wind. Lots of other children, probably here for being rude, or not finishing their assignment, or, like me, sleeping in. I find it weird, boys and girls in the same room. And all ages too. There’s a girl who looks about six next to me, and a boy who looks about sixteen on the other side!
The floor is packed dirt and the ceiling is made of tin with Styrofoam filling the holes.
“All personages will report to the hall for an important message. You have six minutes. “There is no giggling this time when the intercom shuts off.
All the children around me jump up and run to the door, so I follow. They line up quickly and march out the door.
We walk past randomly spaced people holding guns and into a large room with one chair in the front.
The other children and I arrange ourselves into very straight rows and stand, putting all our weight onto our left legs. We stand there for about a minute, and then the bell rings.
“If you are outside the hall in ten seconds you will be shot. 10…
9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… I hope you’re all in the hall.”
A single shot rings through the silent room. Everyone looks around uneasily, then quickly looks forward as an old man walks in.
His feet patter unevenly as he walks shakily to the chair at the front of the room. His voice warbles like his footsteps.
“There is a time… when people need help. Everyone needs… help. Heroes need help. I… our country… needs help. America stands for a happy life, a united community. America should win… this war. But we are running out of help. So we need you to help us. We… want… you to join… us. We need 20 children to come fight with us. Any… volunteers?”
Two boys and two girls both walk forward to stand behind the old man, who smiles briefly at them.
“Only four?” The old man’s face hardens. “ I… still need 16… more of you. If there… are not enough volunteers I will choose you myself.”
I sink down very far, hoping to become invisible as one more boy walks forward. Come on, only fifteen more need to walk up, I don’t want to be chosen. Only fifteen, like that old man’s going to find fifteen more volunteers.
The old man’s face twists harshly. “Fine, I will pick the rest of you. Any volunteers, come up at any time.”
Two girls scurry to the front holding hands.
“Good, but I still need thirteen more. How about the boy in the front wearing the formal wear, and that girl in the back on the left.”
The man goes on choosing children. I slouch down as far as I can go and pull my hair down very flat.
“And just one more,” nineteen slouching children stand in the front, a few of them are crying silently, “that girl… in the second to back row…” that’s my row, oh please, not me, “wearing the sleepwear, the slouching one.”
Me? Oh, please, not me. There has to be some other girl in my row who’s wearing her sleepwear.
No one walks forward.
“With… the black hair.” It is me!
“Me?” My voice comes out in a barely audible squeak.
“Yes.”
I walk forward biting back tears, and join the ranks of the other children, waiting to kill.
I do not cry. I do not slouch. I straighten up and walk slowly to the front of the room. I will make them wait. They will wait and wait. I will be so slow that they’ll forget about me and choose someone else. I’ll be so slow that I will die here and vanish. Transforming into a puff of wind. A quick blast of air. And I’ll be gone before I can learn about this world I’m in. I will have disappeared. I will be gone.
But I find myself at the front of the room, and I don’t turn into the wind. I stay me. This pitiful little girl in her sleepwear, about to cry.
The old man gathers up his coat from the side of the room and motions for us to follow him. He has a coat, a real coat. He doesn’t just use the same blankets he uses for a bed. It’s strange, that at a time like this I would be paying attention to whether or not someone had a coat, but I’m sure everyone noticed. I’ve never seen a real coat before. And I might never again. I could die tomorrow. I could be shot, maybe even by another girl my age, who could have been my friend tomorrow.
I make my face go all stiff to keep from crying. I square my jaws, and make my cheeks go hard. Then my eyes glaze over and stare so hard they hurt. Now I know I wouldn’t cry.
The cart bumps across the uneven air, jangling us around with every snag in the air. Juleya, who is sitting beside me, says that hundreds of years ago there were no snags in the air. But all our new weapons and technology are ruining the air, so now there are snags. I’m not sure whether to believe her; she’s said some other things I know aren’t true. Like that even before they had no snags in the air people rode in these carts on the ground, with something called horses pulling us. When I asked her how she knew all this she said she only came to The Place two years ago and used to read about history.
I’m not sure whether to believe that either. No one has any books anymore, but maybe it’s different outside The Place. I try to listen to Juleya, who keeps talking. It will keep my mind off having to, to go, I shouldn’t think about that. But I can’t not think about it. I have to go fight in a war that I don’t even care about. It makes no difference to me who rules the land. It will still be the same person in charge of The Place. My whole life is about to change. And all because of one weak old man. I can’t bear it.
“And some of the carts after they had stopped using horses had four wheels, which were little circles that spun, on them, and they would go on the ground.” I can tell Juleya’s talking for the same reason I’m listening, to keep from thinking.
But I guess talking doesn’t work as well as listening. I hear a sob beside me as Juleya breaks down and starts crying. I try to comfort her. I sort of give her a one-armed hug. But I’m not very good at comforting people. I don’t know how.
