Mary Mary Quite Contrary

Jasper

Mary bit at the shreds of torn and chapped skin around her cuticles. It has always been a bad habit of hers, but ever since she became part of this god forsaken system it had become so much worse. She did it as a constant reminder that she was still here. That this was still her. This pale, drawn, withered new body was still hers.

She knew that she needed the system to stay alive. She knew that her whole town did. But she knew that to be true because ever since she met with the officials the first time, she had been told that. She had never seen it with her own eyes. What she saw was a broken, corrupt way of living ensnared in a broken, unstable new world.

The people of her town had cast her off ever since she arrived here. They wouldn't talk to her. They would never give her enough food. They treated her as a necessary nucince, as that last scrap of humanity they held onto by refusing to openly let her die. So she stayed.

So she watched, and waited.

So she tried to understand her world.

In the aftermath of that first rainfall, her whole town panicked. They froze. Whole families were killed in one fell swoop. Children, parents, teachers, students. The rain didn't care. When Mary first set foot in the awful, damp, dank grey building that would come to mean so much more to her than just her prison or her home, the only plan the town had was to stay safe. To be together.

It confused her, the warm jumbling morass of haggard, broken faces all just existing together. It was a week from the first storm when she finally left her mausoleum, but there were still enough rations from grocery stores and the like to hold everyone comfortably. Her town had always been close knit, but this band of one hundred or so survivors seemed like a real family. And at first they treated her well too. They were just happy to see another person still alive. But that tenuous peace and tranquillity only lasted for about a week.

Families from other neighborhoods had heard of the way her town had managed to stay alive and well. New refugees started to flood in, dozens a day. On foot. On bike. Scattered. Scared. Her town couldn't handle that many. The building that had evolved to be their collective home base now never had any extra room. The once empty hallways now bustled with grim, hopeless people. The rations started to run low. Rooms started to overflow. And so the system was born.

No one knows exactly who created the system. It just sort of sprung forward fully formed. One morning there was a poisoned, overflowing, collapsing community. The next morning there was an order to things. A hierarchy. A system.

The people in charge were simply the ones who couldn't be overthrown. The ones that you knew if you tried to hurt them they would hurt you back. They regulated everything. The food rations. The people that flooded in. The people that left. The people that died. People no longer existed peacefully, but then again, Mary thought, had they ever? That one small interlude of peace was just a drop in a vast ocean of pain and death. Pain caused when the first drop of rain hit the soil. Things changed when the system set in, because suddenly you had to work for your stay. Either you proved yourself useful, or you were pushed out into the rain by those usefuller than you. Mary knew. She had seen it happen. One wrong word in the canteen, one sick day, and you were dead.