VOID by Taylor Pinderson (little red riding hood read aloud .txt) 📕

steps out her heels clicking on the cement floor. This is the outfit of an authoritive figure, probably government. “Y583.” Her voice is curt and dismissive as she pronounces my four syllable brand. I feel my feet numbly slap on the gray cement floor as I walk op the long aisle, every chair ahead of me empty. My throat is desert dry as I walk through the door way and feel it’s cold, heavy weight click shut behind me.
I clench the inside of my lip in between my teeth till I taste blood, calming my knocking knees with pain. The room is set up like a dentist’s office, the ones found in the forbidden textbooks describing the life and reign of the Destroyers. There is a short, lengthy gray-cushioned chair fastened firmly to the gray tiled floors as if what will take place in the chair might cause it to tip over if not properly attached to the chair. I bite my lip harder, my teeth stained with my blood. I must remember to keep my mouth closed. There is a monitor next to the chair, big and bulky, with a black screen. It is a simple machine, measuring heart rate, sweat glands, and blood pressure. In the time of the Destroyers it was referred to as a polygraph or lie detector. They are not very common despite the simplicity and cheapness of the machine. Technology isn’t common in our society. We aren’t very technologically advanced, not as much as past societies. Technology leads to greed, greed to obsession, obsession to obliteration.
There’s no one in the small gray room. I see a little door on the other side of the room and I wonder if this is some sort of test. Am I expected to sit down, or walk through? I walk hesitantly across the room and reach for the door knob.
“Leaving so soon?” the voice has an edge to it. Emotion. Something I’m not quite used to. I try to place it and my mind produces the word sarcasm, though I can’t quite remember what sarcasm means. The body belonging to the voice is tall lean and sinewy. Muscle is uncommon in our community although none of us are fat. But athleticism is the product of compulsion or obsession none of which the people in my community possess. A faded brand against his forehead, slightly covered by his messy hair and cap, reads W475. W475. I squint my eyes in frustration as I try to place this young man’s face. Memory is one of the traits they remove from our minds at birth, with a vaccine and simple surgical procedure that removes all dangerous emotions and characteristics.
“It’s rude to stare. Sit down please.” He gestures to the chair. Another trait removed from us at birth. Humor. Are the matchers not given this vaccine to scare us? Provoke us? I sit, obediently. The man unhinges the back of the monitor and pulls from it a handful of wires with probes and suction cups on the tips. He steps on a pedal on the bottom of the chair and I hear a mechanical whir as I begin to lean back.
When my body is horizontal, he starts placing the probes all over my tunic. Two on either side of my collar bone, one on my diaphragm, two on each under arm. Then the vague realization hits me. There monitoring my body. As he raises the needle to my temple I understand. They’re putting me through a simulation. This is the guy from the bath room. The one with emotion in his eyes. These are my last thoughts before my body is enveloped in a woozy darkness.
I no longer sit in the old fashioned chair of the gray room but am back in the hall where I waited to enter it. Thought this time I do not sit in the cold plastic chair identical to the ones the many voids now filling the room reside in. now, I am looking down on them, and they look back up at me. There are government officials below me too, their cold hard expressions looking up to me as if they could penetrate my soul, their long black robes flowing though there is no breeze. Suddenly I know what is happening and a glance to my wrists confirms my fears. I am suspended in the air with four gnarled ropes, each of their scratchy fibers cutting one of my limbs. A law enforcement officer below has his hand on a crank that will tighten each of the ropes, stretching my frame till there is nothing left to stretch, and the ropes dangle above their heads each still attached to a part of my torn body. I am being punished, though for what I have no clue. Fear seizes in my chest as I see his hand turn.
I frantically search the emotionless faces of the crowd, though I don’t know what I’m looking for. Nonetheless I find nothing, no sympathy, no pity, not even contempt at my destruction. I knew I wouldn’t find anything, but my body goes rigid with the cold realization that I am alone. I know I should hide my fear, but for some reason that seems foolish to me. Fear is a deadly sin, one that will get you killed, but why pretend you’re not afraid if you are being killed already. My chest is tight and I have trouble breathing as I repeat to myself the most horrible word in the world. Alone. The harsh word rolls off my tongue as I feel the muscles in my shoulder tear. Alone. It rings in my ears as my hip snaps. Alone. I can taste it, heavy in my mouth as the world once more swirls into darkness.
