Out of the Ashes

You stare at the white walls of your room and squeeze a stress ball in one hand. It’s the only non-essential possession they let you have. Soft, small, pliable. There’s no way you could hurt yourself or others with this sphere of foam.

Your walls haven’t changed since the last time you laid in bed and stared at them. Which, to be fair, was this morning. You took a little break from staring to trudge down the hall in your slippers, in the middle of a line of other Patients, to eat a bowl of soup with a child’s spoon.

In a few minutes, you will take another break from staring and trudge in the same line of Patients to the same room where you will probably eat some kind of sandwich. Then, they will stick all of you in a room together with a few couches (never enough for all of you, you usually end up on the floor) and play a movie for you.

The movie is always the same variety of safe. No big twists, no sad endings, no risky topics, and they are all performed by actors that seem more like animatronics.

The bell rings. It’s not so much a ring as a buzz, actually. The way alarm clocks sound.

You sigh and stand, shove your feet into the white fluffy slippers beside your bed, and go to the door of your room. It opens automatically, the locking mechanism temporarily turned off by the bell.

The line is already forming in the hall, blank faces trickling out from their rooms. You move to join them, and something captures your attention. The person in front of you, a girl, maybe a few years younger than you are, has a chain around her neck. You can see it above the collar of her robe, because her hair is pulled to the side.

How did she sneak that in?

This is the first time you’ve seen a necklace since you were sent here, and even though it’s small and maybe stupid, it reminds you of being home, of being free, and you don’t want it to be taken away, to disappear from your life forever.

You stick your foot out and touch it to the back of the girl’s ankle. “Hey,” you whisper. “Move your hair. I can see your chain.”

She startles, turns to look at you. You’ve never seen her before, and you notice that her face has not settled into that all-too-familiar blank expression. She looks scared.

“Thank you,” she whispers as she adjusts her hair.

The line starts moving, and she turns back to the front. The whole walk to the dining hall, you stare at her neckline, imagining that you can see right through her hair to that delicate silver chain.

When you were younger, your mother gave you a necklace with a chain like that. At the end dangled a silver heart with little hinges on the side that let the front of it swing open like a door, and inside was a picture of your parents.

You don’t know where it is now. Probably still in your room at home, where you had to leave everything. You wonder if your parents ever go in there, ever look at your books and clothes and bed and cry at your absence.

Of course they don’t cry. If they cried, they would be sent here. You would see them, walking zombie-like through these halls.

You wonder if you look like a zombie when you walk. If you have the same blank expression as the faces around you.

When the line makes it to the dining hall and starts filing onto the benches of the long tables, you realize you will be sitting next to the girl in front of you.

You wait until they pass out the food to even look at her, but once you all have a plain ham and cheese sandwich and the Nurses are at their stations at the ends of the tables, you think it’s safe to whisper.

“How did you get that in here?”

You still don’t turn to look at her, not trying to draw attention to yourself, but you can hear her. “I swallowed it.”

You hadn’t thought of that. Or maybe you had but were too scared to attempt it. It’s difficult to remember becoming a Patient. It’s like you’ve blurred it out in your mind.

“What are you in for?” you ask her. You’ve never asked anyone else, but before you came you knew people who were taken away for all kinds of reasons. “Failure to thrive” was the most common, you think. People who just couldn’t be the kind of happy they were looking for.

The girl swallows a bite of her sandwich. “I didn’t like my Match.”

That was another common one. They thought they could take away all of the pain of heartbreak by assigning you a Match when you turned sixteen. But sometimes it just didn’t work out.

“What about you? Same thing?”

“No,” you whisper. You never got a Match because when you turned sixteen you were already locked away here. “I had a panic attack.”

You think about it every day. You don’t remember what caused it, just the feeling of total paralysis, the feeling that you couldn’t breathe, the feeling that everything was crumbling down around you and you were going to die.

“So, what do we do here?” she asks. “How do they help us? Is it some kind of therapy?”

You take a bite of your own sandwich, mostly to stall your answer. A memory pops out of the blur, a memory of your parents smiling and telling you that you were going to a Hospital, a place where they were going to help you be happy like the rest of them, and once you were happy they would let you come home.

