Loveless Life

Carved in wood, above the door, the sign read: Personal Watch Facility 15003.
The iron doorbell went off signaling that today’s delivery had arrived. All three were wrapped in brown cloth and rested in three separate carrying seats. Our Head Personal Watch came to the door and picked up all three. He avoided contact as he transported them to their separate rooms. The rooms that they would each occupy for the next seventeen years.

It had always been this way to most. A rare few still lived to remember the forgotten days. The days when one lived with one’s gene providers until one was of proper age. However, that all changed when the governments all came together to decide that it was best for mankind to start fresh. To not burden the new with the problems of the old but instead offer equal opportunity for all. The decree read, “As soon as a child is born it must be reported and sent to the Personal Watch Facility in the nearest county center, where it shall be provided with all necessary living standards. No child shall receive more, nor less, creating a fair society and thus world.”

Every day is the same for me, for every day is the same for them. My job is to sit and watch. To watch through the monitors that they all wake up at the same time from their own beds with the same steel posts. To watch that once they stir from their beds they go and don the same clothes. I watch them trudge the same black floorboards stretched across the narrow halls. The dingy walls collapsing in leading to the dining hall where the antiseptic smell wafted through the air. This is where they will eat the same Monday morning meal as every Monday before.


I see them sit at their isolated desks with their meal, avoiding eye contact. Never do they communicate, for as it says in my handbook, those who do are to be immediately flagged. This is to ensure that no individual should feel left out. A loud speaker excuses them one by one to go on to their daily studies and exercises that they will each do alone. I shall watch them throughout the day. I am to watch their activities and monitor their progress. I will see them eat lunch, and I will seemthem eat dinner. And I shall make sure that they all go to bed at the same time. When the moon outside hangs high and the stars droop down looking sleepy; that is when it’s time.

I will watch him most of all. The boy who I gave a name, the name of Michael. Although each child is not to receive a name until one’s 17th birthday, he is Michael to me. I first noticed him when he cried more than any of the other newborns. I longed to do something, give him something to make it stop. However, such ideas are forbidden. So instead, I watched. I watched the way he curled up in a ball at night and clenched his eyes shut. I watched how he would stare at the sky through his foggy window. However, it was the day that he looked up straight at the camera in his room and just stared. For what seemed like hours he stared at me as noone has ever done before. Like someone deep down he knew what I was feeling. I pretended I didn’t notice his drawings stashed beneath his mattress. Drawings that haunted me when I closed my mind. Drawings of a woman, whos eyes were ever longing. Eyes that I see when I close mine. I never spoke a word. I did this because I felt something inside of me for that child. It is some feeling that I have no words for, except to say that Michael became my reason to be. To be here, to be alive, to watch.

It has been ten years today since I started watching Michael. It is hard to contain this emotion that keeps bubbling up inside of me. I must not let it show though, for if anyone was to notice, I do not know what would come of me.

The storm started that night. The beginning of the end. I did not notice it until all the monitors went down. Then the lights blew out. I looked out the window and the light drizzle I had noticed this morning had exacerbated to a full on raging storm. All the lock systems stopped functioning, and someone was sent to go manually bolt all the doors and windows.

Three days in and the storm had just gotten worse. One could no longer see through the tired windows. I couldn’t stand being locked up in the surveillance room, but orders were not to leave. I needed to know if Michael was ok; it was eating at me from the inside out.

Finally, after not hearing from the Head Personal Watch in almost a week, and with my food sources running low, I opened the soundproof steel door and ventured down the seemingly never ending hall to where I assumed I would find most of the children. However, what I found I could never unsee. There in the dining hall I found them.

Pools of thick, red blood covered the floors. Lifeless bodies were mangled over the stained white desks. Right then and there, I threw up. It just came and came and came until I collapsed onto the hard stone floor. That is when they noticed me. That is when every living head turned and looked at me, away from their fallen prey. Theirs eyes shone in the black of night. They moved like animals in a pack as they started to come towards me. I looked around the dining hall frantic for Michael, to save him, to get him out of here. He was nowhere to be seen. So, I ran. I had memorized the path to his room and I saw it in my sleep. However, my feet just wouldn’t carry me faster no matter how hard I tried. I turned around and the children, if I could even still call them that, were on my tail. I whipped my head around to crash into a zombified version of my Michael. His cheeks were hollow, his lips were bloodstained and cracked, and those eyes, those eyes I had longed to look into, felt haunted and lifeless.

“Michael run! We must go, we can leave!” I tried to shout through my tears.

By this time a group of 20 or so children, whom I had watched for years, surrounded me. They looked hungry; their eyes told me that only blood would quench their thirst.

Michael tilted his head to the side and gaped his mouth just enough to let out a thin stream of drool. I watched him take out a long, sharp item that appeared to be made of rock. For a split second I did not notice what was happening. Then it hit me, like a train would hit a small doe that had wandered into its tracks.

“Stop, I, I can help you! Please, Michael, what have they done to you?” I screamed with all the life left in me. Why couldn’t he understand that I knew him? I could take care of him. We could run away.

They were all around me, I could smell sweat and blood, and with my last breathe I muttered, “I have been watching. I have watched over you your whole life. All of you. I knew when you were sick, I knew when you were sad, and I saw what you felt. I know you, all of you. Please Michael, what have they done to you?”

The children stopped. I looked around to notice the little girl I always saw sing to herself at night. I saw the boy who was so tall that his feet hung off the bed. I saw them wearing the same torn clothes on different bodies. I saw the same desperate looks on their incomparable faces. I saw all these individuals. I saw that my Michael was not mine. And yet, he was not his own.

He stepped forward and looked into my eyes before he whispered, “No. Look at what you have done. If you knew, why didn’t you help?”

And then the end came.