The Dead Lands

The caravan pulled into the roundabout of an old yellow-bricked elementary school, and there he was, waiting for them on the front step—a thin man, bald and goosenecked, with a notebook and pen. He was smiling wanly. He, with the help of the drivers, unloaded every cage and examined every slave. That’s what they were now, slaves. The heavy woman tried to pull away and got kicked to the ground and beaten with a cudgel. A boy cried and one of the drivers cuffed him in the ear and he cried all the louder.

 

The thin man did not answer questions, but he asked them. “Have you had any illnesses? Have you had any children? Do you know any trades? Do you know how to cook? Do you know how to sew? Do you know how to garden?” And he commanded: “Open your mouth. Take off your clothes. Hold out your arms. Turn around in a circle.”

 

To Gawea, he said, “Is there something wrong with you?”

 

“No.”

 

“I ask, because your eyes…You don’t have a tail? Or seizures? Any difficulties with language?”

 

“No.”

 

“Hmm.” He made some notes on his clipboard and said, “Next,” and sent her into the black mouth of the schoolhouse behind him.

 

 

 

They branded her on the shoulder, along with the rest, her flesh sizzling, bunching up in a letter, F, and a number, 131. They cleaned her, gave her fresh clothes, assigned her a bunk. “You are now part of something bigger,” the thin man told them. “You’re serving a kind of collective. The rebirth of humanity. The reconstruction of the country. Your work matters. It’s important. You’re better off here. Forget your old lives. Forget what people used to call you. You’re a tool now. You’re a shovel, you’re a hammer, you’re a sickle, you’re a trowel.”

 

When the heavy woman tried to protest, the thin man nodded to some guards and they dragged her out back and tied her to a post and lashed her with a whip seven times, and after that nobody said a word when told what to do. Everyone had a task. The job of the gardener was to raise and preserve food. The job of the tailor was to weave and sew and patch. The job of the slaver was to harvest slaves. In this way, town by town, or hive by hive, they multiplied, programming behavior, constructing a new world.

 

Gawea was assigned to the hospital. When they told her what to do, she did it. It was easier that way. Easier to focus on a task, scraping a broom across the floor and making a pile of dirt. Knocking down cobwebs. Mopping up puddles of blood. At first it even felt welcome, curative. She had a place and function in the world. As long as she kept busy, she didn’t have to think. Her head remained empty. Emptiness felt safe.

 

In this way, several days and then weeks passed. She washed trays of tools—scalpels, forceps—until they gleamed. She stripped the beds of sheets, collected towels and aprons from the floor, soiled with blood and shit and amniotic fluid. “It won’t be long,” the thin man told her, “before you’re ready for a child yourself.”

 

Mostly they left her alone. She had a way about her, a stillness even when moving, that didn’t draw the eye. Today she paused at a second-story window to observe a papery gray wasp’s nest, half the size of her, dangling from a nearby branch. The black-bodied wasps, each the size of a finger, crawled across its outside, thrumming their wings.

 

Then she went about tidying a cot, folding a blanket around a thin mattress stuffed with wool. She was in the pregnancy wing, and in the room rested three other women, all wearing shapeless gowns to accommodate their rounded stomachs. Two of them weren’t much older than her, young enough to still look longingly at dolls. The other had gray threading her hair.

 

They rubbed their hands across their bellies, sometimes clutching themselves, as if trying to strangle away the pain contracting there. Gawea answered to the midwives, one of them a slit-mouthed, wide-hipped woman who always pointed a finger when she called out, “You!” before assigning some errand.

 

Gawea paused in the doorway of a room where she found the midwives busy with a birth, drawing a squalling purple-skinned baby from between a mother’s legs, wiping it with a towel and laying it on the mother’s chest before cutting the cord and sewing a tear and easing out the placenta and stanching the bleeding.

 

In the next room, a woman paced the floor with her fists balled into the small of her back. Her eyes were closed and her teeth bared. She breathed in a pattern of quick pants and long gusts.

 

And in the room after she found her mother, Juliana.

 

Gawea recognized her instantly. It was more than the framed picture her oma carried around. Her mother was, after all, more than a decade removed from that charcoal likeness. Hollow eyed. With thinning hair, yellowing skin. All these years and several births and so many years of hard labor later. No, the recognition was deeper. As if blood were magnetized.

 

A baby suckled at her breast. It was curled like a shrimp into the nook of her arm. Its head was still coned from birth, its skin wrinkled and splotchy. Juliana was smiling, stroking its downy hair and humming a song that stopped short when she spied the girl.

 

“What do you want?”

 

“Mama.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“Mama.” Her voice was tiny and delicate, like a teacup rarely used. “It’s me. It’s your daughter.” She hurried to the bed and laid a hand on her mother’s. Something happened then. Ever since losing Oma, she felt closed down, locked away, unaware. Now, as she grabbed hold of her mother, it was as if two doors on either side of a house burst open and sent the wind rushing in and out, all of it mixed up with birds and bats and bugs and rain. “Mama.”

 

Juliana’s eyes watered and her nostrils flared, as if exposed to a whiff of alcohol that once made her sick. “I don’t know who you are. Get away from me. I said get away from me.”

 

A scuff sound. In the doorway stood the slit-mouthed midwife. She was wiping her hands off with a towel that matched her shirt, patterned with blood.

 

“Get her away from me,” Juliana said. “Get her away from my baby. She was trying to take it from me.”

 

“No,” Gawea said. “Mama.”

 

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