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Today marks seven years. Seven years exactly.
Isabella stares at the wall, trying to grasp for an emotion, but all she feels is a painful pit in her stomach, a feeling of emptiness she was far too familiar with.
She’s standing before her carvings – lines, where she’d marked each passing day, on her cell wall. If she hadn’t been recording how long she’d been here, she thinks she would’ve lost touch with reality altogether.
If there was a hell on Earth, it was this institution. Intelligent cattle girls were placed here, their lives spared in exchange for the possibility of motherhood. As long as they could survive such a place, they were allowed to live out the rest of their lives overlooking human farms.
And ‘motherhood’, safe to say, was a title not simply given to a woman. In order to be a mother, there was laborious training to go through – physical exercise, combat, as well as tests in composure, emotional endurance and intelligence – a trainee mother would very much work until her hands bled and her feet blistered; until her mind became a slave to the system. It was equivocal to torture – every day was just a tightrope walk between life and death.
Isabella moves away from the carvings on the wall, towards the barred window. She’s grown tall enough to reach it without having to stand on a stool, after all these years. The weak sunlight leaks in, offering little warmth.
She closes her eyes, though does not dream of anywhere in particular, as she finds that happy thoughts are much too painful. For now, she enjoys the faintest touch of wind on her face; the fresh scent of morning dew and wild herbs. Springtime is around the corner.
“Isabella.” Comes a deep, rumbling voice.
She jolts, straightening her dress, and turns towards the entrance. Now since she was a ‘birther’ - a term applied to women who’d had a child – she’d gotten her own room. Not that it got rid of the sounds of women wailing at night, but at least she didn’t run the risk of having her child harmed by other trainees.
“How do you do, Albor,” she greets, walking with a dignified grace that her life depended upon.
The strange, ink-colored creature by the door is a demon, wearing a mask that resembles a deer skull with multiple horns, and eyeholes trailing down the middle. He has to squeeze himself inside, his long spindly fingers curling round the edges of the doorway. His joints rattle like bones as he slinks towards her, the cape he wears denoting his status as a higher-up.
Isabella is acutely aware that one swipe of his claw would result in instant death. She catches a glimpse of the red stains splattered across his mask, and immediately looks down again.
“Ah, have you noticed?” comes Albor’s deep, warbling voice. He points towards the bloodstain, sounding amused, “A mother was misbehaving earlier on, and I was feeling rather peckish on the way here.”
His joints clatter uncannily as he moves, his yellow eyes wide open. It’s very much unsettling.
Isabella holds her gaze to the ground, balling her dress in her fists.
Strange. It seems no matter how old she grew, she could hear her younger self crying in fear, ever so softly –
Ah, no, that isn’t it this time.
Albor turns his attention to the cradle in the room, striding towards it in a manner that makes Isabella’s heart leap in alarm. She quickly follows suite, stopping to stand behind him; just enough to see the face of her baby, his face contorted as he cries louder at the sight of the demon.
“Ugly little creature,” Albor comments. He extends a claw, tracing it over the baby’s forehead. “But because he’s been birthed by you, I do believe he has the potential to be a great harvest someday.”
“Thank you, Albor.” Isabella answers.
“You’ve made good progress.” As he speaks, he does not lift his gaze from her baby. “I am most certain you’ll be exempt from here once your offspring is old enough.”
Isabella feels a surge of joy, yet remains as stoic as ever.
“Thank you, Albor. I will continue to do my best.”
The demon finally looks back at her, like he has to reluctantly turn away from the infant. Once again, Isabella is on high alert.
“I will report back to the higher-ups with the good news, and will see you again in a few months,” he comments, and just like that does he slink away, to a daunting world that Isabella would never understand. She watches him disappear, relieved, and immediately paces to her baby’s side.
“He’s gone, so please stop crying,” Isabella whispers.
She carefully brings the child to her chest. He's so warm in her arms, and so small, she sometimes fears that she’d squeeze him too tightly. She sits on the bed and gently bounces him on her lap, trying to calm him down. His crying thankfully fades into silence. But Isabella earns not a smile or a laugh from her baby, just a look of curiosity from his wide, black eyes.
-
A couple of days left, and Isabella would be granted her freedom. Her child had grown old enough to be weaned, and so this was their last night together, before he was sent to a farm.
The moonlight pools into her cell when her child lets out a peep. As soon as Isabella hears his broken whimpers, she knows he’s about to cry. She trudges towards him, tired from hardly sleeping the night before.
“You’re always keeping me up, aren’t you?” Isabella whispers, hefting the ever-growing baby into her arms. It’s as if he knew of their separation, somehow.
She grabs the leftover milk bottle, using the faint light from outside to aid her.
Isabella guides it towards him, yet instead of drinking from the bottle, Ray spits it from his mouth as if in rebellion, and the bottle clatters as it falls on the floor.
“ - Wicked child. Just what do you want?” Isabella mutters, exasperated. You’re not thirsty or dirty, or need to hiccup, and you’ve been checked for sickness – you should be fine! So why are you always crying?
She hears her child start to whimper again, and all Isabella can do is try and hold him near her chest, swaying him gently as she whispers “Shh, shh, sh,” against his forehead.
He’s quiet now, yet not sleepy – he’s looking up at her with his coal-black eyes again. Eyes that are wide and expectant.
“I see how it is,” she murmurs, moving to sit on the bed, “You want a song again, don’t you?”
Making herself comfortable, she clears her throat, still raspy from a bout of sickness.
