The Untouchables

The sky is a nasty gray, the grass has long dried and died. Only the dirt and muddy plains are left where my grandmother previously said was once grass.

Our limited world has no diversity everything is always the same, our expressions are the same, our clothes, our houses, our wants and needs, and our hearts, trapped in our own lives with no way to release our desperate wanting to go somewhere else, someplace new.

 Our homes are made out of old now chipping clay bricks which are crumbling all the same. My hands are beaten with the same dirt that covers most of this place, the place I have only to call home.

This is it all I could ever have and not want, this is the dirty outside world that my eyes wish they weren’t limited to.

My dress-the dress mother sewed me to wear for this year, the only dress that my dirty name owns hangs it’s self loosely around my thin frame, my dress which looks starved, which looks empty, which looks as if it has eaten too much dust is the dress I must wear until next year.

My overly parched lips are colorless, from my tire of licking them, my eyes are darken from all the unbearable fake sadness that has become reality, heavy from burden and deeper than an infinite feared lonely abyss. My eyes grace no light, which allows it’s self to accept black as it’s descript.

The smoked brown hair I was born with looks like I washed it in the earthly ground. My feet bear, heart empty, my smile brown.

I just fade off into the background just like everyone else does. My life and my being has nothing extra that sets me apart but the name given to me that allows me to remember I’m someone- someone important, myself.

“Ribbon, please come and help me pick these.” My mother calls out while I’m in deep thought.

Mother is a farmer for ‘Them’ and although this place is only for the ‘Untouchables’ they still need our crops to survive. ‘They’ are what my people around here call the people that live above us.

At a time the geography of our land where we live now was once just a long steep hill leading up to beautiful flat grass plains according to my grandmother, she told me one day ‘They’ sent the poorer people down the hill and destroyed the incline to the plains so no one could come there anymore and because it stretched miles long and wide you would have to climb nearly a mountain high it reach the barricaded top so of course only they could come and go as they please.

We are the “Untouchables” outcasts who live harsh lives. We are given the jobs that are considered impure such as cleaning the streets or digging graves and we have to live apart of the other members of our society. We are strictly ruled and controlled for such un-helpable reasons like being poor…

My mother and I pick the fruits and vegetables that we all wish we could afford to eat, although we plant it and undergo the labor that farming requires we only get a small cut out of our goods.

Mother is silent, which is something that doesn’t happen much unless she’s thinking about something or upset, then she turns to me and I now realize what it is.

“Ribbon, you know you’re my only child and now that your older it’s about that time to talk about marriage,” mother smiles faintly.

“I’m only 15.” I simply reply to this commonly discussed topic.

Ribbon Saintwaters my name gives the appearance of a homely, feminine nature but to its dismay I’m the opposite in the least.

“I know I know you hate this topic so just forget about it,” she sighs. “So besides marriage please be on your best behavior when ‘they’ come to get some of the crops.”