The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

I tried to imagine what it would be like to go home. The endless talk of the wars, and the masks that we wore in the cities and big towns, and the dreary gray skies, and evenings in front of the television. I couldn’t stomach the thought of waking every morning and hating it, all of it: the flavorless brown cereal that was supposedly good for gut health, the coffee that hadn’t had time to cool, the walk to work, that stupid hill that I hated—the feeling in my thighs just before I got to the summit, and knowing that I’d make the same walk the next day over and over. And the standing around, day after day, waiting for something to do and then resenting being given work to do. The chitchat, the mold on the wall of the breakroom, the hole in the ceiling above the staff toilet, the insects that gathered there, and then the commercial sheen of the display counters. Going home and dreading doing it again the next day, and still never having enough money. And what was the point of it anyway, if I was never going to be able to afford nice things, or have anything worth owning—when we all would probably be dead in twenty years, maybe thirty if we were lucky? 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.