The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

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.

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.