Death Row (dystopian)

We are the prisoners. Incarcerated for unknown crimes. This is the order of things. The prisoners and the free. In the past we must have been convicted and sentenced, but that memory has morphed into the uncertainty of myth, like our origin, like our salvation.

Will the free ever forgive us.

We are the nameless. The anonymous mass, jostling against one another in our fetid prison. It has been posited that our elders are the ones who committed the crimes, their sins now ours as we endure this punishment. But in this place, much is said on a dreary day, trying to make sense of things, what else is there to do.

Day in, day out, the routine remains the same. Waking up. Eating. Shoving. Sleeping. Nowhere to go, just back and forth and around. Sometimes we attack each other to ease the boredom. A fleeting distraction. The air in here is thick with the stench of stress and excrement.

There are those of us that lie down on the hard ground and never rise again: apathy, illness, depression, it makes no difference. We step over them, on them, jostling for room. Eventually the bodies are removed and more take their place.

Some prisoners disappear and then the rumours fly that they have escaped. Yet surely these are tales to ease the terror, we all know they have likely been executed. Didn’t our own eyes see the guards take them away.

Now and again a prisoner has a short flirtation with hope. Head high, they’ll parade around.

“Stay strong, stay strong. A pardon is sure to come. Have no fear!”

It’s not long before their bluster fades and falling back into the crowd they shut up.

In my section of the prison, we’ve got a real loud mouth. He’s been here for a while and thinks he knows what’s what. He’s always going on about us being prisoners of war, and how we must have been brutal warriors to incur such a punishment. Because surely, we all know that there are prisons with less harsh conditions.

Prison is prison, I think. Anyway, we’re too young. The only fighting we know about is the constant scrapping between us. The struggle for dominance. We bear the lacerations.

The new arrivals whimper in the night.

We are the orphans. Abandoned by our mothers, so the myth says. Loud-mouth insists this is a lie. Shaking his head, he charges through us. “We were stolen, we were stolen.”

One time, I got as far away from everyone as I could and closing my eyes, I tried to picture her. But the image of a warm and loving mother who birthed and fed me is as foreign a notion as that of a life other than this, and I could only conjure up blurs of grey. After that I attempted to ignore loud-mouth as much as possible.

Today, I did something unusual. Something I never would have dared to plan. An action driven by a primal impulse that I didn’t know I possessed.

Mealtime. The guards came as always moving their way up the passageway to deliver our food. The scent of sustenance wafting, overriding the foul air. As a guard entered our section, we crowded in on him, clamouring to be the first to eat. In this prison, mealtime serves a double purpose. To immerse oneself in taste and smell is a blessed need and distraction. We are always hungry.

“Back with you, back,” ordered the guard, prodding us to the side. Pushed up against the barrier, I happened to notice the guard had left the doorway ajar. Slipping behind him, I fled down the passageway, heart pounding, legs pumping, I almost leapt for the surge of joy it gave me. Hope stirred in my belly. For what, I don’t know. To find a way out? Or, at least, experience a deviation from this barrenness? But the way persisted with stubborn monotony, section after section of prisoners, terminating in a high wall. Shouts rang out. The thump of footfall intensified behind me. As I was prodded back to my section, I sensed the others turning away, their fragile hope pummeled into resignation

After the guards had gone, loud-mouth informed me that freedom fighters were plotting our liberation. I pushed him away. How could this be possible? The guards are big and strong.

We are the forgotten and unforgiven. I refuse to entertain the idea of pardon or rescue and now live only for the gusts. The gusts belong to the guards, swirling in whenever they arrive. Bringing a transitory newness that lingers on the guards as they move among us. Nameless olfactory messages that tease and fade. I close my eyes and try to understand what they want to tell me.

Lately, I’ve noticed some of the older prisoners getting jumpy when the guards arrive.

“Our time is coming; our time is coming.”

Rumours ripple up and down the corridor of the horrid method of execution. Gas burning eyes, noses, throats and lungs. Screaming and panic as the prisoners struggle to escape. I shake off this horror story as fabrication, but tremors run through my body for the rest of the day.

In the dark hours, fragmented sensations flicker through my mind. So much warmth, then panic and pain and scrambling, scrambling back towards the warmth. I can almost place the source of this warmth; it teases me with familiarity then slips from my reach.

Yesterday the guards took loud-mouth away.

“Execution,” grunts a passing prisoner. “He knew too much.”

I awake suddenly to sound and a wholly new smell in the air. Fear shoots through me. What is going on? It can’t be the usual guards they don’t smell like this. I nudge the prone bodies around me.

“Get up, get up. Something is happening.”

I turn towards the gust as dark figures emerge. I sense fear and excitement as they move towards us whispering and pointing. Light shines into my eyes.

A girl lifts the piglet enfolding him into the cloth of her jacket as the others around her do the same with more piglets.

“Liberation my friend,” she whispers. “The only crime you’ve committed was being born another species”

“Fuck, there are so many,” says another.

A sharp retort, “You know we can’t save them all. Take the lightest.”

Moving to the door, the girl hurries across the yard followed by the others. One by one they scramble through the hole in the fence and towards the waiting van. The rumble of the van is both welcoming and unnerving.

“Come on, come on, let’s go,” calls the driver.

The girl climbs into the van and nuzzles the piglet’s ear. “Can you ever forgive our kind?”