Darklandia (3 page)

As I walked past the silver door of the darkroom in our apartment building, I could just barely glimpse the outline of a star etched into the surface from the acid used to strip the paint. My mother sent a message to the Department of Community requesting to have the door replaced to “erase the dark reminder imprinted on its surface.” The request was denied within hours. Her subsequent request to the Department of Felicity never elicited a response.

I climbed four flights of stairs to the third floor and, by the time I reached apartment 307, I had made my decision. No matter how thirsty or hungry I became tonight, I would not drink my water ration.

I held my sec-band inside the security scanner to the right of the doorframe. The titanium band flashed with green light and the door to apartment 307 slid open. I stepped inside and found my mother seated in my father’s old armchair with a basket of yarn at her feet and a half-finished baby-blue scarf curled in her lap.

“Good evening, Sera,” my mother said, without looking up from her busy fingers.

“Good evening, Mother,” I replied, as I unzipped the front of my gray tunic, my school uniform, and hung it on the coatrack.

The thin, sleeveless dress beneath the tunic clung to my back from the August heat. My morning ration had worn off and my sense of smell had returned. The stink of sweat and vitamins steamed off my skin and dress, neither of which had been washed in more than two weeks.

“Our wash request was approved this morning,” my mother said, as I passed her on my way to our bedroom. “Sweet felicity.”

The tickle in my throat returned as I thought,
“It’s my stench that reminded her of this.”
I shook my head trying to ward off my defiant thoughts as I entered the bedroom. Of course, she couldn’t smell me. I was being paranoid.

My mother and I shared a twin bed. I used to sleep with Grandmother until my father was purified. Mother thought it would be better for me to sleep with her after that. She didn’t want Grandmother’s diseased thoughts to saturate me while I slept.

That’s how it happened. If you spent too much time with a darkling, after a while their presence cast a shadow over your every thought. It happened to me four years ago when I was thirteen, after my body began to change. My ration dosage was adjusted, just like Darla’s was when she turned thirteen three months before I did, but the new dosage wasn’t strong enough. I began to see everything differently. The rations tasted like salty blood, which I could only stomach for a few seconds before I vomited them. Every time I vomited, the gloom became more solid; disorienting and smothering like a thick autumn fog. I considered rapturing myself or turning myself in to the Department of Felicity to be purified. Anything to make the blackness go away.

My body fell softly onto the bed and I sighed at the coolness of the blanket against my skin. It was nearly eight o’clock but the sun hadn’t gone down. I desperately wanted a sip of water after my four-mile trek down Broadway, but I had to resist the urge. Maybe if I took a nap the thirst would go away.

I closed my eyes and hoped my mother didn’t come in to collect the dirty laundry. The dim-red sunlight shining through the window penetrated the thin skin of my eyelids and swirled in my vision, a dance of light and shadow. The security camera propped in the ceiling corner above the window was pointed directly at me.

I drew in a long, stuttered breath, a ragged breath, like Grandmother’s as she sucked against the fabric of the sack over her head. My heartbeat sped up as my thoughts grew bleaker. Just ten hours had passed since my morning ration and I was already becoming a darkling.

My mother entered the room quietly. I opened my eyes to find her smiling face hovering above mine.

“Are you sleeping?” she asked.

Her smile made me uncomfortable. I wanted to say,
“Obviously, Mother, I am not sleeping,”
but that would be bad. I had never spoken to my mother like that before and it would be a surefire way to make my sec-band flash red.

“It’s time for your ration,” she said then she left the room.

The tickle in my throat had ripened into a painful lump. My joints ached, my body listless and heavy with dehydration as I heaved myself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. My eyes itched as the room darkened around me. The ration would make all these symptoms go away.

It’s in the water rations.

The lump in my throat doubled. I could hardly breathe as I imagined my grandmother’s crinkled smile and the thousands of people who would gather to celebrate her rapture at the Felicity Festival on Saturday. Then three words materialized in my mind. Three words I had never heard spoken aloud. Three words that curled inside my chest, like ribbons strangling my heart.

