Creative Writing Competition : 1st Runner Up

1st Runner Up:
Name: Andrea Yip Shu Yin
Course: Cambridge A Levels

Title: Marked

Marked 

I stare at the group of people in front of us as they shuffle to the cafeteria. My eyes settle on the set of letters inked onto our arms – a code that differentiates us from the rest and a symbol of a chain right above it. A man in front of me – his movements the most lively of the lot as he doesn’t slouch and drag his feet as the rest of us do – suddenly turns around to sneer at me, revealing a set of ashen teeth. Hygiene isn’t terribly important here so most of the prisoners stink from the lack of a badly needed shower – including the one standing in front of me. 

He breaks away from the monotonous movement of the crowd and they make way for him. His fingers brush my jaw; dirty, unwashed and beaten up hands enter my line of sight. But I don’t react. I won’t. This is not the first time that a fellow prisoner has taken interest in me. My blonde hair that I inherited from my mother has a habit of attracting the attention of others.
 

“My, my. What is a beauty like you doing in a place like this?”
 

I hear a ‘pop’ sound from the right and a few moments later the man collapses to the ground, his eyes rolled to the back of his head. The letters ‘G7-690’ peek out from beneath the sleeve of his gray T-shirt. It is the only identification that us prisoners have. I step over the man, too used to the presence of corpses to even blink an eye. All around me, the rest of the prisoners do the same. A voice on the intercom gives an order to the guards surrounding us a few moments later.
 

“Someone clear G20-690 off the floor.”
 

A group of people cloaked in white approach the fallen figure and pick him up like a rag doll. The crowd parts from them and continue walking in unison as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened – and nothing probably did. Although only the worst prisoners are handcuffed, freedom is a word that ceases to exist around here.
 

I crane my neck to look back at the man known as G20-690 but he is already too far gone for me to spot him. He is the fourth man that I have known to have died today. Soon, I will lose count and stop keeping track. I have seen too many lives being snatched away from their bodies to even care anymore at this point of time. I look at the letters tattooed onto my right arm and the symbol above it. The memory of the day that I got marked flashes into my mind and I swallow bile to keep it at bay. It is not a day that I want to remember.
 

My name is G10-950, 10 symbolize the age that I was marked. That was the name that they gave me. But if I try hard enough, I can still remember a woman’s voice- my mother’s – in my memory.
 

What did she call me again?
 

Ah yes… Lexi. That was the name that was on the edge of her lips every time she spoke to me. I try speaking it to myself but the name feels strange on my lips, like an ancient name that should be forgotten. I have long gotten accustomed to the names that they have given us to mark us as theirs. It is unwise to remember. It will only open up old wounds, old memories that will do nothing but gnaw on the gaping hole inside of me, making it worse.
 

I never knew the man which was my father. The prisoners are kept separate with a cell just about the size of a person to contain us. The prison is deep underground, set in rock, so I have never seen what my mother used to call the ‘sun’ or ‘daylight’. Even the colours in my vocabulary are limited to shades of black , grey and white with an occasional red- crimson red, the colour of blood. My mother used to tell me about the ‘blue sea’ and the ‘green trees’ but those words were – and still are – alien to me. After all, how can I know what something is without ever having seen it in my whole life? The rock in which my small cell was carved from was cold and uninviting. But it was in this very same cell that my mother used to sit me on her lap and tell me stories of the magical land above. Those times were my only escape from the horrible truth that awaited us at the end of the day. Prisoners disappeared on a daily basis – we would never know who was next. I witnessed my first killing at the age of three. Mother tried to shield the dead man from my line of sight but as she hugged me, I could see his cold and empty eyes and even feel the life leave his body.
 

Mother was a prisoner like me. She wasn’t born here, unlike me, so she knew how the world above looked like. She said that during the war, it all changed when they kidnapped her and took her here. She was already pregnant with me by then. They might have gotten my father too – that, she did not know. They tried multiple experiments on her while I was still in her womb. I do not know if those experiments made me deformed or not. After all, most of the prisoners here are already broken. But mother used to always call me beautiful. She became a target of the leaders because she was with child. I can only begin to imagine the tortures they must have put her through just because I was in her womb.
 

