The Wire Hanger

Chapter Five

            Going to school once the days grew hotter and longer was always more difficult; it used to be that students got the summers off, but that was when they were needed to work the farms and things like that. Now that all of that is automated they don’t have to rely on child labour. It was one of the great societal advances the corporation managed. In the hallway of our school, the president’s face beamed out at us every morning. He stood tall in a gray and black jacket, mimicking the uniform of the Protectors – or, I guess, they were copying him – his hair and beard gone uniformly gray. They updated the portrait every few years so it was as though he aged in sudden jerky leaps. Nobody I knew had ever seen him in person; he was based in the centre of the city, and rarely ventured outside of it.

When I was very young, just a child, someone had vandalized the portrait and it had to be taken away until its replacement could be brought it. Whoever had damaged it had done so fiercely, so that the plaster underneath was gouged. It looked like an upside-down triangle. But that had been a long time ago, and since installing an ID monitor on either side nothing like that had happened since. Underneath his smiling face was the corporation’s motto: Working Together for the Greater Good.

            On Thursday I beat Esau home from school because he was playing basketball with his friends in the parking lot behind the school building. He yelled for me to join in but I kept walking; we’re both short for our ages but he doesn’t seem to notice, or pretends he doesn’t. It’s harder for me to do that. And I’m not especially coordinated, although I’m a fast runner, and getting faster.

            Nobody was home when I got there, which wasn’t unusual; my mom sometimes stayed late at the elementary school to grade papers or lesson plan (right now her fourth graders were learning about photosynthesis). I took an apple from the fridge, bright red and round, and settled in at the kitchen table to do my homework. I liked it best when nobody was around to interrupt me, when I could settle into the silence of the house. It was an appropriate silence, not like the kind when everyone was there and talking and you could still hear the silence between their words, settling into the bones of the house, filling every crack, caulking every space that the wind might howl through.

            When Esau came home my mother still wasn’t back, and he was starving, so he made us both grilled cheese sandwiches. The cheese came wrapped in plastic slices, not even close to the real thing, but my mom said that once people preferred it this way, even when they had access to real cheese. I was pretty sure that was a lie but the sandwiches were good, at least the way Esau made them. He dips his in ketchup which I think is disgusting, one of the few tastes that separate us.

            “Dad’s on the late shift tonight, right?” he asked.

            “Yeah,” I said. The late shift was four in the afternoon til midnight; he didn’t like working it, because it meant he missed seeing us, and our mother, entirely, but he’d been put on them lately. He grumbled a bit about seniority – I guess a few of the younger guys, ambitious and hungry, had been given the better daytime shifts, when less was likely to happen and you got to be home for supper – but off he went, uniform neatly pressed. He did that himself – didn’t trust my mother not to burn the edges where they thinned. It was probably time for him to get a new uniform but I think he was attached to this one, even though the buttons across the stomach were beginning to complain. I found my mom reinforcing them one night when I couldn’t sleep: “Don’t tell your father,” she said with a wink. Now it seems like all my life she’s been telling me not to tell him. The things I’m not supposed to tell are stacking up, threatening to topple at the back of my throat.

            “Where’s Mom?”

            “Dunno,” I said. “Marking papers I guess.”