Rise-Flash Fiction

This story can also be found on Wattpad right here. I wrote it for a contest for The Handmaid's Tale.

My view of the world is different from a man's. A man looks up, looks out, and sees what is his domain. I scurry, I flit, looking only at the floor to see what might impede my movement to serve.

Kneeling in prayer, my lips automatically reciting the prayer for our government my mother had taught me so long ago, my view remained only the floor. Silently, I waited, daring to move only when I heard his voice, extolling the virtues of government crackdowns this week.

Cracked, my eyes saw what I should not, people, faces, his eyes.

Caught, I flinched my eyes back down to the ground.

Here, there were shoes and legs. This was my world, the world I should not dare to leave. That brief moment of defiance could cost me everything, so I looked down at my world instead.

My father's silk-blend covered knees, the modest light pink cotton of my mother's cheap, ankle length gown, the navy blue of my sister's equally long dress along with a flash of navy tights that was quickly covered.

I knelt the same as they did, my head bowed, always bowed, so that I did not see the sins of the world and could not be tempted into my own troubles.

My lips moved, my hands clasped, and I looked as pious as the rest.

Still.

Unmoving.

Beneath dark hair, hair that covered my face like a veil, my eyes began to move again.

It was my eyes that spoke for me now. My eyes that spoke the words I could not speak, for fear of censure, perhaps even reprisal. But only to him.

With little more than glances we'd fallen in love. Our eyes devoured each other guardedly, in stolen moments. Our eyes spoke of love, our eyes made plans, our eyes changed our fate.

I don't know what color my eyes are, I've never seen myself, no one has ever told me their color. But, his are green, the green of a cedar tree in a dry summer, and they have told me volumes about how he loves me.

I look down as a cleric walks by, tapping the stick meant for those not paying proper attention.

As he passes those green eyes shift to a door, the one that he will leave by. I understand his meaning and know that the time has come.

Standing with the rest of the citizens, I wait for my parents to become embroiled in conversation with another family before I move, quietly heading for the lady's room, the room we went to when we needed to calm our nerves from a sermon that may have proven too stirring for our sensibilities.

There I found a brown gown, one that would blend into the woods I was about to enter.

I changed quickly. I left, I left him behind. Running, running for freedom. From them all.

That was the world of 2020. I'm heading for the wall. I'm heading for freedom.