I miss you.

The coughing began slowly at first as I attempted to clear the painful swelling in my throat, but it quickly progressed into a fit so violent within seconds my face became hot and damp with real tears. Tiny lights sparked in my vision as the force of each cough exploded inside me.

My mother stepped calmly into the bedroom and stared at me from the doorway. It was the same look she cast my father the day before he was detained—the day he unpinned the blue star from the lapel of his gray overcoat and tossed it down the garbage chute.

I fell to my knees in front of the full-length mirror and willed myself not to look at my reflection. I didn’t want to see the change. I didn’t want to see my face transformed with this hideous sickness, this gruesome pain turning my insides into a burning chasm. Is this the same feeling that made the commissioner force the knife into the mayor’s chest?

“I need water,” I whispered, even though my lifesaver dangled round my neck like a tantalizing oasis in this deserted apartment, even though I knew there was no water. Tomorrow was washday. No water until tomorrow, and even then it would only be the few gulps I could sneak while showering, well out of the view of the cameras.

“Get up,” my mother commanded. The way she said it made me want to cry, really cry. I looked up and she was still smiling as she glanced at the angels in the sky, the security camera. “Time to drink your ration, Sera.”

I finally glanced at my reflection and clapped my hand over my mouth. My face was puffy and damp, my skin and eyes a violent red. Wisps of light-brown hair fell from the braid that hugged the back of my head and dangled down my back as limp and listless as my body. I pushed myself off the floor, avoiding the urge to glance at the camera, expecting my sec-band to flash red at any moment, and followed my mother into the kitchen.

Kitchens were once the most used room in a typical American home, but they were hardly used anymore in Atraxia. Our cupboards were stocked with boxes of unused toiletries. My father hoarded bars of soap, toothpaste, and laundry soap for years, certain that one day the Department of Community would cut off our supply of goods without warning.

I stepped toward the steel ration dispenser protruding from the wall under a cabinet full of bottles of bleach. I held my glass under the tap and placed my right thumb over the blinking blue sensor on the neck of the dispenser. It took three seconds for the sensor to recognize my thumbprint and dispense the ration, which had been prescribed just for me, into my cup. It sputtered out, a viscous, greenish-blue fluid plopping into my cup and filling it halfway.

Grandmother once told me the darklings had a saying about a glass being half-full or half-empty. They used it to motivate each other to think positive thoughts, to be cheerful in the face of adversity. What would my grandmother think of this glass? Half full or half-empty?

My hand trembled as I raised the ration to my lips. Though my mother stood behind me, I could feel her watching. I could feel the angels watching.
Smile for the Angels.

I forced a quick smile before I gulped my water ration. The thick liquid soothed the aching folds of my throat, but the salty, metallic flavor immediately reminded me of blood. I clamped my lips together tightly and covered my mouth to keep from spitting it out.

“Go to bed,” my mother said, taking the glass from my hand and using a grimy rag to wipe the inner surface. Everything in this apartment was grimy the day before washday.

I trudged toward our bedroom then stopped in the middle of the living room. “May I sleep in Grandmother’s bed… now that she’s gone?”

My mother stared at me from the kitchen, her hand still working circles inside the glass as if the filthy rag could wash away three weeks of ration residue.

“You may,” Mother replied, and I tried not to smile too wide. I tried not to smile like a darkling.

I slipped into my grandmother’s bedroom and closed the door. Leaning against the doorframe in the darkness I could hear my mother setting the glass on the counter, flipping the light switch in the kitchen, and closing our—her—bedroom door.

The rations worked their magic in my blood. The heaviness lifted. My throat and joints no longer ached. Just as I had transformed into something monstrous in front of my mother’s mirror, now I was changing into something else. The sharp edges rounded, the flaws buffed out, the streaks wiped clean. I was being purified.

I burst out of my grandmother’s bedroom and raced to the lavatory, closing the door softly behind me, and vomited my ration into the steel sink.

