The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

I’ve always been a passive kind of person; it is both my worst quality and the thing that people like most about me.

Intelligence can be artificial, but charm is always real, and Susie had that in spades.

I had already known the answer: it was the same every year. I only asked out of my old habit of prompting people to explain things to me even when I knew the answer. When I was a child, I found that it would make people more likely to want to help me, and it served me just as well as an adult.

They didn’t know beauty, these boys. They saw blurred outlines and thought they knew the picture.

I thought that we had lost some crucial bit of power, not from the act of being judged, but by showing that it meant something to us.

I wanted to be like the boys, who seemed to have forgotten that it happened the moment they stepped away. Was it that the boys didn’t care as much about their appearance, or because they were already so sure of their worth that external opinion meant nothing to them? I didn’t hate that I was the second-most beautiful: I hated that I had to stand there and be told that everyone else thought so.

What did it matter to wake up at the same time every morning and wear the same clothes and try to eat more protein but less sugar, when an earthquake or a tsunami or a bomb might end it all at any minute? Or maybe we would all continue to boil, slowly but surely, in the mess that we pretended was an acceptable place to live.

rather than fixing a situation that made me unhappy, I tended to hang around and wait for someone to fix it for me.

Reality had become a slippery thing: I wasn’t certain on what part of my life I was an active part of, and what was a result of the machinations around me. But that, to me at least, felt no different from how it had been on the outside.

I knew what I didn’t want: I didn’t want to go back to work, and do little jobs that didn’t mean anything. I didn’t want to force myself out of bed every morning, and feel like my soul was being pulled from my body. I didn’t want to live with my mother, but I didn’t want to try to find somewhere else to stay. I wanted to be free from the daily confrontation with the slow decay of humanity and everything we had built. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted quiet. I wanted to stop pretending that I cared about things.