The Woodlands

I heard a couple of people in the crowd laugh but the rest seemed to have simultaneously stopped breathing. Behind me someone was moving through. Grant smiled down at me cruelly.

“Poor decision, child,” he said smoothly. Then he turned and walked away.

I barely had time to process my mistake when a policeman grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and pulled me upwards to face the crowd. He rattled me around like a bag of apples and I could feel my inside bruising.

“See here. Here is lesson for all of you of how NOT to behave in the presence of Superior Grant.”

I saw my father’s wobbling figure moving towards me like a mirage.

As my brain started to whip into a milkshake in my skull, it occurred to me that I shouldn’t have done what I’d just done. It also occurred to me in a dangerous revelation, that I wasn’t sorry at all.

Somehow my father managed to negotiate my release. Besides, the Guardian seemed anxious to catch up to Grant, who was moving on to the next group of children. He dragged me through the crowd and we crouched behind the stone wall of Ring One, listening to the faint, quivering voice of a child asking her question. “How do you weigh your wisdom against your strength, Superior Grant?” I had the odd thought—how could wisdom weigh anything?

My father clasped his strong dark hands around my face worriedly, turning it from side to side. “Are you all right?”

I nodded, fierce tears ru

He shook his head, but amusement twisted his face, “You want to know a secret?” I nodded and he leaned down to my ear. “I don’t like him very much either,” he whispered.

The crackling and whining that always preceded an a

“I am here to a

The crowd murmured but that was the extent of their opposition.

Then he said, “Have your elder children available for collection by tomorrow morning.”

The crowd hummed and then an angry voice splashed out and fell flat on the stones. “You can’t take our children!” Other voices began to rustle like the crackle of shifting leaves.

I took a step up onto the ledge of the wall to get a better look. I watched as a policeman moved slowly but deliberately towards the man that shouted, with a face like horror. He took his baton and clapped the side of the man’s head, hard, to show they could do whatever they wanted. As it cracked, an arc of blood sprayed onto the faces of people closest, like droplets of red rain. The crowd fell back from the man’s crumpled body in a wave. A woman screamed and threw herself down beside him. The policeman joined the others, twirling his baton around in his hand and wiping the blood off on his pants. Everything went quiet, like the guardian had swished all the air out of the circle. If there were birds, even they would have ceased to breathe.

I looked to my father for his reaction. His face was white, his whole body shaking with anger, his mouth open slightly like he wanted to speak. Don’t speak, I prayed.

He crouched down and shouted through the gaps between people’s legs, “President Grant is an insane dictator!” then stood up quietly and did a brilliant impression of a normal, frightened person. The policeman’s head snapped around and searched the crowd but no one was willing to point him out; they didn’t want to be punished.

He pulled me to him tightly and I clung on to his leg.

“Are they going to take me away?” I asked naively.

“No beautiful girl,” he whispered. “You are all we have.”

When we got home my parents fought like never before. I stayed in my room with my ear pressed to the wall. I couldn’t hear my mother at all but I caught my father’s response to everything she said.

“No.”

“Come on, it wasn’t that bad. She got away, didn’t she?”

“Yes, but she’s a child. She’ll learn to control herself.”

“Yes, exactly like me. I’m still here aren’t I? You’re being absurd. She needs her father.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

Silence.

The next morning at school, my class was half-empty and half-full of red-eyed, stain-cheeked children who had lost their brothers and sisters.

In my child brain, where an hour could seem like a week and a gap of months seemed to go by in an instant, it was like my father was swapped with Paulo almost immediately. Suddenly, my mother was remarried, my father had disappeared, and where there was once warmth and laughter, there was only hardness. Looking back, I’m sure that’s not quite how it happened but like I said, I was eight.

Now, at sixteen, I was amazed I had lasted as long as I had. And after the twentieth time of my mother asking me why I was like this—I started to wonder myself.

I think the answer was a combination of things. The first being that I severely lacked that healthy dose of fear most people seemed to have. Fear being healthy, because not fearing the Superiors was about as good for you as a mugful full of bleach with your morning toast. The other reason, which took me longer to work out, was that even though I hated my father for leaving, I still wanted to hold on to him somehow. His memory was slippery and I struggled to get my hands around it. But when I did something unexpected, something to raise the eyebrows and sometimes the hands of my teachers, my father’s face became clearer in my mind, the edges sharpened. I could see him smiling at me crookedly and pretending to be cross even though I knew he wasn’t. These memories would pull in and out of focus like flipping photos.

And ultimately, when almost everything I did was controlled by the Superiors, by my teachers and by Paulo, I took what little control I could for myself and held onto to it fiercely.

It was a slow dust of a day. The earth swirled in mini tornados, scratching up the eight meter walls and slipping back down again, because in this place there was nothing for it to cling to. It skittered across the grass, kissing the blades, and tearing around the perfectly manicured trees that sat in the front yard of every home. Here in the rings of Pau Brazil, nothing settled—nothing ever could.

I shrugged on my grey uniform. My mother was right about it being cheap and nasty. It was itchy and it seemed to beckon hot air and repel cool air. It clung to the wrong parts of me and billowed unflatteringly everywhere else. I didn’t really care. Everyone looked the same so it didn’t matter. I let the back of the shirt fall, wincing a little as the rough cloth brushed against my sliced-up skin. I couldn’t quite see it but I could feel it lightly with my fingertips, raised ribbons of split flesh. New scabs were already forming over the old scars. I never gave it a chance to heal. Soon there would be fresh cuts to add to the healing ones. I gathered up my assignment papers and shoved them in my bag, placing my mother’s treasured mascara into my pencil case. She would kill me if she knew I had it. It was given as payment about ten years ago and she only used it sparingly and on very special occasions. Well, this was a special occasion, I thought as I smiled to myself. My lips fell quickly as I remembered today was Friday. Friday was the worst day.