I’m on the ground again, my limbs still intact, but I’m still not in a comfortable position. My face is smashed to a cement wall, my hands chained above my head. I don’t know where I am but to my left I can see many other people in the same position I’m in, and I catch glimpses of law enforcement officers positioned behind us, heavy metal guns pointed to the back of our heads. Fear seizes in my chest again, not from the death threat standing behind me, but from my willingness to conform to my curiosity when I know that it’s illegal. The thought doesn’t seem quite as foolish to me now because I doubt I am going to die.
I look to my right and see I am on the end of the line of people, the rope tying my hands tied loosely to the jagged edge of the wall. I tug on it and it falls to the ground, instantly freeing my hands. I look quickly to the officer behind me and see that his attention is focused on a speaker on a stage to my far left. I slip quietly away almost laughing at the easiness of my escape. I quickly walk down the dusty gray street careful not to look back and give away my position. I turn the corner and I’m staring at the back of a black, government tunic.
The speaker on the stage.
I’ve walked a full circle, right back to the shooting. And all of a sudden I’m angry, so angry. It almost blinds me as it bubbles up in the pit of my stomach. I’m angry at my carelessness in my escape, at my selfishness for leaving all these people here to die while I ran away. I’m angry that the government would even think of killing all these innocent people. I am angry I was born into this twisted country while the rest of the world can freely express themselves.
I feel the anger spreading through my body like a wild fire, warming my fingertips, making them itch to hit something, to smash, to destroy. I’m so, so angry. I ball my fingers up into a fist bring my hand back and I hit the staring government official straight in the face.
The heat in my body dissolves and my surroundings shift to a gray cement street, the one wear my parents live. A Restraining officer is talking to me, his stubby blonde hair barely visible under the black, Government Issue cap.
“You’ve been bad.” He says,” You have defied the government, and have shown evidence of three of the deadly emotions, Fear, Greed, and Anger.” His voice is monotone as he rattles of the list of my misdoings. I sense movement behind him but cannot grasp what’s happening behind his broad body structure. He continues, “Such actions must be punished. You are to sit here and watch this display calmly, and accept the consequences for your actions. Any more disruptions will result in your immediate death.” He looks at me, shakes his head and walks away. Now I see the full scene behind him.
It’s my mother, in the middle of the street, standing stock still, her tunic ripped, her face blank. Law enforcement officers stand behind her, a club in each of their hands. They take turns beating her with hard blows that convulse through her old body. I need to help her but the officers words keep floating through my mind. Any more disruptions will result in your immediate death. One of the officers hits her again and she crumples with the force of the bat. I scream and lurch forward, my hand outstretched. An officer kicks her and I clutch my side as if I was kicked, myself. I know I must go to her and help her. I furiously push the officer’s words out of my mind and rush to her side, cradling her beaten frame in my arms. I look up and see the officers club descending on my head.

TRUTH

I wake in the gray room, my tunic mottled with cold sweat, my breath coming hard and fast. W475 stands above me, a worried look on his face. He hurriedly removes the monitor from my body and raises the torso section of the chair so I am in an upright position. He bites his lip and opens his mouth as if to say something but closes it again. Finally he manages to stutter, “Co-come with me.” He turns on his heel and walks out the door on the other side of the room. I raise myself from the chair, still shaking from the simulation, and quickly as possible follow him out the room.
My mind gets carried away in the long, silent walk to wherever this strange boy is taking me. Did I do something wrong? Does he know that I exhibited the traits of all for deadly sins and is hauling me off to get killed? Did I do something minor to prevent me from becoming matched to an occupation at all. Is this another test, one to eat us alive as a “worried” official leads us on a long walk to nowhere? Where are we going?
We wind our way through countless dark hallways, no other officers with clueless voids trailing behind. I try to count time