Taking the Throne: A Daniel Tiger Tragedy

Chapter II: Make-Believe

25 years is too long. 25 years is much too long to spend "vacation" at the Neighborhood of Dying Dreams. When I arrived, a naïve ten-year-old, no one cared that I was royalty. That I was "Prince Wednesday I, son of King Friday XIII and heir to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe". There were some interesting characters at Dying Dreams. Sure, there were a couple of people like me, failed monarchs, but there was a host of other people. There was a bulldog in the mafia, a pirating parrot, dozens of serial killers and even inter-neighborhood terrorists.

When I discovered this, I was quite shocked. A mannered son of royalty did not deserve to be seen as equal to the scum of the earth. I tried to protest with the guards. I got beaten. At first, before the labor, I thought, "Y'know, this place isn't so bad!" Then the real pain started.

In Dying Dreams, it's either freezing cold or scorching hot. Not transitionary period. In the first year alone I lost two toes from frostbite. The labor varied from extremely demanding to literal torture, 14 hours a day, every day save for our rest day and Discipline Day. While everything else is physical torture, Discipline Day was purely mental. The Warden, a mysterious figure clad in red, would read a long list. The day consisted of: 1) standing out in the hot July sun from sunrise to sunset, 2) absolutely no food and, worst of all, 3) the Warden reading out the personal data of every inmate that Dying Dreams has collected. This includes fears, insecurities, and basically everything negative in your psyche. Sure, it's fun when you're laughing at a man who refuses to eat green food, but the pure shame that you feel when it's your turn is indescribable.

Also indescribable is the torture. If you even let out a chuckle on any day other than Discipline Day, you might spend the rest of the day in The Pit. Now, there are a few Pits. There's the Animal Pit (filled with snakes, creepy crawlies, and whatnot), the Water Pit (literally a 30-foot-deep pit filled halfway with water), and, worst of all, the Death Pit. About 5 people, out of the usual 300 inmates, die per month. Now, they have a communal death hole, but they never fill it with dirt. As punishment, they send people down the hole to sit in it, with hundreds of bodies at varying levels of decomposition surrounding them, for up to a week, no food. While at Dying Dreams I heard stories of people, in a starving rage, start to eat the fresher bodies. There was even one guy who caught an illness from this cannibalism and ended up dying in the pit. Naturally the guards were happy that they didn't have to move the body, for it was already in the Death Pit.

I have mentioned several times now that you can go days without food, but the food we got was far from gourmet. They called it their Signature Nutritional Medley. It was more like a colorless mush that just barely got you all of the nutrients that you need. We normally got two meals a day (with these hard nutritional pellets served in the middle of the day while we are working), but sometimes, when we were behaving badly, everyone had only one meal (without pellets) per day. Those days were like hell. One year during my sentence this happened during the days leading up to Discipline Day. At that time I purposely misbehaved so that I could be sent to the Death Pit to eat the bodies. They tasted wickedly good to a child who had starved for a week.

Anyways, enough explaining. I soon learned all of this during my first year. There was one person, though, who understood me. Wilma. She came from a privileged family like me, had the same sentence as me, and was even the same age. Fate had aligned. She had luscious golden hair and stunning green eyes that always were sparkling, even if she hadn't eaten in a few days. Like all of us, her ribs were easily visible, even against her orange jumpsuit. Despite this, I thought that she was extremely beautiful. Needless to say, I had a crush on her.

She had tried to kill her father to get her inheritance, but was caught and sent to Dying Dreams four months before I arrived. We were buddies together, often getting sent to the Pit together because it was too boring alone. She was the only light, the only fleeting hope in this place that sought to crush it, that I had left. We made plans to go seek revenge on our families after we were released, even though it was decades in the future.