The Woodlands

by Lauren Nicolle Taylor

  The kinder blonde woman, whom I’d learned was named Apella, guided me to an opening in the chattel and gently pushed me through. I walked with my eyes set on the ground, trying not to attract any attention. I felt like a spy—the only one aware of what had happened to us.

  After a week of the same routine, I realized Apella was always putting me behind the same girl in the yard. She had short, black springy hair and a downcast posture. Her hands looked raw, like she had been nervously scratching them. Once she tripped and I heard her whisper, “Whoops”. No one ever spoke in these lines—no one really noticed they were in a line.

  I watched her carefully. She always kept her head down, but every now and then I saw her head dash from side to side, taking in the surroundings as I had been doing. Counting the number of guards, ten, looking at the exits, only one. The other thing I noticed was she would occasionally rub her belly. It didn’t appear to be by accident, it was affectionately, comfortingly. I decided she must be at least slightly aware, as I was, and decided I had to speak with her.

  Back in my room, I tried to think of some way I could make this happen and came up with nothing. I could bang into her in the yard, but with the total silence how could I speak without being noticed? I could give her a note, but I had nothing to write with and no paper. It seemed hopeless—whatever was going to happen would happen. I had no control. I pushed the wheeled table away from me in frustration, quickly retrieving it, hoping no one had heard the noise. That was the first night I spent crying myself to sleep. I lost count of how many nights I let myself be this way. I was a pathetic creature with no hope and no faith.

  Then I felt it. At night, after much sobbing, it moved inside me. A tiny kick, a snare on the inside of me. I felt ill. Poisoned. It had moved into my body without permission, without me knowing. I wished I could cut it out, be rid of it. Whatever this thing was, I didn’t want it. I wanted my life back. I resented sharing my body with this parasite. I resolved I would hold out long enough to get it out. I would find a way to be me again.

  The days started to blur. I got bigger and bigger. The routine never changed. The girl in front of me never turned around and I never spoke to her. I felt lost and so very alone. I decided I should make a run for it, but I didn’t even know where we were or how far underground.

  Then one day it was not Apella that led me to exercise, it was some other woman. A much older, less gentle woman, who shoved me into the line with her cracked, weathered hands, scratched and gnarled like a tree branch. I was nowhere near the springy-haired girl. I scraped my feet along the fake grass for forty-five minutes or an hour, I don’t know how long, and then tree lady pulled me out of the line and shoved me back to my room.

  I walked through the doors and thought she must have led me to the wrong room. It was completely different. The woman roughly led me to my bed and sat me down, chucking my legs up and raising the rail, like she was handling a sack of grain. I tried not to look around too much, but it was difficult. When she left, I let my eyes wander over the new pictures. The photos had been changed, a lot. On one side was a condensed version of my room. On the other side was a different scene. It was darker and dirtier than my side, but it had more ornaments. All handmade. Exquisite little dolls made of sticks and colorful cloth, sitting on dark, wooden shelves amongst glass jars full of buttons, ribbons, and shards of glass. I couldn’t help myself. I had to look closer. I left my bed and approached. Thankfully, a few days after the falling ‘incident’, they had disconnected me from the machines so I was free to move around my room. Each doll had its own personality. I reached out to touch them, my hands shaky. They looked so real. One little doll had dark, springy hair and beautiful, ebony skin. Her dress was detailed with tiny glass shards, each sewn on in a swirly pattern like the dance of a wind that had blown past a tree and picked up all the leaves. I sighed. I missed the trees. The silky purple color of her dress was deep and foreign. We didn’t have such colors in Pau. The face of the doll was painted on in such detail. The kindness of her face was unmistakable. Whoever made these was very talented. A lot of love had gone into these toys. I stepped back, feeling like I was intruding into someone’s very personal sanctuary. I heard the door creaking and quickly climbed back into the bed, to resume staring at the wall, when they wheeled her in.

  I was to share a room. The girl’s stomach was much bigger than mine—perhaps she only had a few weeks left. I had memorized the back of her head so well that it was strange to see her face. It was not at all what I had pictured. I imagined a strong face, the face of someone older and wiser than me. Someone who could help me. What greeted me was the face of a child. She couldn’t be more than fourteen. She was beautiful: smooth, perfect ebony skin, and kind, dark eyes that looked completely unlike mine. They were full of hope—this was not the face of someone who had given up. She looked almost happy. Her face mirrored the doll’s, only younger.

  I heard the staff talking to each other. “I don’t know what they are thinking, ordering more. We are crowded here as it is,” one woman said.

  “I know, now there is only one of us to ten of them. I don’t know how we are going to manage it,” someone whined.

  “And with the exercises and the room changes, I’ve barely slept in days.”

  “A happy mother equals a healthy baby. Right?” I heard laughing.

  “Well, what choice do we have? What Este wants, Este gets,” the other voice replied in a sigh.

  Este. That meant we were probably near Bagassa. Superior Este had a reputation as a formidable woman, harsh and brilliant. Her assignment was the Sciences. We were part of one her experiments. I wondered what this girl had done to end up here. I knew what my crime was.