Sweet felicity, it felt good.

3

My grandmother’s stiff bed sheets scratched my skin and made me itch all night. The pain in my throat had returned as soon as I vomited my ration and it only got worse when joined by a massive pounding inside my skull and roaring hunger pangs in my belly. Is this what darklings felt like when the drought and famine were at their peak?

I never fell asleep. Every time I began to drift off, a sound would startle me: the crumpling of the sheets, the whoosh of my feet sliding across the mattress, my heartbeat. It all sounded so vulgar. I tried not to worry about what my face would look like in the morning after an entire night of lost sleep, but my thoughts were out of control. On multiple occasions, I considered sneaking out of bed to drink my ration, but it would look too suspicious: accessing my rations after curfew on a school night. Besides, I wanted to know what it felt like—what my grandmother had experienced— in her final days, in her final seconds.

I lied in grandmother’s bed surrounded by her powdery scent, trying to block the image of the sack over her head and the blue ribbon tied around her neck. I didn’t know what time it was. Grandmother had no need for a clock in her bedroom. When a person reached 114 years old, time became as obsolete as drinking rations.

I waited for the sun to rise before I slid out of bed and slipped into my gray tunic. I often left the apartment early on schooldays to pick Darla up on the way to school. My mother wouldn’t suspect anything. I hoped.

My head felt hot and stuffy, as if my brain were wrapped in a layer of fuzzy wool. After just a few blocks of walking, my feet began to ache and perspire inside my boots. Sweat sprouted on my chest and the back of my neck, my steaminess no doubt leaving a heady musk trailing behind me. Today was washday. At least I’d be able to wash away this grime when I returned home from school in a few hours.

If
I returned home.

I glanced at my sec-band, expecting it to flash red at any moment. How long would it take the Felicity department to realize I hadn’t consumed my ration this morning? How long before the angels approached me in their handsome blue uniforms and escorted me to a leisure home?

The thought of spending the rest of my days in a leisure home didn’t frighten me as much as the purification procedure. No one, except the Department of Felicity, knew what the purification entailed. Some thought it was a surgical procedure, some thought the purified spent the rest of their lives inside Darklandia, and others, very few, believed the purification was just another name for a rapture.

I climbed the steps of Darla’s brownstone, trying not to look at the Guardian Angel standing on the corner across the street, and pressed the door buzzer. A moment later, a deep voice crackled through the speaker. “Come in, Sera,” Darla’s father said. The metal security door buzzed and I glanced once more over my shoulder at the angel before I entered the brownstone.

The climb up the five flights of stairs left me wheezy. My thighs burned and shoulders drooped from lack of energy. I needed some nourishment or I would pass out soon.

I reached the sixth floor and found the doorway to apartment 613 open and waiting to receive me. I entered Darla’s living room and found her brother asleep on the sofa. Darla’s apartment only had one bedroom. Though her parents had petitioned the Department of Community for a larger apartment, their request still showed a status of “In Process” in the Community Petition server. Our request had been “In Process” for eight years, but that didn’t matter anymore with Grandmother gone.

Darla slept on a cot in the living room of their cramped apartment and her brother slept on the sofa while their parents enjoyed the privacy of the bedroom and the only twin bed. Darla liked to speculate about what her parents did in bed while they were alone. Her guesses always made me uneasy, but today I found myself visualizing them in that tiny bed, their bodies pressed against each other in the darkness.

Darla entered the room, her ginger ponytail swinging behind her as she bounced toward me with the same smile she had worn last Friday and every day before that since the day I met her nine years ago. I was beginning to despise that smile.

“Sera, you….” she said, tilting her head as she examined my face.

I hadn’t taken the time to look at myself in the mirror before I left the house and now a sudden panic electrified my bones as I wondered what I must look like. I couldn’t tell Darla I hadn’t slept. Insomnia happened to darklings, not us. I couldn’t tell her I was hungry. I tried to swallow my nerves as I contemplated how to respond, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I had no saliva.