If only I didn’t exist… would that have made it a little easier for her?
 

I remember when my mother used to joke by saying that we were lucky that neither of us were claustrophobic or we wouldn’t be able to survive in here – if this could even be called surviving. I didn’t understand though.
 

How could I be afraid of containment if this is the only thing that I have ever known?
 

I grew up in this tight and dark place, a child born in the underground world. I would never know what it feels like to be free.
 

On the eve of my fifth birthday, my mother’s sickness took a turn for the worse. She was always sick – the experiments that they did on her made sure of that. But on that day, she was coughing up so much blood that I thought that she would really die. There was a commotion outside our tiny cell when suddenly a man wearing white burst in. He sneered when he saw me and brought his foot back to hit mother in her side. I threw myself against him but he just shoved me off. I felt something hard hit me in the head and when I awoke, mother was already gone. I never found out where she went after that, but I didn’t need to. I knew that she was already dead.
 

After that, the cell seemed so lonely without her. I would wake up in the middle of the night, clawing at my skin and driving invisible hands away. Nightmares invaded my sleep without mercy and I would often cry out but there was no one there to hear me. Time passed slowly in this place. There was no clock for me to tell time- even if there was, I wouldn’t know how to read it as I had never seen one. Every day was the same to me in this abyss of time.
 

Then everything hanged on the day that I turned ten. I only know that because the man in the white cloak told me. I had stopped keeping track by that time. They called that man the ‘doctor’. He showed up in my cell when I was still half asleep. I still remember what he had said to me.
 

“Happy birthday, child. Today is a very happy day!”
 

I watched in fear as he took out a needle as long as my pinkie, the edge smeared with blue ink and grabbed my arm. He then began to pierce my arm repeatedly, over and over again. When I lashed out at him, someone threw a bag over my head and invisible hands held me down like they did in my nightmares. I screamed, but my screams were muffled and I doubt that they even cared. Finally, when the pain was over, I heard the voice again. His breath stank of acid and when they pulled the bag off my head, I could see that his teeth were spotted with dirt. Blood was dripping off my arm and when I looked, I could see the letters G10-950 inked on it.
 

“Now, G10-950, that wasn’t so bad now, was it?”
 

His eyes were cruel like a snake. They dared me to challenge him. I kept quiet.
 

“One more thing before you finally become one of us.”
 

He motioned with his head towards something as the hands began to hold me down again. I then saw a piece of metal glowing brightly. When he pressed it against me, it felt like he was peeling my skin apart, layer by layer. I lashed out ever harder than before but the hands that were holding me kept me still. When he took it away, I could smell my skin burning and my arm was black where he pressed it. A symbol of a chain was carved into my right arm, just above where he had inked my earlier. He grinned and left as the others began to crowd around me.
 

“It’s time for celebrations, little girl.”
 

One of them had said. Before I knew what was happening, they began to tear my clothes off with a wild and uncontained ferocity. I blacked out soon after.
 

When I awoke in the morning, I felt like an elephant had stampeded all over me. That day, I went for my first ‘experiment’. They walked me down a maze of hallways only to stick numerous needles and tubes into me at the end. It was too bright for me to see anything but whatever they were doing, it hurt. Sometimes they cut me too. As I got older, the experiments grew harsher and my body began to grow ill quickly, like my mother. I once saw a little girl get cut open – she didn’t survive that one though. Lucky her. She didn’t have to go through the same torture that I did.
 

I watched a few other prisoners take their own lives too. It wasn’t difficult. All you needed to do was act out of place and they would kill you on sight. Sometimes I wonder how my mother kept living… and why.
 

What did she have here that death was not a solution?
 

Then I soon came to realize the answer. She had me. She continued living for the sake of me.
 

As my condition worsened, I knew that death was approaching. Yet, the thought of it frightened me. My mother brought me up with tales of the land above and beyond it.
 

Would I never be able to see it before I die?
 

That night I had a dream of my mother. That was when I realized that when my mother was talking about the land above, she didn’t mean the land where she came from. She meant the land that we all go to after passing on, the land where I get to see her again.
 

The next day, I walked into the experiment room for the last time with a smile on my face. It was finally time for me to go.