They spouted out the same spiel you’d heard a thousand times, from parents and teachers and the Government. “Before the Improvement, people were sad and angry and stressed out, and because of that, they would do bad things, and the world was all chaos. So the Improvement came along, and made sure that we could never be upset. The Improvement makes sure we all have jobs and houses and food to eat and a person to love. But it only works if we all stay happy.”

You don’t know how to tell this girl that they’re not going to help her be happy. “There’s no therapy,” you whisper. “There’s not much of anything. They don’t care about fixing us.”

Out of the corner of your eye, you see her frown. “But then how do we go home?”

Instead of answering, you look across the table. Sitting in front of you is a man that you think is approaching a hundred years old.

“Oh,” she whispers.

“They just get rid of us so they can have their perfect society of happy people.” The next bite of your sandwich tastes a little bitter.

Between you, there is silence for a moment. You think maybe maybe she is mourning any expectations she had for her future. But then she says softly, “It won’t work.”

“Huh?”

She turns towards you, and her voice slips out of a whisper. “It won’t work. Everyone is going to end up here. Half of my school is here. Businesses are closing because all of the workers are here.”

Her slightly raised voice has caught the attention of the nearest Nurse, and without you noticing, the chain of her necklace has edged out of her robe again.

“You have prohibited materials,” the Nurse announces. “You must come with me.”

The girl turns to you, but you keep your eyes on your sandwich. “Where? Where am I going?”

“You are a danger to this Hospital. You must be removed.”

The Nurse gestures for another to come help her, and they take her by both arms and force her to stand. You don’t look, but you hear her protests and fear as they take her away.

There goes the first person you’ve spoken to in the last four years.

In the silence that follows her removal, as you try to force yourself to swallow bites of dry sandwich, you turn her words over in your head.

The Government’s plan isn’t working, is it? The world needs you, all of you, the broken people. They need you because as it turns out, most people are broken.

You wonder if they’ll let you out. Return you to your homes and let you live normal lives. You wonder if they’ll let you choose your own Match, your own job. You wonder if you might actually see something besides these white walls again.

But they might not. They might all be so brainwashed, so intent on their happy world that they let you all die here while the few people who live up to their expectations languish in their perfect world.

You can’t trust them to do what they have to.

After dinner, you sit through a movie in which a young boy gets a dog. You sit frozen on the arm of a crowded couch, and your mind is miles from the boy and his dog.

You all shuffle in your line back to your rooms, and the lights go out right on schedule. You wait until all of the noise in the whole building has quieted, until the whole world is darkness and silence.

Then you slip out of bed. Walk to your door. It’s not closed all the way. While it was closing, you had dropped something in the path of the door, and it stopped it from fully shutting. Not enough for any of the Nurses to notice, because when the door hit it, your stress ball squished between it and its frame and there wasn’t enough visible to draw any attention.

But it’s enough of a gap for you to squeeze your fingertips in and pry the door all the way open.

And then you’re out. The whole Hospital is yours to explore, but there’s only one place that’s really of any interest to you, and you know exactly where it is, because every day for the last four years you’ve watched the Nurses bring trays of food out from it.

The kitchen.

You tiptoe through dark hallways until you finally reach the door you’re looking for. You know that no one will be there, because it’s been hours since you ate dinner and you don’t eat again until lunch.

But in the kitchen, there are stoves. And rags. And when you turn on the stove, and place a greasy rag on top of it, the whole thing becomes engulfed in flames. And when you turn on several stoves and place several rags on top of them, the whole kitchen is illuminated in flickering light, like the light of the movie screen, and heavy smoke starts to fill the air.

You take one rag that is only flaming at one corner, and you bring it out into the dining room and set it on one of the long wooden tables. Then you go back to the kitchen and get enough flaming rags that you can set one on each table, and by then the smoke is heavy enough that the fire alarm trips.

You hear all of the automatic doors in all of the Patient rooms slide open with the sound of the alarm. “Run!” You yell, running yourself, running through the Patient hallways. “Everyone get out while you can!”

And with a line of Patients behind you, not shuffling, but running, expressions not blank but alive, you make your way to the entrance of the building and you go farther, you run until you know you’re safe, and then you turn around and see the whole thing in flames.

The Hospital has failed to thrive.