East Wing, Part I

Complete and utter fiction set slightly in the future.

In my very first memory, the walls were striped red and gold. A chandelier glittered overhead. I remember watching the crystals spin, transfixed, as my mother tried to coax something sticky and white into my mouth. My father sat at the table, eating carefully with one hand while typing on a laptop with the other. His rings flashed in the faint gray glow of the screen.

Then a knock rang at the door and reverberated through the whole house. I remember thinking the knocker must have a hand of iron to make such a noise. My father slammed the laptop shut so hard the Esc key zinged across the room. My mother scooped me up with one hand. The other clutched a steak knife.

“Put it down, Sara.”

My mother shook her head and shifted me so my weight rested on her opposite hip.

“It’ll only make things worse for us.” My father’s face was stoic, his voice close to a monotone.

“I’ll not let them take us.”

“They’ll take us anyway. The only variable is how much force they use.”

I twisted in her grip. “Mommy?”

“You scared, honey?”

“Yeah.” Plaintive.

She held my father’s eye for a long, tense moment before the knife hit the table with a muted clatter. It gleamed softly, steel against dark wood. My father let out a low breath. Together, the three of us waited; my mother clench-jawed and shaking, my father horribly calm, and me, four years old and frightened into whimpering silence.

Then I can’t remember anything more.

***

Mother says they burst in the windows, guns pointed at us from all directions. She says she resisted and she thought they were going to shoot her but instead they clubbed her across the back of the head and that’s why she gets her migraines now. Father says it wasn’t nearly so dramatic: they walked in through the front door, marched us outside, and forced us into the car. Either way, we ended up here.

It’s amazing how easily one can get used to a situation, how seamlessly the unimaginable becomes the normal, the everyday, the dull. I have spent my existence within these flat gray walls. That shred of a child’s memory is the only connection I have with the world outside. My life is here. I have slept on that slab of a bed every night since I was four years old. I measured my height in pencil marks against the concrete of the doorframe. I learned to tell time from the stark white face of the prison-issue clock on my wall; taught myself to read by sounding out the letters of the sign outside my window:

WASHINGTON DC PENITENTIARY
East Wing:
Federal Crime