Dystopia

SHORT STORY: DYSTOPIA

“Are you still alive?” the guard asked, smiling.

“Yes, sir.” he said. “But I’m in a lot of pain.”

“Good,” the guard said, laughing. He thumped his boot right into the man’s chest. He choked out blood and it spread over his torn clothes, a scarlet color spreading along the pale surroundings. The man tried to stand up again, but the boot simply came back onto his chest and pinned him down to the hard, concrete ground.

“You had eight kernels of corn in your pocket.” the guard snarled, all signs of the previous fake smile gone from his face. “Eight, young man- eight.” The guard laughed out loud at the thought of such an offense.  “Selfish wretch. Scum of the nation. Counterrevolutionary!” He laughed again. “You know very well that you are not to hoard food for yourself, not here. Everything is to be shared equally.”

There is nothing to be shared, the man thought, but he still nodded, almost too exhausted to do anything. Some blood was still dripping out slowly from his lips but he tried to close his mouth and managed to keep most of the red liquid inside. It build up inside and in the end he had to spit it all out, a mass of red in stark contrast to the grey concrete.

The guard knocked at the man’s head once more in the nose, sending him rolling in agony. It was nearly too much, almost too much for him to bear, despite all the times this has been done to him. Almost like a miracle, however, the guard stood back and nothing more came. “I’ll let you go.” the guard said, smiling again. “You’ll live for today. That is, if you survive. You work hard enough; I don’t want to rip your short life from you yet, even if already it is worth nothing to me.” He laughed again and it was not a pleasant sound. “Go. Go! Get out of my sight. Back to your work!”

Although the man’s body ached in pain and he could hardly breath, he staggered up to his feet, bowed deeply to the guard and limped out of the room, back into the freezing cold air outside. More blood dripped out of his nose, leaving a trail of crimson droplets on the pure snow.

The young man sighed, hard. He was barely seventeen, but already he had already been through worse punishments than this one on almost a weekly basis. He was starving, freezing and always in pain, but still he worked; not meeting work quotas would mean the infliction of even harsher punishments on him by the guards.

He understood life, that it was meant to be like this. There was a superior class, a noble group of guards, who kept the society under control. They were harsh and rather merciless, but that was the way it always had been. After all, society needed the rule of these guards, who, according to their own sayings, were under the command of a distant Great Leader, somewhere else. He did not know or care much about these things; he already had too much to worry about. He did yearn for escape, for a better life; but he had no knowledge of the outside world and the guards never told him anything, nor did the teachers in his early morning ideology classes.

Trudging through the snow to return back to the coal mine that he worked in every day, the young man saw a group of people streaming the other direction. He was exhausted, but he did not want to be late and perhaps get beaten for it, so he tried to run as best as he could, finally joining in the line. It was a line made up of many people, from young men and women like himself to small children to hunchbacked ancients around forty years old.

“What’s going on?” he asked one of the children, a gaunt boy with an oversized head.

“Execution.” was the reply. “We all have to watch.”

He groaned silently. These happened every once in a while and he was sick of it.

Not again.