Lamae | #JustWriteIt WINNER ✔

10 | Scales

At this, Rashida's face became calm and relaxed. "I don't believe what I'm hearing," she said softly. "Your parents were right."

Essa had taught me how to take out my contacts while I was there, and as I did so, my eyes stung further. I walked to her, took her hand, and put the tiny glass bulbs in her open palm. "Take these to Baba. Tell him he can turn me over now." My voice was cold. "I will always love you."

Rashida had been about to speak herself, but then she closed her hand over the lenses, a bitter look shone in her eyes. "Farewell." With this, she left the room.

▣

Baba burst into my room within a few minutes, his eyes ablaze with fury. I could do nothing to escape his grip as he ripped me from the bed with one hand and smacked my cheek, again and again, with the other. Each CLAP was more fire, more shame....but strangely, no regret.

After he had decided my cheek was bruised enough, he dragged me out to the living room, where gray-coated officers were waiting for me. I knew these all too well. They were sighted, just like I was.

As Baba thrust me into their grip, and my hands were chained with cuffs that cut into my wrists and made them bleed, I gazed upon my parents with red eyes. My eyes could never hurt as much as my heart when I spoke those last words to my mother. 

"Even you, Ammi?"

Her lightly-lined face was placid. "We cannot allow a sighted person into our family. It is the biggest shame."

"So honor comes before love? Before truth?" I shouted over my shoulder as I was dragged away.

But my Ammi—my sweet, sweet Ammi, whom I love even now—never responded to that question.

▣

I was taken to the area of Lamae where citizens do not go, because it is considered unspeakable. But I learned very quickly what this place was called: Layiq (it is a Lamaean word that means Unbecoming).

As I crossed the threshold into the gray building, I looked at my shoes. I knew now what the Alhukum would do. They would kill me, and not quickly or painlessly. All because they wanted to stifle any ideas of rebellion.

No other people were here. At least that was a single consolation—the fact that if anyone in Lamae was living as someone who was sighted, they were not caught.

But at the same time, I was lonely. I had heard that torture was always easier to bear if someone else was going through it along with you. What if I accidentally damned a person I loved because I was too weak? Or worse....what if I exposed Essa's work altogether?

How would they break me first? What would their first tactic be? As I waited alone with the silent, gray-coated officers who stood beside me, I was unsure which was worse: knowing, or not knowing.

▣

They placed me in a room. A simple, cold metal room, with a single metal bench attached to the wall. I was thrust in there.

I remembered reading about differing torture methods at school, but I had expected something more painful. In school, we had learned that the most common torture methods were physical pain, designed to crack a person open and reveal their darkest secrets.

(Tales of needles being jammed beneath our fingernails till they exited at the first joint; people being water-boarded to give the illusion of drowning; bodies being split open and their organs showcased—these were methods we were all familiar with.)