  I could hear them complaining as they walked down the hall, until they passed someone who shushed them. Then the woman with the harsh voice stormed into the room. Apella was right behind her.

  “Apella, can you connect, er, um...” She lifted the young girl’s arm up to a portable scanning device, which responded in its monotone, “Clara Winterbell.”

  “Err, Clara, yes, can you connect Clara to the monitors and organize her dinner?” She crinkled her face, her straight, grey hair looking messy. Bits of it had fallen out of her tight bun and were floating wispily in front of her eyes.

  Harsh Voice seemed stressed and distracted. She wiped her forehead, attempting to push back the stray hairs. Every other time I had seen her, she was businesslike, efficient and disconnected. Whatever had happened, she was obviously frazzled by it. Apella, on the other hand, who was normally nervous by comparison, was calm and seemed almost pleased. She hooked Clara up to the various machines and monitors, tucked the dopey girl into bed, and walked out. As she passed through the door, she turned and I think she smiled at us. The door shut and we were alone.

  Clara sat staring at the wall for a while. Then her hand lifted to the shelves projected onto her side of the room and caressed the doll I had been looking at. I could tell this doll meant a great deal to her. I could also tell, for certain, that she was not under the fog, as her face was running through a myriad of emotions. I couldn’t tell if she was happy or sad.

  “This is my mother,” she whispered as she turned her head, only slightly, in my direction, her eyes still on the wall. “We have been apart a long time.” Her movements seemed very careful as she turned to face me. Her face was hard with resolve as she said, “I am going to see her again, and you will see your family again, Rosa Bianca.”

  A small spark of hope ignited inside of me. Maybe this girl knew something I didn’t. “How do you know my name?” I asked, trying hard not to lose my cool. Trying to whisper and keep calm so the staff didn’t notice our talking.

  “Apella told me,” she said nonchalantly.

  “What else did she tell you? I asked.

  “That I could trust you,” she smiled, “that we would be friends.” She patted her belly. The look on her face was so ridiculous, given our situation. She looked relaxed, like
we’d just met at the grocery store. Not like a trapped, pregnant girl who had been drugged and god knows what else.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, rolling my eyes. “We can be friends.” Friends, a rather pointless thing to have in our current condition. Allies maybe. I wondered why Apella had spoken to her. Why she had pushed us together was also a mystery to me. So was Clara’s odd demeanor. Was she crazy?

  “So you worked out the gas—how long did it take you?” she asked.

  “It must be about three weeks ago.”

  “Oh,” she said as she looked down at her belly again. “I have been awake for a lot longer than that, maybe about four months, though time is hard to measure here, isn’t it?” she said, giggling. I felt sorry for her. Perhaps she had been driven crazy from being down here so long, with no one to talk to. I wanted to reach over and pat her head.

  I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice when I replied, “Yeah I guess. So how old are you, Clara?”

  “Seventeen.”

  I guess the surprise on my face was quite evident.

  “Yeah, I get that a lot. I’m just petite. Well, that’s what my mother always used to say. I’m tiny but mighty!” She held her tiny, thin arms up as if showing off her muscles.

  I laughed. She was as cute as a button. There was something about her that I couldn’t resist. She was unhateable. Likeable. Where I was suspicious and guarded, she was warm and honest. We talked for quite a while. I asked her loads of questions. She asked me some but eased off when she worked out she was only getting one-word answers. She seemed happy to share her past with me, and it was better than staring at the wall. She talked of her love for her family. About her deep respect and admiration for her hard-working father, who worked on a large farm fixing machinery and her devotion to her mother, who taught her how to make her dolls. She explained that her mother used to make toys for the Superiors’ children. When she asked about my family I kept it brief and, sensing my reluctance, she never pushed me.

  Clara talked incessantly about her home. “Palma, Ring Five!” she exclaimed, holding her hand up in mock salute. She went on to describe her home, her tiny little head nodding up and down as if attached to a spring, as she spoke. Her full, dark lips talking so fast it was hard to keep up. Palma sounded identical in size and shape to Pau Brasil but the people were different. My town was consumed with fear, where everyone watched their every move and tried so hard not to draw any attention to themselves. Palma was ruled by their love for each other. They poured themselves into creative work. They had art and stories not written in the standard, supplied history books. They even had people that made and played instruments. I was shocked. I thought all the towns were the same. That we were all in the same immovable boat, entrenched in thick, binding mud we could never pull ourselves out of. These people sounded crazy or brave, I wasn’t sure. I was shocked and so very jealous. So very jealous, until I heard how the people of Palma suffered.

  “How can you do things like that? I mean, how can you get away with it, without being punished?” I asked eagerly.

  She scrunched up her thin, pointed nose, “Oh, we’ve been punished.” She shook her head, recalling. “Once I saw I woman beaten to death in the street for not surrendering a simple wood pipe.”

  I looked at her, puzzled. “You mean, for smoking?”