She opens her mouth, but a sudden wail fills the air. It's not her child, but another woman somewhere down the hall, crying into the night. It sounds more like a creature letting out a tremendous yell, and Isabella covers her child's ears. She waits it out, counting the seconds, until the sound peters out.
She clears her throat, again, stroking her infant's hair with a shaky hand. As softly as possible, in the little cell, she begins to hum a melody from long ago. Her voice trembles, as she half expects another woman to begin caterwauling, but it's so quiet that everyone down the hall might as well of been holding their breath.
Isabella rarely hums nowadays – songs from her childhood brought back too many unwanted memories, and so it didn't take long for fragments of her childhood to come back to her full-force.
The child who’d taught me the song, she reminisces, he was only a boy.
Only a boy whose life was stripped from him. She used to be plagued with frequent nightmares of him, waking up to cry out his name.
She squeezes Ray's hand, comforting herself more so than her child, and continues to hum, even when her voice cracks in pain. And she soon notices that little Ray’s eyes are growing droopy, his breathing slowing down out as he falls asleep.
Why is it that the only way to silence him nowadays is by doing the only thing that brings me pain? Isabella laments.
She finds that she cannot finish the tune, her heart beginning to ache as memories flood back. As Ray drifts asleep, she is suddenly moving, hastily placing him back in the cradle. She goes back to bed only to have her turn of crying, pressing her face into the bed sheets. She felt like a helpless child again. The song plays in her head, as does the images – his mousy brown hair, his inquisitive blue eyes, his freckles…the boy who embodied a happy quietness about him, a feeling of bliss that Isabella would never experience again.
She felt pathetic over missing him – he was long gone, after all. But perhaps it was for the better, in the end. Such a gentle soul didn’t deserve to see the reality of this world.
Isabella hums gently to herself, the sight of her sleeping baby turning into a smudged spectacle of dark colors as she silently cries.
Ray. A child named after the beams of sunlight. That’s what Leslie was like – the paragon of light, untouched by life’s wickedness.
-
[The Bunker, After Goldy Pond]
Mama, is that you?
In the clutches of sleep, Emma hears a familiar lullaby, but the tone of voice is deeper, the notes wobbly with unease.
She feels as if she’s resurfacing from a deep, dark ocean as she becomes conscious, and her eyes open slightly, adjusting to the dim light of the room.
She’s on a bed, in a familiar room – it seems she’s in the bunker again. She breathes a sigh of relief, before it occurs to her that someone’s snoring softly nearby, and she notices a slight pressure on the blanket, near the bottom of the bed. She shakily sits up, eyeing the person, and feels her heartbeat calm upon realization. She would’ve been very much startled if it hadn’t been for the familiarity of the dark, side swept hair and angled brows, her childhood friend seemingly passed out before her.
Ray must be exhausted without me around helping with the kids, she thinks fondly.
He’s all curled up on top of the blankets, appearing peaceful – truly, he’s still a child, despite the cold front he always put on.
Emma presumes he’s out cold. As she moves, she realizes that under the blanket, he has a loose grip on her hand. It was barely a grip, more like his hand gracing over hers, but it was warm and comforting. Absently, she curls her fingers around it, alert when she feels him gripping back in response. She looks at his face: his eyes are still shut. His joints are twitching though – it seems he was dreaming.
He’d also began muttering under his breath; whatever he was saying, he didn’t seem too pleased about it, his brow scrunching in discomfort and a frown on his face. It was a pained look.
Emma doesn’t like the fact he looks upset. She feels the fogginess of her sleepy state dissipate, and it dawns on her that a mask had been placed on her mouth to help her breathe. It makes loud puffing noises, and Emma finds it uncomfortable, deciding that she wants it off immediately. She pulls it over her face ungraciously and leans over Ray.
The song she’d heard echo in her mind earlier, in her unconscious state – it seemed to bring her great comfort. She begins to quietly hum the tune, although her pitch is flawed. She can’t remember it quite right.
It’s evident that Ray’s in a deep state of sleep, and there were dark bags under his eyes. With a look of delight, as she continues to hum, she reaches to smooth down the bristles of his hair, marveling as they stuck back up.
He’s just like a hedgehog, she thinks amusedly. She hadn’t done such a thing to him since they were little - he'd always get mad from it, the kind of anger that threw Emma into a laughing fit.
Ray grumbles in his sleep, the tension on his face gradually smoothing out. Emma slowly brushes the fringe away from his eyes. As prickly as Ray seems , Emma muses, he’s still a child like the rest of us .
She carries on with the tune for as much as she can, though adds her own little flair along the way, not being able to piece together all the right notes. She gets so lost in her little rendition that she almost jumps when her gaze meets Ray’s. His fringe is still combed to the side, exposing both eyes, yet instead of his usual slight frown, his face registers a degree of shock, and Emma can’t help finding his wide eyes and bedridden hair comical, cracking a smile.
“You woke up,” he says simply.
“Doy,” she responds, “So did you, it seems.”
Ray sits up, brushing himself off. The spot he’d slept in was warm – just how long had he rested there?
“You looked like you were dreaming about something…unpleasant,” Emma comments, to which Ray looks away, his frown just visible under his messy fringe. He composes himself, sluggishly standing up.
“Just a weird dream, is all,” he says, his eyes widening again as he turns her way, “I should be asking you the same thing, though! Wait a second, Emma - I’ll go get the others.”
His voice had been trembling ever so slightly, whether in sadness or relief, Emma isn't sure.