Dystopian Setting
Original Work
“Price of Silence”
I walk home slowly, breathing in the cold air. It used to smell of smog and fast food burgers. During Christmases of the past, there was a pleasant aroma of pine trees, apple cider, and roasted chicken. Now, the scent is of newly-poured asphalt, wood smoke, lime, and just a hint of rotting flesh.
There are still rebel attempts, efforts to fire up a revolution to take back the country. They usually end with bullets and blood-stained concrete. They've stopped immediately cleaning up the bodies, choosing instead to anoint them with powdered lime and shroud them in an insignia-printed sheet. Sometimes, cards are accompanying the display, often quoting scripture. The most disturbing tableau I've seen was an entire row of female bodies, the shroud folded back to display their heads and breasts. They had tried to protest the Ordained Marriage Law, a new edict that established the Appointed Marriage Bureau, where fertile women were required to register for arranged marriages. The card had read:
Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
- 1 Corinthians 14:34-35
It was a warning. Everything is always a warning. Every single law change since 2020 was a warning, but we were all convinced that someone else would fight for us.
I walk through the market square, now called God's Promenade. I just call it the Market in my head. I hate the pretentious new names they gave these places. The old hardware store is now called The Onyx Stone and the supermarket is now Eden's Bounty. A clothing store for the fertile women, Fruitful Looms, sells all of the vibrant colors I am not allowed to wear. I can't even enter the store. I have to change out of my work clothes before I leave the building, lest I forget how low on the totem pole I am.
I wear dark gray, like all barren women. A demure-length skirt dusts my drab winter boots. They are zip-ups, not laces, for obvious reasons. I have a crocheted poncho which drapes over a thick woolen turtleneck. My hair is tucked into a matching crocheted cowl. I wrap a short knitted scarf around my lower face, the smell of damp wool masking the bitter lime and decay.
They've cleaned up the recent bodies - leaving them too long results in odors the lime can't even begin to overcome. Yesterday, the body of a teenage boy was slumped against a brick wall, head lolling onto his shoulder. The shroud wouldn't stay over his head, so the bullet wound showed, dried blood and all. I hate to say it, but you do get used to the death when it's so blatantly shown for shock value. We had to view each body as a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to usurp authority. I have nightmares where I am awake yet bleeding out on the concrete, my split-open torso filled with writhing maggots.
There are no homeless people, no vagabonds jingling Styrofoam coffee cups of coins, no street musicians busking for meal money. Everyone had a place within American Republic society! Though for most people, that place is in a mass grave, trash fire, or solemn patch of blood-soaked ground where they were slaughtered. There's no laughter, no children playing outside in the snow. That's only allowed within their 10-foot-tall school fences, topped with barbed wire. The schools are nowhere near here, near the dead bodies, businesses, and processing centers. Those are located in the elite compounds along with their affluent fathers and broodmare mothers. To call them parents, like equals, was laughable.
I had seen many kids pass through the hospital, visiting their Senator fathers. I have also seen the mothers, looking so tired yet still having the energy to give me smug once-overs. Oh, yes, dutiful mother. I am so ashamed of my infertile ways. Oh, I wish to be reduced to my reproductive organs and dealing with five brats, house chores, and being submissive to a man who only sees you as a walking vagina.
It's mean to think such things. They arguably have the worst lot. Still, my righteous fury is the only vice I can have.