The Selection

Chapter 42: Running

And started it did. Olivianna played her game well forcing me to go days without food even though I knew she had access to it. After day four of no food, she allowed me to come out of the small cellar and emerge into daylight. I was stared at from all angles. Men, women and children alike kept their eyes on me no matter how rude it seemed.

"Get her a dress from Tina's. That dress is unsuitable," Olivianna told a masked man beside me. He nodded and walked away. I stared down at my lavender dress, torn beyond repair and stained with blood. I wore a dress as the other women around did. Brown and ratty, just reaching my ankles and the arms reaching my wrists. As a worked in the field along side the others I wondered why in the world they would make sleeves since it was so incredibly hot but I stared at the other women I realized my dress was the only one that covered all of my skin.

Every morning I would awake in the cellar, forced to pick in the fields, then finally as the sun went down I was fed my one and only meal. After finishing, I was pulled into the cellar once more. The only positive side of that was the cellar was cold. Occasionally, they would take videos of men slapping me, screaming in my face or throwing me. At first I was scared but after the third time, I was numb. No longer caring about what happened to my body, no longer caring if I made it home. I stopped counting the days into weeks after a month, losing hope by each hour. I could over hear Olivianna talking about the day she would kill me because she knew the day they sent a video of that was the day Anderson would be forced to send all of his troops. The excitement in her voice was appalling, disgusting, but even I couldn't act as though she wasn't brilliant. I couldn't act as though the entire rebel nation wasn't brilliant. They had their own government here and their own people. They all had jobs with no money being earned. If you worked, you were fed. Simple.

It was a normal day as far as I was concerned. I trudged up the stairs before sunrise, was given my basket to pick cotton and then went on my way. I stared off over the field watching as the sun peeked over the horizon. For the first couple of weeks, I pretended Gabriel was watching the sun rise and set too but after awhile I began to scold myself for acting ridiculous. It felt as though this had been my entire life and I had only visited Gabriel in dreams.

I started where I left off yesterday, walking barefoot in the soil.

"Good morning, Ember," Terry, an older woman I'd met here who worked on the line in front of me.

"Good morning," I whispered, trying not to draw attention to myself.

"S'pposed to be chilly today. Gusts of wind rollin' through," She informed me. Her dark skin wrinkled at the sides of her eyes as she smiled. She was much older, although I never asked I'd guessed late 60's. Despite the hard work that tore apart our hands each and every day she always seemed in a good mood. When she was not telling me stories about her, she was humming which I enjoyed very much. She told me happy stories about when she was younger. She spoke about running in fields, picking flowers, a swing her father built her. Then the stories turned into her first love, their first date, how he proposed. She never continued after that.

"I can tell," I said, feeling my hair whip around in the wind. The swift air blew around me untamable. Not only did it whirl around the dirt and leaves around but a sudden aroma hit me as if it were a hardwood door. I immediately turned and hurled what little food I had in my stomach.

"Oh dear," Terry whispered. "You all right, girl?"

I held a thumbs up as I dry heaved several times, bile spewing. Terry cussed under her breath and dropped her basket at my feet, leaving me to dry heave alone. I fell to my knees and leaned onto my hands giving the earth anything I had left in my stomach. I hadn't understood what caused the sudden outburst but my initial thought was maybe Olivianna poisoned me. A much better death then a public one that Gabriel would have to watch.