Come back. Come back to me. It was my mother’s voice. I heard it often in my sleep. I had run from her at eight years old when the soldiers marched in and rounded up women. They were seeking fertile women. The birth rate was dangerously low and the state needed babies to feed the war machine and babies came from mothers. Young women who were fruitful. The soldiers scared me and I ran from her. Come back she had cried out. She didn’t mean it. I ran. She wanted me gone from the grip of the soldiers.
It was a wasteland out there. Environments destroyed by corporate greed. I shaved my head. Wore men’s work boots. Hid in sweater hoods. I couldn’t be a woman blossoming in this land. I would be taken by the state. Forced to procreate. Forced to have a baby sacrificed to the state for its endless war. War had been brewing for fifty years. No one knew why other than many companies profited. The Environmental Protection Agency had been dismantled before my time. Corporations dumped and fumigated without restrictions. What was once rolling green hills was now dry, crispy with gas emanating noxious odors.
We were better off in the urban areas. You could raid dumpsters. Sleep in rat-infested alleys that weren’t saturated with chemicals. I stuck to Baltimore. When I ran from my mother we were in Pennsylvania. A church had relocated us there when my father broke my mother’s jaw. Mother was still young. She had me at sixteen. I knew she was in some building somewhere being raped. She was probably pregnant. She probably had already had four babies. Four babies snatched for the military.
Come back to me. I always heard her voice in my sleep. But I could never come back to her. Our bond had ended. Why did she say it? Was it her way of saying she loved me and would never forget me?
I’m sixteen and my breasts are too prominent. There were doctors, crazy doctors, who could remove breasts for those girls who wanted to hide as boys. I saw one.
“I take your breasts, they think you are a boy and you go to war. Die a brutal death. You keep your breasts and get shuttled to a procreation farm. You breed until you can’t. What’s your choice?”
I tightened my mouth. “I’d rather die on a battlefield than spread my legs for an ass hole.”
“Well, I suppose you’re right. If you can’t breed or stop they will kill you anyway. If you want a bullet in the spine…rather than an injection…your choice.”
And so the doctor took my breasts and I continued to roam that desolate land until the military rounded me up and I was left with memories of my mother. Come back to me. Mother. We would never see each other again.
THE END
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