Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
I was already awake, couldn’t sleep with both dread and sadness filling me, so I heard as someone raced to my room. My mother burst in, rushing over to me in the bed, and telling me to come with her. But I’d turned frozen, unsure of what was happening, or how she had even gotten out of the basement. She grabbed my wrist and dragged me from the bed, whispering that we were leaving, that she was taking me away from the house. But we hadn’t even made it to the door before my father’s shadow moved into it. And behind him, his soldiers, and behind them, the people anyone in The New Order feared most, the only ones who wore a different color in our society. The attendants, in their dreary gray long jackets that befitted their jobs.
My mother’s fingers dug into my skin as the soldiers pulled her away from me. When I reached for her, crying harder than I ever had before or since, an attendant hit my hands with a stick so hard, I thought in that moment that they were surely broken. I screamed that I was sorry as she sobbed that she loved me. Years later and I still haven’t forgiven myself for those seconds I wasted being confused on the bed. I think I will always wonder if those seconds could have let us escape, or might have kept her from ending up here.
The sounds of creaky wheels make me look away from the dirty window. I find my mother being pushed in a wheelchair through the door to the visiting room. She can’t even stand anymore. I look her over quickly, assessing, checking for what’s changed since I last saw her. Before my mother was committed and people stopped even mentioning her name, I was always told I looked just like her. Everything from her height and hair to her smile and the way we spoke. The eyes, of course, set us apart before, but now, no one would say the same.
Her hair is stringy and greasy, and I already know she hasn’t been properly washed in days. Her skin is dry, with dark circles under her eyes, and clear exhaustion in her green orbs that search for me. But still they light up when she sees me coming over to the table the attendant pushes her towards. My throat clogs with emotions and the tears trying to rise, but I swallow them and give a weak smile as I reach her. She tries to smile back, but only the left side rises, letting me know she’s had some type of shock therapy done on her recently, but not recently enough that my father kept me from seeing her.
I have never even allowed myself to think it was guilt that prevented him from allowing me to see her at her worst, but rather that he wanted me to see her this way, the way she is right now, so I could know it gets so much worse. So, she could speak to me, and warn me from ending up like her. So, I can be reminded, each time I come to see her, that she will never leave this place, and that if I’m not very careful, I will join her.
“Hello, Mother,” I say while hugging her.
“My beautiful Selina,” she rasps out.
Her voice used to be so beautiful, telling me stories I now know she wasn’t supposed to, when she should have been reciting tenants to me. Singing me lullabies that are now forbidden. Defending me from a father who had no mercy then and has none now.
“I’m sorry it’s been so long since I last visited.”
“You know you never have to apologize to me.”
“You have half an hour,” the attendant tells us before walking away.
“How have you been, my darling?” she asks.
It never fails to amaze me how she worries about me when she’s in a place like this.
“I’m well. And you?”
She only hums but doesn’t answer. She never does. I’m almost afraid of what the answer would be if she should.
“How’s your reading been going?”
The only person who knows about my trips to my father’s library is my mother. Or … the only person I thought knew before my father informed me of how foolish I’d been to believe that.
“I’ve been reading about the skeletal structure.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. And you’ve been careful, right?”
I hesitate to answer, and worry overtakes her face. It’s the same worry I saw the night she tried to get me out of bed, as if she knew the horrors that would happen if I didn’t leave with her. She certainly knows what would happen if my father caught me in the basement. Exactly what has happened. I blink at a sudden realization, though. My mother escaped the basement to come to my bedroom, and I’ve never known how.