Looking Through Barbed Wire

The barbed wire feels cold to my touch. I prick my finger and draw some blood intentionally just to remind myself where I am. It’s funny that they still use this type of containment in year 2041. You’d think they could come up with something more technologically advanced.
The top three rungs are electrified. That old gal, Hattie, from camp #23 found that out for us last week. I guess the spirit of escape is alive and well in some of us.
The East sky is busy today from my view. The shuttles have been cutting the cloudless sky all morning. That’s what we used to call them back in my day…shuttles. Now they use the term “transport”. My bunkmate, Sara and I were reminiscing how the transports used to be a special event when we were young girls. We made gleeful trips to the coast with our parents to watch them blast off up into space after a tension-filled countdown. We would stand there with our necks strained back and oooh and ahhh at the sight.
I guess they had this plan in the works even then. The hyped launches were probably just for show and appeasement. Were they going off to manipulate the atmosphere of that purplish planet during those missions? Readying the air for the mine workers?
I vaguely remember a couple missions ending in tragedy…..shuttles blowing to pieces before the nation’s eyes. There’s been gossip that there had been a couple of sympathizers on board those missions but I don’t believe it. I think they were purely accidental.
That word sounds foreign in my brain….nation. I haven’t spoken that word above a whisper in a long time. We must refer to the “zones” when speaking to each other. I believe I’m in Zone 3…..used to be a state in the nation called Virginia.
They separated us by age and health last Spring. My husband, Joseph, went to the camp in Zone 4, formerly known as Kentucky. My son, Lonnie, went to the conditioning camp to be acclimated to the ways and means of the new planet’s mining procedures. He never got around to finishing college and I think that circumstance is what sent him to the mining camp.
I can’t think of him now.
As I stare at all the transporters shooting into the heavens, my mind flashes upon the face of our last president. She had kind, soft eyes. I seem to recall her daddy was a reporter murdered in Pakistan before she was born. He had eyes just like that too. In my heart, I know she had no part of this.
Perhaps she is in a camp too.
I’ve pretty much accepted my fate here. Our age group will never get on those transports – no matter what the Zone Chancellor tells us. He makes his grand speeches in the round before us after we’re given our daily “vaccine”. It tastes like the grape Kool-Aid I drank as a child. It’s funny how the Chancellor’s speeches are both so vibrant and disconnected after drinking that stuff. God only knows what it is. I’ve got some theories about it but I will not speak them.
I pricked myself again with the rusty barb before heading off for breakfast. I’ll just keep my hands in my pockets today to avoid going back to the “quiet room”. They saw the blood on my sleeve last time. I won’t make the same mistake.
And what about the young ones? How will they miss what they never will know? Us old ones are not there to tell them how it used to be. I reckon that is part of the plan too. Sick genius.
Oh Lord, let me live long enough to see the resurrection of that precious paper framed so long ago during a hot summer in Philadelphia. I miss my family and country with a hurt that could cleave my soul. I feel like laying my will down upon the parched earth.