“Nothing ever goes right for any of us. And now they want us to make something go right for them and one more thing go wrong for us.”
I’m shocked. I would never be able to be as brave as she had just been. Nobody ever says something bad about someone in charge. We all think it, but nobody says anything. Maybe that’s why Juleya’s here.
Juleya continues to cry into my shoulder as the cart rocks side to side in the air. It’s almost like we’re babies, and our mother is rocking us continuously side to side.
But I feel like my mother has dropped me. And left without ever noticing my absence. Juleya’s crying mixes with the other children’s sobs, and they mingle in the air and leave a trail of grief behind the cart.
It feels like years have passed when we finally step out of the cart onto the packed dirt outside a bland gray building. I’ve never seen such a huge place. The Place was big, with six floors all stacked on top of each other, but this one is bigger. I count twenty rows of windows, then give up. That’s the farthest I can count. The old man waves us forward into the building and follows behind. He doesn’t have any guards, but he doesn’t need any. There’s nowhere for us to run, and he has a missile clipped onto his belt.
We walk through the tall door into an open room with a man sitting on a chair at the side of the room. The old man walks over to him and says something, then points towards us. The man nods, then waves pointedly at the wall, which spews some paper into his hand. He then hands the papers to the old man and nods respectfully. The man then walks over to us and hands us each a paper.
“You will each fill out the form I gave you and hand it to Yeysa, the man on the other side of the room. Hurry up.”
I pull a pen out of the paper and look fearfully at the paper. The letters jumble in my brain and fail to even fully register, let alone form words. I’ve never learned to read, but I don’t know anyone else who can. I look around the room panicking, a few of the kids seem to be able to read and are helping each other, but no one around me. I look over at Juleya, panic rising. She takes one look at me and scoots over next to me.
“That line there, that says name. You should write your name there.”
I bite my lip and set my pen to the paper, laboriously forming letters. I can write my name, along with the words mom and dad, but nothing else. Finally my name rests upon the paper proudly. Messy, but still there.
“And right there, that says age.” Juleya points to a space on the paper.
That’s easy. In no time I form 13 on the paper. There are numbers on some of the walls of The Place, so I can write those.
“And that word says description. So you would write, like your eye color, and hair color, and anything else distinct about your appearance.
I stare blankly at the paper. I can’t spell anything but my name. Juleya seems to sense my uneasiness and takes the pen from my hand.
She says she wrote that I had brown eyes and black shoulder length hair. She has very neat handwriting. Well, anyone’s handwriting would look neat next to mine.
Juleya and I get up and give our papers to the old man, then sit back down.
After a couple of minutes the old man leads us down a hallway and into a separate room. Another woman comes in and directs us into four different groups. As I had hoped, Juleya and I were put in the same group. We were directed into another room, and, to my surprise, given guns. Juleya and I stare at each other, completely taken aback.
“Each of these guns are fitted with a destructive device. If any of you use them on anyone you shouldn’t be using them on, you will be destroyed.” The woman’s voice is cold and hard as the gun she is holding.
“Normally, you would be given a short training period, but we don’t have the time for that now. You’ll be sent to the fighting zone tomorrow at 9:45.”
Tomorrow! I don’t even know how to shoot. I expected it to be hard, but no training at all. I don’t know how I’ll survive. Literally. Juleya and the other kids in our group walk over to the blankets at the side of the room and each sit down on one. I follow numbly, hoping for 9:45 never to come.
The bell clatters around in my head ferociously, stinging my ears and head. I get up and realize that there are no ports. The other kids seem to have noticed too, they’re all standing around as though they don’t quite know what to do. Finally one girl says that we should probably just head down for breakfast. How any of them know where to go for breakfast I don’t know, but somehow we all find our way into a large hall with one long table in the middle.
I sit down lightly on a stool and wait for the bowl and cup to come out of the table. But they don’t. Instead, a plate twice the size of my head and cup one and a half sizes the height of my hand materialize before me. The plate has a piece of bread with some red blobby stuff on it. I don’t stop to wonder what the red stuff is; I just take a bite of the bread. I haven’t had bread for two years. As soon as I finish my bread an apple appears on my plate. An apple! I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never had one. So this is why we’ve been having food shortages at The Place. The army gets all the food.
Too soon we are being hurried out the hall and into a new cart. A woman hands us each a gun and a water bottle. This ugly, heavy metal blob weighs me down every time I move. The water bottle clangs against my leg as I climb into the cart slowly. Juleya is last to board the cart. I can tell she is about to cry, but she doesn’t. At least, not yet.
The cart finally slows to a stop and we all clamber out, some of us rushing, some of us (like me) going as slowly as possible. Someone screams. Everyone else looks up, panicking. The whole place is new to us. Suddenly everyone around me is screaming, yelling, running. I look where everyone else seems to be staring and see a missile soaring towards us, filling the air with dread.
This memory chip ends here. Nothing else could be found of it.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
