I awoke; in the literal and metaphorical sense, I awakened. An unusually hot and rainy summer descended on us, thick walls from tiny droplets. In the afternoon, I could walk out into the middle of the square courtyard in the centre of the compound and be submerged. If you haven't experienced a true monsoon, then it's hard to explain; the sound can be almost deafening, yet just a few seconds after it starts, you forget you can hear it. You forget to hear altogether. It's as if your brain switches off your ears to keep from drowning entirely in the sweet sound of a billion droplets hitting the ground, hitting each other, hitting the roof, hitting skin and hair and jumping back up again just to collide with something else.

Your eyes adjust their settings, too, I have heard of snow blindness before, but no one has ever described the effect of torrential rain in all its brilliance on the human eye. Everything becomes blurred, like you're seeing the world through one giant but tiny panelled kaleidoscope that moves everything just slightly from its proper place. Standing in the middle of that beautiful courtyard with my ears deafened, silence blocking out the sounds of the household, and with the rain cutting me off from the world as if it was a curtain, I felt something. I felt anything and everything.

I still don't think you can feel hope unless you have something to hope for; that's why we were so easily controlled. Without knowledge, you cannot know, and then how can you know what to hope for? So no, not yet did I feel hope, but I did feel potential. With my beautiful Aunt and her doting gentle husband, for the first time, I did not feel afraid. No, that's not true. I still felt it, but it was not under my skin, in my clothes and shoes, in my food and how I walked and talked. Within the compound, I could be and live and look and love as I liked, and since I rarely left, I always liked. It was a radical change.

I stood a lot in the rain. No one asked me why. No one looked askance. It was the first time I had ever actively done something to express the feelings inside me. Since it wasn't cold, I could stand for hours. My Aunt had suggested I let my hair grow out a little. So I did, feeling the little drops flatten it to my forehead and then run down my face tracking over my eyes and nose, pooling in that little dip above my top lip and then downwards over my mouth, down a body that had never felt the comfort of loving arms. I consider that rain my first kiss, my first lover, the first time my body was known, the first time I knew it, the first time it knew a sensation other than shame. It liberated me; it washed me clean, exploring every crevice and fold of my skin. Every secret and sin was cleansed.

At that time, I wished for nothing more than to stay exactly how I was. In the morning, I would wake up to the sound of chirping birds; what a sound! My Aunt and her women kept them in ornate wooden cages around the interior porches and fed them the finest grains and leaves. At first, I was scared of them, because birds are considered superfluous to the People's Republic. sShool children are taught from an early age to catch and kill birds of all kinds; though I had never had much heart for the killing, I had caught my fair share. I felt the guilt buzzing in my ears as these precious creatures sang me awake with all the joy of innocence I had never had.

Since I had brought nothing with me and there was no need to wear my uniform in the compound (I was told that the doctors had cut it away from my body) for the first few weeks, I wore simple pyjamas. They gave me three sets, a rich green, a deep orangey red, and indigo blue. I had never worn these colours; I had barely even seen these colours, let alone worn them in a light, airy fabric my Aunt called 'linen.' I marvelled at how they whispered to my skin. If the rain was my first lover, then pyjamas were my second. They gave me a freedom my uniform had never allowed, ruthlessly pinching my body into robotic uprightness. I was amazed by the transformation that had taken place within me. It was as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, and I could finally walk easily. My arms swayed rhythmically by my sides, and my shoulders were broad and relaxed. The headaches that used to plague me were a thing of the past, and I realised that it was because I had stopped tensing up and reacting to everything around me. It was a subtle change, but it made a world of difference in my life.

