thewhitelily

She’d chosen to join the Children’s Army when she reached the age of seven.

‘Chosen’ was, perhaps, a strong word. Those who chose not to join on their seventh birthday were not considered for advancement in later life, beyond an ordinary labourer's position, regarded all their lives with suspicion. So were their families. She had never considered that there might be another option but for her to join the Children’s Army. Her mother and father were proud of her in her uniform, and all was right with the world.

But she had chosen to excel. Chosen to throw herself, body and soul, into the training, into the recitations of creeds and manifestos, into the activities and the formation marching. Chosen to inform her superiors of her classmates’ possession of banned items and their unsanctioned excursions, about their disloyal references to the Glorious Leader from behind cupped hands or closed doors.

Perhaps that was not so much of a choice either. She had never considered that there might be another option but to commit to the thing entirely.

However it came about, her zeal meant that she was promoted, trusted, and given special training for a special mission. Education in mathematics and chemistry, and physics. Blast forces. Mix ratios. Language lessons. Deportment lessons. Acting lessons. She was to be sent on a mission; she was to give her life for the glory of the Republic.

She felt privileged to be the lucky one chosen among the thousands of other candidates, and her mother wept with joy at the honour.

At seventeen, she was given the name "Mae" and sent to a foreign land, to study at a foreign university.

She excelled, of course. She was used to excelling. She had never considered that there might be another option.

As she came to the end of her degree, she began to wonder what came next, but no further instructions arrived on the little receiver that had been sent along with her; its tiny red light remaining dark and still.

A man named Henry Baker liked her, and since she’d been told to do what she needed to do to blend in, she encouraged it. He was a little dull, perhaps—an economics major with designs on investment banking—but he was solid, and easy to deceive. When he proposed marriage to her, she accepted his hand along with her citizenship.

She thought her superiors would be proud of her achievements.

She found a job, teaching mathematics to highschoolers. Henry went to a large bank. They bought a comfortable home, and Mae put the receiver on a high shelf where she could easily see it but it didn’t attract any attention. A little heirloom, she told Henry, from her family.

She waited. Fell pregnant. Multiple times. Raised her children. Rose to feed infants in the middle of the night, changed nappies, kissed bruised knees, wept at the coming and going of fevers, cooked dinners, sewed dance costumes and gave driving lessons.

She still glanced at the receiver sometimes, where it sat on its high shelf gathering dust, but by the time ten, fifteen, twenty years passed, she’d long realised that she’d been abandoned. Forgotten; her superiors killed and the records lost or burned in the revolution when the Glorious Leader’s regime had toppled. Or when the Glorious Leader after him had been lynched outside the People’s Palace. They did get news of her homeland here, but it was difficult to work out what was true from so far away.

She changed the receiver’s batteries once per year along with the fire alarms, out of habit.

When she was forty-seven, the diagnosis came through. Cancer. Henry quit his job to be with her through the chemotherapy. Be with her, in case he couldn’t be with her, later. They removed her left breast. But that was all right, a little padding and no one but Henry knew the difference, and since he didn’t seem bothered by it there was no reason for her to be either. And she lived.

It was another ten years after that when it happened.

Mae Baker was up late, watching television. The show was a decadent thing, women wearing too-tight skirts and sleeping with each other’s husbands, but Henry had fallen asleep with the remote and Mae was in a tricky spot on the baby jacket she was knitting. If she dropped a stitch at this point, it would surely work its way back to unravel the whole thing, so she was stuck watching the mindless drivel. Her third grandchild was due in a month and she was slow enough at knitting that she couldn’t afford to redo the piece if she wanted to finish it in time.

The brainless woman on the show let out a high-pitched scream at the sight of yet another pair of ridiculous, absurdly expensive shoes—shoes that would have fed ten families for a year where Mae had once lived. As she glanced up to the ceiling in a silent search for help, her eyes locked on to the tiny red, blinking light on the receiver.

There was a faint scream and the sound of knitting hitting the ground.  

In his armchair close to the fire, Henry snorted, murmured, and fell back to sleep.