My Chains Are My Weapons

A primal scream ripped out of my bruised throat and bounced off the ghastly prison walls, and soon a thousand women were screaming in their sleep too, the howl of the traumas the past few decades had seared into them.

I woke up wearing a baby pink nightgown, and screamed even louder.

The locket beared down on my neck like a guillotine. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t bre…

“So that’s the female that dresses like a man,” he sneered.

How did I get caught? I’d been so careful, all those months. All that terror and caution, for nothing. I’d risked a few moments of freedom from the suffocating burden of being trapped in a body I never asked for, dressed in clothes I was forced to wear or face death, and here I was, those few minutes were going to cost me my life. You might think I was crazy, but cornered by four hulking teenage boys in a dismally dark alley, I didn’t regret it. This was no life to live. I was willing to face death if I couldn’t be free.

The boy jeered in in my face. “What good would death do to you? You’re probably insane enough to have wanted that in the first place. We’re not going to turn you in.”

They weren’t?

His smile slowly twisted into a smirk that would haunt me for the rest of my life, however long that would be. He put his beefy hands on my shoulders, and slowly pushed me down.

“We’re going to turn you into a real woman,” he proclaimed, confident in the power this society had vested in its males, the helplessness pounded into the females.

It took me a moment too long to understand what he was saying.

No. No. No!

Anything but this. Anything. Give me the rusty guillotine. Give me the fire at the stake.

“Not this! Please….”

He only laughed harder. And then he tore my clothes, my freedom, off me. And as three boys held me down, he forced his way into my unwilling body.

I found refuge in my bed. How long did I lay there, motionless and stone cold? Don’t know, don’t care. Nothing mattered. Nothing could get worse.

Until I felt the baby kicking.

I screamed, a desperate cry that sent my mother running into my room. She’d stopped coming here after a while and set up an automated feeding IV, disgusted by the urine puddling on my mattress, the vomit curdling on the carpet.

Vomit. Oh, no. I thought it was just the trauma trying to purge itself from my body.

My body. Ha. The males of this wretched country’s body, more like. Nothing was mine anymore. But nothing ever was. And that was the point. Now I would be required by law to marry my rapist and bear the rest of his children.

I mumbled that I had a nightmare. She sighed and left, muttering that she should have called the Mental Health Committee weeks ago, that she was going to call them tomorrow if I didn’t get up, wash off my filth, and put my modest attire back on to help her with domestic duties like I was created to do.

I didn’t think she was serious. Mother truly loved me, unlike most of the women in the town, who hated the many children they’d been forced to carry. It probably helped that Father died in the house blaze when I was three months old, before Mother could bear more children for him. She was scarred so badly, no other man wanted her. But I couldn’t risk it. Everyone knew what happened to the females reported to the Mental Health Committee - they were locked up for the rest of their lives, sedated with heavy drugs that left them drooling and listless. Proper women didn’t have malfunctioning brains, and there was no purpose in society for crazy females. It was crazy females that had destroyed the rest of the world, when they found an outlet for their mental maladies called feminism. They denounced servitude to men, encouraged abortion, and drove God into a rage that led him to destroy the world with droughts and wildfire.

We were the only country spared, and that was because we were the only country who still had a complete abortion ban. Not because our scientists had developed an innovative water conservation method our leaders forbade them from sharing with the rest of the world. Autonomous females were a menace who threatened everyone’s safety and needed to be kept away. That could be me among them tomorrow.

Not that I cared at this point. Being drugged into a semi vegatative state sounded just fine. But if I were locked up, I’d be forced to grow this parasite in me, claw my way through childbirth, have milk spurting out of the breasts I so despised…

I needed to get rid of it. How? There were no drugs I could take to do this. Abortion was impossible and illegal here. Women who were caught were executed in the city square with a rusty guillotine that slowly drew out their screams for maximum effect, and we were all required to witness it. Men, women, boys, girls. The men would rub their hands in glee, and the women would look sick, pale and terrified. It could happen to them next. It could happen to them if they knew their best friend aborted their fetus, and they didn’t report it. And so, we stopped having friends. Better to watch an unknown woman die than a woman we loved. It was each woman on her own, in a society where we had to do as men willed. We had no power.

I wondered how it would feel, facing the guillotine. Most women lost any semblance of whatever remnants of dignity they had once they were on the platform. But some marched defiantly, staring back into the men’s faces. Some of them even laughed, as though they were relieved to be exiting their cage. A few had pinned on large “Resist” pins with an image of a coat hanger at the last minute, which were ripped off before their heads were lowered into the rusty contraption that would slice their rebellious heads off.

Coat hangers? Why coat hangers?

I got out of my bed for the first time in months, my body creaking in protest as I launched my atrophied muscles towards the closet. I took my hideous lavender coat off its hanger, and inspected the hanger, shaking.

And then, some survival instinct took over, and I jammed the coat hanger up my portal of misery, aiming towards my uterus.

Blood. So much blood.

Mother ran into my room when she heard me screaming, screaming, screaming as though I had been butchered, because I was, and her screams joined mine when she saw me taking a bath in my blood. She saw the coat hanger and nearly keeled over.

She hid the coat hanger and tried to stop the bleeding. It was like putting a bucket out to catch a monsoon. She sobbed and told me she had to summon the midwife.

No.

“I’m going to die anyway, let me die this way instead of the guillotine!”

She said the midwife had been her dearest friend years ago before men had pitted all the women against each other, and would declare it a miscarriage. That would be better for me, she assured me.

It wasn’t. There isn’t a day now that I don't think about the guillotine with longing.

Females who had miscarriages were assumed to be at fault. While they hadn’t directly murdered their babies, they hadn’t cared for them properly, hadn’t given them the nutrition and dedication they needed to be born. Maybe they had even wanted them to die.

We were sent to a massive prison rehabilitation complex, one of many in the country, where we would be reformed into loving future mothers.

We were never to be given the title women again. We were females. The lowliest of the low. None of us were fit to be married to men after that. At the end of the rehabilitation, men would come to select us to be their concubines, so they could father as many children as they pleased. We were breeding machines.

It was my worst nightmare. The guillotine now seemed like an act of kindness to me. Maybe that’s why those women had grinned before they died. It was the best option.

Before I entered the prison, my mother was obligated to put the locket around my neck. I would wear this locket for the rest of my life, marking me forever as a female instead of a woman. Inside the locket, I knew, was a picture of the fetus I had killed. I never bothered opening it.

But my flashbacks made me irrational. For some reason, I needed to amplify my torment. I tore open the locket.

The photo of an underdeveloped pale body stared up at me. I wept. I had murdered this baby with a coat hanger. I deserved my fate. What had I done? I knew this was why they did this, to make us cower in guilty submission and accept the chains of our lives, feeling like we deserved it for our heinous crime. But despite knowing this, it worked. I felt like a piece of dirt.

I stroked the photo of the baby with the same hand I had used to murder it. There was something hard protruding underneath it. I picked up the photo.

A key. A master key that would let me out of my prison cell and out of the complex.

Etched into it was the symbol of the coat hanger.

My mother was part of the resistance.

After weeks of muddled despair that had blinded me to all hope and plundered my spirit, I finally found what I needed to fight back and break out of the system that had broken me.

I was going to use the locket that chained me, as a weapon.