My parents never gave up Graden’s location even though they knew their sentence would be more severe because of it. What they didn’t anticipate was that their punishment would include watching their other sons waste away in the re-education camp.
In a Red Camp there is no rice, no grain of any kind. Prisoners are re-educated, not in the benevolence of their dear Leader, but in ways to soothe to sleep their starving children. I hope my mother sang the old lullabies to Dashiell and Cole as they lay on the damp floor of their hut. I hope praying each night that their sons would not die gave my parents comfort, however fleeting.
Dash never did get his birthday cake. He’s buried in the same unmarked grave as his brother and several dozen other prisoners who died the same week they did.
I learned of their fate because Francesca sought out information on my family; she believed I deserved to know what happened to them. As far as she knew, my parents were still in a Red Camp somewhere. She blamed herself for all of this and was convinced the only reason my family fell victim to the Round-up was because of my mother’s connection to her. This may be true, but there is only one person responsible for what happened to them, and it certainly isn’t her.
What of Graden? A friend of the family was able to send word warning him not to return to the city. For several years, he traveled around the Land, working odd jobs to keep himself fed. One afternoon, soon after my twelfth birthday, I was told I had a visitor waiting for me in the school’s lobby. Graden had convinced the headmistress that he was a cousin from the country here to look for work.
Having never known what exactly happened to our family, it fell upon me to tell him our brothers were dead. A long silence followed. His jaw was set firmly and his expression never changed. Graden was no stranger to bad news. Finally, he spoke again. “Why weren’t you sent to the camp with them?”
This was a question I’d asked myself over and over again, but all I could do was shake my head. Francesca believed I was separated for leverage. The camp wardens could tell my parents any number of horrible things were happening to me back in the city; I’d contracted the pox; I’d been made a slave of your father’s favorite Loyalist; I’d become a Loyalist myself and openly shunned them—how would they know it wasn’t the truth? Her theory made such terrible sense, I couldn’t bear to say it out loud to Graden.
My brother never stays in one place for long but he does comes to see me whenever he can. Our grandparents have passed, our parents will never be returned to us, and our brothers’ deaths haunt us both—we are all the family we have left. We love each other, but our visits are never without tension.
Our past is an ocean my brother and I are constantly struggling to cross. We continuously pull each other under in our own frantic attempt to survive. The only way either of us can stay afloat is to keep each other at bay.
This is what we do: we pull; we push; we survive. We swim in opposite directions in search of dry land.
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Every Day in May (grand prize winner) ✔
Fantasía***WINNER of the "BREATHTAKING: A FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL WRITING COMPETITION!" "You are a secret kept from the world, but not from me." So begins the peculiar message found slipped under a bedroom door on the morning of May first. Theo...