  She shook her head, smiling, “No, an instrument. You blow on it to make music.” She showed me the Y shape of it by drawing it in the air and then held the invisible pipe to her lips and blew. I nodded and pretended I knew what she was talking about. What was music? “This woman fought with a policeman. The pipe had been given to her by her son, who had just left for the Classes a month earlier. She knew she would never see him again and this was all she had to remind her of him. I remember her holding onto it so tightly as the policeman tried to twist it from her fingers. They kicked her and kicked her until there was nothing left, wrenching it from her dead hands and throwing it in the bin. Others tried to intervene and they were arrested. They just disappeared. We have lost hundreds of lives trying to protect what we love.”

  I recalled the heartless couple, wincing as I remembered all that blood.

  I felt relieved, as stupid as it sounds, that at least one thing remained the same. They still took the children to the Classes. This, we all had in common. Still, I was quite shaken by this revelation. The people of Pau Brasil had removed their feelings. Parents were merely caretakers. I mean, I understood the reasoning behind it. What was the point of loving someone so much for eighteen years who was going to be taken away from you? I loved my mother and she loved me, but it was understood that this was always going to be temporary. So we kept each other at a distance. She’d had to say goodbye to her parents all those years ago, when she went to the Classes, and we had known my time was coming. It was foolish to care that much—it served no purpose. The way Clara’s people functioned made no sense to me. The love that she felt for her parents, her friends, what she called her ‘community’ was self-destructive in my mind. I didn’t understand it. Nor did I understand her love for that thing inside her. I didn’t get it but my heart longed for it. I had lost so much because of caring about things. I touched my stomach very gently. I wasn’t sure my heart could ever love that way again.

  A woman arrived with dinner and we returned to our drone-like state. Clara was a pro at looking dazed and dopey. But she was still so cheeky, taking risks I never would. When the woman’s back was turned, she poked out her tongue. We ate in silence, waiting until the woman returned to take our plates. She checked our milkshake cups to make sure they were empty and left.

  Lights out.

  “Do you know what’s in those milkshakes?” I whispered in the dark. But Clara was already asleep. I could hear her soft breathing and restless movements as I tried to sleep myself. That quiet sound of air escaping her lips was the best sound in the world to me. It felt good not to be alone anymore. I excitedly made a note of all the questions I needed to ask her in the morning, knowing I would probably forget most of them.

  Clara was getting more sleepy and sluggish every day. She waddled around during our exercise as best she could, but she struggled to keep up. I had noticed that other women, who looked like Clara, were disappearing from the lines. One day they were there, straining under the weight of their giant, bulging stomachs. The next day they were gone. They didn’t return. There were always new girls to take their place, though. We all wound our way through the roped-off courses like a deformed caterpillar. The line of girls compressing and expanding when one bumped into another.

  Despite her exhaustion, Clara continued to radiate that aura of faith. I don’t know what she was hoping for, what gave her any hope at all. I knew for certain, she wasn’t going to get it. She was too sweet and trusting. I didn’t want to break the bubble that she had surrounded herself with. The one that let her believe she had any claim on the child she was carrying. Well, that’s not exactly true, sometimes I did. Sometimes, I wanted to take a giant, gleaming pin and pierce it, watch it explode, covering her in the dripping truth. I wanted to make her see the world the way it really was, cruel, unfair, and devoid of hope. But, knowing her, it would only strengthen her resolve.

  One day they took me to exercise and left Clara alone in her room. I couldn’t help but turn my head in worry as I left her. If they had taken her out of exercise, soon they would be taking her from me. Selfishly, I was concerned about being on my own.

  When I returned, I relaxed in relief to see her still sitting in her bed, eyes on the wall. She winked at me, as my attendant roughly ‘helped’ me onto my bed. This one was old and huge, her uniform barely stopping bits and pieces of her from billowing out. The staff kept changing now. When the large woman left, Clara started rubbing her belly again, a habit that disgusted me.

  “You know they won’t let you keep that thing, right?” I spat. She seemed so naive sometimes. Or caught up in her own world and I felt the cruel need to dent it, since I could
n’t join her there. She couldn’t be as strong as she seemed.

  “I know,” she said and, for a moment, a small crack opened in her positive armor. But then that light appeared from within, and she beamed at me. “I’ve thought of a name.”

  I pursed my lips. A name? That was insane! I couldn’t comprehend her love for this child. I couldn’t stand it. Why name it? I knew the name I would give mine. Leech. This thing that had intruded into my body was as unwelcome as it was detested.

  She ignored my incredulous look. “Hessa after my father, if it’s a boy. Rosa if it’s a girl.”

  “Don’t name that thing after me,” I snapped. I turned and looked at the wall. I felt wretched and angry. Most of the time I felt like Clara was crazy, that she floated around on a cloud that I couldn’t puncture or dissipate despite my attempts. Other times, she made me feel deficient, like there was something wrong with me for not feeling affection for this thing I was carrying.

  She snapped back at me, her face seeming older, worn. She slammed her fist down on her thigh. “I know you don’t understand it, Rosa, but I love this baby. I am her mother. That is a strong bond. My love is MY choice, don’t ruin it.” Her voice ran out at the end of her sentence and she started to pant, struggling to catch her breath. Each word seemed harder and harder to expel, like she was pushing them out and they were backing up in her throat.