The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

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

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.

I wondered if we were always doomed to fail, because they were strong, and we were weak. Was this how it was always going to turn out?

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.