Simply put, I was trying on freedom for size, and I liked it. Although I still felt very nervous around strangers, I opened up to them; I found I had opinions on things I had never even considered. I was quick to smile and never failed to elicit laughter from the large extended family in the compound who readily accepted me into their lives. Aunty started to call me her 'live in laughter,' and would marvel at my high clear brow, thickly lashed hazel eyes and full sensuous lips while I lay with my head in her lap in the hours before lunch. You will have to forgive me the vanity, but having hitherto only looked upon myself with loathsome disgust discovering that I was neither disgusting nor loathsome was intoxicating. I enjoyed feeling beautiful.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

Most days, around 1pm, the household would settle into the rhythm of the midday meal; often, I would be invited to join my Uncle and Aunt. He came home for lunch whenever he could, declaring himself incapable of going the whole day without seeing his beautiful wife. I am not an expert on relationships by any stretch of the imagination, but I believe these small courtesies held them together and kept them as much in love as they were the day they married some 30 years prior. During these lunches, I learnt about the world and strange concepts like 'current affairs'. It took me a while to understand, to gently stretch the borders of my mind to accept a reality other than 'production' and 'output'. I had always been taught that change and development were unnecessary since our society was already perfect, but my Uncle was apparently something of a firebrand; his wit and intelligence made him popular amongst the upper ranks of the party, whilst his family, money, and power kept him safe from being branded 'counter-productive'.

He had even been beyond the Wastelands, and I am sure he was going to tell me all about it one day when my Aunt indicated some silent message only they two could understand simply by bringing together the edges of her eyes in an attractive but enigmatic crinkle effect that ended the story of his travels with a laugh and a change of subject.

It was during one such lunch that my Uncle was entertaining us with a hilarious story. At the time, I wasn't sure I believed it. One of the senior officials had been gifted a rather strange item, retrieved from beyond the borders of the Republic. My Uncle and his friends spent the morning playing with small hard balls in the inner courtyard of the Head Central Building. They used strange clubs and tried whacking, bouncing, batting and juggling the balls without knowing the game's purpose. Eventually, they decided to hit the balls as hard as possible against a concrete wall. They created a scoring system based on who could make the biggest dent. I later found out this strange gift was probably a very expensive set of golf clubs; however, at the time, Aunty and I were more amused that 'whack ball', as they called it, was what our great leaders did with their mornings.

During this comic story, Uncle mentioned that one of his 'whack ball' buddies, The Supreme Minister for Southern Factory Production, was coming for dinner in six days and that he had explicitly asked for me to be present. Before we had time to question Uncle further, and I suspect he waited until the last minute to tell us just so we couldn't plague him with questions, he had to dash back to his work.

My Aunt and I didn't see him much for the next few days, and she told me when she tried to ask him, he gave up no new information. It seemed she and I would have to prepare ourselves in the dark. She wasn't worried, she trusted her husband's ability to protect her, but I woke every night tense and shivering. Was it my father? Was it someone who knew me before?

My Uncle was expected to entertain regularly for his work. Since this would be my first appearance at a dinner with people who weren't family or close family friends, my Aunt had decided to involve me in the preparations, probably to keep me from my anxious fretting. I won't describe all of the details; any normal person probably already has a clear idea of what goes into planning a formal dinner for upwards of twenty guests. I, however, was like a child doing everything for the first time. Planning the menu, arranging the seating plans, dragging the carpets and silks out into the courtyard to be shaken and cleaned in the brief moments when it wasn't raining and then dashing back inside with them shrieking with laughter when it started up again. My Aunt's plan worked after all, at least during the daytime, but each night when I laid my head down on the pillow the fear would creep back and banish my sleep.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading the latest chapter! I will be releasing a new chapter every two weeks. Follow me to get updates when new chapters are available. Alternatively, if you just can't wait for the next instalment, check out my Early Access Tier on Ream for a new chapter every week.

Join the Discussion! What did you think of Chapter Three?

I am so excited to bring you Chapter Three and I really hope that you loved it, but without critique, there is no improvement! So, leave me a comment below (or on my community page) and let me know what you think about the third chapter of Beyond The Wasteland. Did you like it? Did you hate it? What would you have done differently? Who do you think is coming to the dinner party? Would you run away or would you face the threat head-on?