The Plucking

I am of the divine, my womanhood a gift to save others.

I am a budding flower waiting to blossom into the vessel I may become. I must pray, obey, and beg for beautiful mercy.

I must pray to be worthy.

This hallowed truth hammers into me, the words forced down my throat until it's hard to swallow.

I am one of the chosen. I am one who will become the Mother of the Nation or, if my womb is tainted, the Server of Man. Either way, this pink is a sign of luck and obedience.

I am revered. I am honored. I am blessed. Ask anyone.

Just don't ask me. I will not say it is so. I know a good woman's reverence comes from silent agreement. I am blessed to not have to speak but simply to have my world decoded for me.

Was silence always the way of the woman? This question whirs in my brain, my inner voice my only true friend.

We stand in a line, our bodies draped in the lush pink, standing before the Commander and his wife. We will be understudies today, figuring out what true divinity looks like, what, if we are lucky, our future divinity will look like within the next year or so. Our time to blossom is coming, after all.

I readjust my sleeve gingerly, hoping I am not noticed. It does not due to draw attention. The pink is the only color I've known for my past thirteen years but, when I am ripe, they will, Lord willing, pluck me from the vine. If I prove my holy value, I will be honored in the greatest way.

They will stuff my sacrificial body into the most treasured color: Red.

Standing and staring at the stiff wife, her collar seeming to strangle her, I wonder if it's always been this way. The quiet formality, the rigid structure. The divide between the wombs that will and the wombs that won't.

What was there before? Where was I before? Was there ever a before?

Glancing down the line of pink, I wonder if these questions barrage my sisters' minds. I wonder if they, too, feel drowned in the pink and terrified of the red.

Trying to quiet the questions, I fix my gaze steadily ahead, I notice her. The Anne, the elderly kitchen servant in her trademark gray. My heart flutters so violently I worry the others will hear, that they will know I feel.

I can't take my eyes off her, though, no matter how hard I try.

I see red in her eyes, a redness of the divine but also not of the divine.

And suddenly, peering at this woman in gray, her wrinkled face so familiar to me, I know a glimmer of before. Without a word, her familiar blue eyes tell me there was a before.

There was definitely a before.