I crouched in the corner of my room, the corner furthest away from the window. The sun is relentless, and unlike the other rooms in our house, in my father's house, my room did not have air conditioning or a UV-resistant cover on the window. I was beyond sweating, my body desiccated, and like me in the People's Republic, everything is dry or drying up.

Even the Thames, that once mighty river, is reduced to a few barely flowing puddles of stinking mud and the iconic bridges serve merely to elevate us above this filthy mire so that we may cross the exposed river bed unsullied.

The people are also dry, slaves to production, output, efficiency, and the straight line are our gods. Even communication has been reduced, boiled down to the barest minimum. Outside of the approved sentences listed in the Manual of Approved Phrases, there are curt nods, arched eyebrows, and fingers that twitch in response to barely spoken questions. These dehydrated movements are such subtle indicators of more expansive expressions that half the time, I can only imagine what people are talking about. Sometimes I wonder if everyone is just playing along to some ridiculous game. Perhaps no one in the People's Republic ever knows exactly what anyone else is saying. We have rendered communication pointless.

I am not like anyone else; I am not a producer. I spend my days hiding at home, trying not to be seen by anyone, especially not by my father. My mother can barely look at me; if she needs to talk to me, her eyes hover somewhere over my left shoulder, and I don't even remember the last time she looked at me directly. This may sound depressing to you, but it is a vast improvement to me. All the years from my birth until I left for military service, my mother made it her full-time job to make it clear to me that I was a disgrace. She never once attempted to protect me from the violence of my father and brothers. On many occasions, she would be the one telling my father of my latest crimes, reading off my bad behaviour from her little blue notebook while he undid his belt. Still, of all the conflict in my family, it was not the violence and beatings that left me permanently damaged; it was the lack of love, the constant bullying, and the mental residue of living my entire life in a state of terror.

By the time I was on my way to puberty, I had stopped trying to keep up, quit trying to fit in, and simply withdrew into myself. I could sit for hours alone in my room, on the hard little bed with its utility grey sheets, doing nothing and thinking nothing. Once my military service had finished and my days began to blend into each other, I could go entire days without breaking the surface of my silent dream world. When I did end up with other people, it rarely went well.

On the day that everything changed I found myself summoned from my silently baking bedroom on the third floor to the dinner table. With my eldest brother dead and second born son missing presumed dead it was now up to me to honour my father's dinner table when he had guests.

It was with great reluctance that I took my seat at the uncomfortable, grey dining table. I had done this before and knew the drill - remain serious and silent. Unfortunately, in my rush to get there, I had overlooked a crucial detail - my shirt sleeves.

The shirt was clearly designed for utility rather than style, probably created in the same factory that produces our grey underpants and our grey wedding dresses. The shoulders hung limply, with empty spaces where military badges would ordinarily be attached. The shirt sagged and pulled in all the wrong places, emphasising my lack of athleticism and inadequate physique

My father noticed immediately; I could tell by the way he didn't look at me; he didn't need to; he had already seen evidence enough to warrant punishment later, so why keep looking? He said nothing, not yet; there was a stranger at the table. I didn't know who, I didn't need to know so I wasn't told but he was there. I couldn't do anything now; rolling down my sleeves would only make it worse, wouldn't it? That's what I thought, but perhaps I was also being perverse. I do it sometimes, on purpose.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I kept my head down, and I prayed to my food, not for a reprieve from the punishment that was to come, but only that this time I would die. You see, back then, I had not learned to hope. But in the strange way of fate, the more I stared at my plate and tried to be invisible, the more the stranger noticed me. I still have not learnt to hide in plain sight, in the same way that tip-toeing only makes you louder and whispering just carries your voice further. I could not hide without making people see me more.

As my father attempted, with less and less success, to seem interesting to the stranger, the stranger asked more and more questions about the family and about me. It was a sick game, perhaps like 'cat and mouse', except sometimes my father was the mouse, and sometimes it was me. The stranger was chasing something, and all I could do was stammer and blush when questions were directed my way.

Ours is, of course, a culture of pride, and no one was more ashamed of anything than my father was of me. The stranger was undoubtedly attempting to exploit my father's shame to his advantage. I found him staring, gazing lazily at my hands and the three extra inches of bare wrist where my cuffs should be, making occasional noises of agreement as my father worked harder and harder against the stranger's tide of blatant disinterest. I had shamed my father with my careless attire and broken the law. Now this stranger businessman would work his advantage.

As my father was halfway through a long and convoluted explanation of recent adjustments to the regulations of trading fish stocks in the 'Manual for Business,' the stranger, rather rudely ignored him and addressed me directly, "Do you like living here in the south?" he said with a sly smile.

His words hung there while my father spluttered in surprise, and his simmering gaze settled heavy and hot on my cheeks. Slowly, I dragged my eyes up from my plate to hover somewhere between the stranger's hairline and eyebrows; too scared to look him directly in the eyes. Still, I managed to notice so many details: the striking light green colour of his eyes in contrast to his clear but deeply tanned complexion. His intense and penetrating gaze threw me into such confusion that instead of answering with an expected and acceptable phrase such as, "I like all parts of the People's Republic," I did something I had never done before. I composed my own sentence. I admit it was not a masterpiece, but I was still a beginner then.

I said, "I should like to see the North."

I was surprised by the sound of longing in my voice; I didn't think I longed for anything, except maybe death. My father jumped in loud and booming, attempting to cover up or somehow deny the discomfort that only he felt. All I felt was an exhilarating tingling up and down my spine and in the seconds before his voice snapped the link, I saw everything there was to see about our dinner guest. His hair swept back, longer than regulation, curling around his ears, framing a wide face, squared and chiselled but with a deep sensitivity, set with those green eyes and framed with long lashes. Broad shoulders, muscled in a way that suggested swimming in clear salty waters and dancing on a hot summer night. He was not like the men I knew who wore their muscle-like armour, gained from hauling guns and stretchers, bare-knuckle fights and aggressive sports that always involved smashing something. As my eyes started the sweep back down to my plate, I noticed the first thing that made me smile in such a very, very long time. The stranger had also rolled up his sleeves, just one roll of the cuff.

Magic.

Only in the People's Republic does three inches of exposed wrist flesh have so much erotic power.

Author's Note

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