Running

So this is a piece of flash fiction kind of like part two to the piece I wrote a couple weeks of go, called An Impossible Future. You can read that first if you want to, or you can just read this piece, but either way, hope you enjoy!

I liked to stare out at the ocean. To watch its mesmerizing waves and become lost in them. I wished I could be like those waves sometimes. I wished I could sink into oblivion, spared from the horrors of this world. I came here every day, and every day I felt the same man lurking behind me. I wished he would stay away.

I so badly wanted to go to him. I wanted to touch him and feel his skin. I felt something in me calling to him, but I had to pretend he was invisible. If I so much as breathed in the wrong direction toward him, I knew they would take me away. I was on thin ice already. Part of my body was already going under.

I used to have a husband. He died. Not by accident either. I pushed him down the stairs. I feigned ignorance, of course. I was a good actor. They almost believed me. But the one in charge, I forget his name, he saw right through me. He knew what I had done, but he couldn’t do anything. There was no proof, so I was as free as one can be when they’re already imprisoned in society.

I planned to run soon after that. I had to. It was my only option. I could no longer live with all their rules, and I knew it was only a matter of time before they arrested me on some technicality, and I disappeared for “reconditioning.”

I had a friend who had run months before. She wanted me to go with her, but I couldn’t get away from my husband. She taught me how to run, though. How to slip through their systems and where to meet her when I finally got away.

They claimed no one had ever escaped. That no one could ever survive outside of the city limits. They lied. They lied every day to thousands of people who ate it up as gospel. People who willingly turned a blind eye just so their perfect little bubble of hell wouldn’t be shattered. The truth was, hundreds have ran and hundreds have escaped. But these people are erased from the society. Memories are altered and databases are wiped, as if the person never existed in the first place. They tried to do that with me to make me forget my friend and everything she told me, but she gave me a rare drug before she left so I would remember her. But it was almost gone. If I didn’t leave soon I would forget her. They put the memory altering drugs into our food.

As bad as it was here in the city, I could never ask the man behind me to run. I could never do that to him. I might be able to escape, but he would most likely end up dead. Yes, I would run soon. But it would not be with him. It would be alone. And then he would forget about me and it would be like I never existed.