Dillwyn Alstom D6 [Finished]
Aug 31, 2017 12:32:15 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Aug 31, 2017 12:32:15 GMT -5
Dillwyn Alstom
District 6
Sixteen
He told us there was no such thing as the war.
They invented this, just like they invent everything, to keep us trapped here. People were marched off to incinerators and changed into ash just so that they could thin us all out like animal and cattle. There’s a place though, somewhere outside of these walls, far and away, that doesn’t have anyone pulling strings or in control. But we’ll never get there.
He never let us dream big because he said that dreams were just side effects from drinking the water. They put all sorts of chemicals into the water so that we believe them when they tell us there isn’t enough food to eat and that we deserve to be locked down the way we are. Lots of people believe it, too. They think that dreaming’s the way out, like what we’re seeing isn’t something they’ve created for us. All the faces of the dead and the people that we miss are just illusions from the tip of our brain down to our toes. There’s no truth to it; it’s easier to make us feel like we’re connected to some great big universe than to have us focus on the here and now.
Dayla and my mother left because they drank the water. They swallowed down whole bits of untruth because my mother said she couldn’t believe my father anymore. I was only six when she left. I don’t remember what she looks like. Not the way her lying face reflected the sun, or the way her hair came down past her shoulders. She didn’t like to sing when she made breakfast and she certainly didn’t call me Dill. She was just another illusion, I think, sometimes. An illusion that the government sent and created so that we would be distracted from our true mission.
We tinker with the bits and pieces that we find. I reckon we’re the best mechanics in all of district six. The ones that could fix all the broken machines and put them back together again. Someday we’ll have the parts for the flying machine, to fly up and out of this place and off to who knows where. He says that I just need to trust in him and he’ll provide, and so I do, because there’s no one else that I’ve ever known that’s been right the way he has.
Our flying machine won’t make chem trails the way the hover crafts do. He says that’s another danger, and that’s what can cause my illusions to get out of hand. Some days I breathe in too much, and I have to lie down and cry it all out. It’s when I get the jitters through my hands, and I think in circles, that’s when I know that it’s been too much. And I’ll tell him it’s a bad day, and he knows, and he’ll give me a spoonful of rum and a drop of detergent, and then I’ll lay down and try not to think.
Except sometimes all that I can do is think—and think, and think—I can’t shut off the little filter in my brain because if I did they’d just be in control. Except I’m in control, I’m the only one that can put one foot right in front of the other. But when you can’t shut yourself off, you can feel the wheels spin, and spin, until you forget what you were doing, or why you were doing it. Except you have to finish, because if you don’t finish you know that the feeling won’t ever go away.
I get lost, I think.
I get lost a lot.
He told me once that I looked too much like her. He said, you’re just sent here to torture me. My hair was blond like hers, my eyes blue, too. I was too pale, too skinny. I wasn’t rough and tumble like he’d been as a child, but I could move about, was skinny and get in the nooks and crannies of places. He wailed on about how I wasn’t his real son, and that he made me answer things that only I would know. Where did he keep his favorite screw driver (buried under old dirt on the roof). What would I have been named if I was a girl (a trick question: the government had impregnated my mother with a male to control for the number of boys that year). What was I to do if the peacekeepers came to our door (take the cyanide pills stashed in the cupboard, and leave one for him to take if he wasn’t home). He still cried, down on his knees, and begged me to go away. We didn’t talk about any of the truths he had to tell for six whole days, until at last he had to teach me that aluminum foil could be used both to reflect the gamma rays they used to melt our brains and to stop them from sending radio signals to create new memories in our heads.
We sleep with foil night caps every night.
I don’t ever imagine what the other boys and girls must think because they’re too far gone to know. All these years of drinking the water, of radio signals in their brains, chem trails, a diet full of carbohydrants—I feel sorry for everything that they don’t know. The boys used to call me names, or say that what I knew was wrong. They did that until I knocked the two front teeth out of Tommy Schumer’s face. They didn’t so much as question when I muttered walking down the street—I got to have my own world, away from them.
It does get lonely, though.
I want to share my truth the same way he does, but—I don’t think I’m as good at it. No one wants to take advice from a skinny kid with holes in the knees of his pants, or grease on his face half the time. It’s better that way. No reason to get attached to folk that don’t understand. They all care too much about what they’ll never understand; it’s my job to keep living with what I know. A cross to bear, that’s what my father says.
My own cross to bear.
