Hold Me Never (Holding Never)

HOLD ME NEVER

By

Natalie Kristen

Copyright
© 2013 Natalie Kristen

ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED

This
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are
used fictitiously or are the products of the author's imagination.
Any resemblance to actual locales, events, establishments or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

For my parents

Thank you for all
your love

You are amazing

To see a World in a
Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a
Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the
palm of your hand

And Eternity in an
hour.

A Robin Redbreast in
a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a
Rage

A dove house fill'd
with doves and pigeons

Shudders Hell thro'
all its regions...

-
William Blake

I
stare at the ugly, black metal pieces in front of me.
Mechanically,
my hands which are stained with dirt and grease pick up the pieces
and start piecing them together. It
is
almost like doing a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. Almost. Doing a puzzle
requires you to think and concentrate, to figure out where the pieces
go and how the completed picture will look like. Not so here. What
I am doing right now is numbly going through the motion
s
of putting all the metal parts together and passing it along the
line. Someone else will screw in the nuts and bolts. It will then
travel along the conveyor belt to another worker who will do
something else to it, fasten a pin,
tighten
the parts,
attach a label, polish it. Until finally it leaves the conveyor belt
and the factory. A completed weapon. For the Imperial Army of the
Unified States.

I swipe at my face with the back of my hand, feeling an
itch at my chin. I have probably spread a line of black grease
straight across my chin, but what do I care? There is no way I could
look worse. My hands and face are dirty and sweaty, my brown hair is
pulled into a tight ponytail under an old, ragged cap and my work
overalls are stained and torn. I glance up at the rest of the
workers hunched over the long work bench. Everyone is clad in the
same cap and overalls bearing the logo of the Imperial Army. We are
the Emperor's people, his workers, his slaves.

All
the workers are girls and women. The oldest woman here is sixty-six.
The youngest is nine, the same age I was when I first started
working in a factory. My first job was sorting out produce, not
assembling weapons. The items may be different, but the conditions
and hours are the
same.
Working twelve hours a day, with just one lunch break and two toilet
breaks. No one dares speak a word, even though we spend almost all
our
waking
hours huddled shoulder to shoulder in the factory.
A
girl had
whispered
and
giggled to her neighbor, and a soldier had put a bullet through her
head. Her blood stains are on the wall behind me.

Some
of the girls in the factory share the same
dormitory
as me.
There
are communal dormitories all over Town
Eighty-seven
.
Our
t
own
had a proper name once, but when the Imperial Army marched into town,
the Emperor renamed, or rather, renumbered all the towns and
villages. All the states had once been free and independent, but now
most have been “unified”. Annexed and occupied would be
more accurate, but these are costly words to whisper. They could
cost you more than your life.

I
glance down the line of bent faces to my left. I see these faces
every single day.
Our
faces wear the same expression of w
eariness,
resignation and fear,
but
our minds dream different nightmares, nightmares we can only whisper
to
each other in the shadows of our congested bunks before sleep claims
us for a few fitful hours each night
.

I
stare at the row of t
hin
female hands that have been hardened and calloused with pain and
suffering. There are no male hands on the assembly line. The men
who
have
not been tortured and killed have been sent to the labor camps, the
mountains and mines. They are being worked to their deaths, just as
the girls and women are being
forced
to assemble weapons which will be used to quicken their deaths.

There is the thud of a heavy footstep behind me, and I
bow my head lower as I make a show of handling those repugnant metal
parts in my hands with great care. The footstep belongs to the only
male in the factory.

Officer
Goddot is an angry, violent supervisor, and the smallest mistake
could earn you a thrashing. Leena, a
conscientious,
quiet
young woman lost a couple of teeth to his fist simply because she let
a screw drop from her fingers and roll to the edge of Officer
Goddot's boot.
Officer
Goddot's
speech is often slurred, his eyes rheumy and his face inflamed by
cheap alcohol. He is a seething, pot-bellied, middle-aged stagnated
soldier, his life as good as over. Drink and rage is all he has.
If
you were sent to oversee a small factory in an impoverished town in
one of the outer Unified States, your military career
was
as good as gone. It was a golden handshake, without the gold, and
without the handshake. It was a slap in the face, a punch in
his
flabby
gut.
With
his down turned mouth and wrinkles,
Officer
Goddot
look
s
like he
is
in his
fifties
,
but I'm guessing he's younger
than
he looks
.
Frustration
and
bitterness can age and harden
a person
so
.

Officer
Goddot moves down the line, grunting and cussing under his breath,
which forever smells of alcohol.
He
swaggers to the front of the factory and stands under the gigantic
portraits of the Emperor and Empress of the Unified States.
The
Emperor
and Empress
smile
down at us from the front wall of the factory. They look like
caricatures, with their
elaborately
coiffed hair
,
garish pink cheeks,
dark
red
lips
and wide, greedy smiles. Gold, diamonds and multicolored gems glint
from their heads, ears and necks.
The
Emperor's close-set
light
gray eyes and orange hair contrast starkly with the Empress's wide,
dark eyes and black hair.

The
Emperor and Empress are not dressed in military garb in their
portraits, but in gilded cloak and gown, like they're dressed for a
ball or a party. But this is no
party.
This
i
s
war. All the time. The Unified States is always at war.
The
Imperial Army is not here to maintain peace and order, but to s
pread
f
ear
and violence. That's how they unified the states.
With
blood and tears.
Be
annexed or be annihilated.

With
a yawn, Officer Goddot
pulls
up a chair and slumps heavily into it. His lips are moving under his
unruly mustache, but I can't hear what he is muttering above the
drone of the machines and the conveyor belt. Not that I care what he
is saying to himself or to us. Soldiers of the Imperial Army are not
really human in my eyes.
To
compare them to animals would be highly
insulting
to
the
animals. They march into sleeping towns and villages, and rape and
plunder, without remorse, without pity. They may wear human faces,
but they show
no
trace of humanity.

Except—one.

One soldier.

He was the only one who didn't rob and rape. He tried
to help.

He tried to stop his Commander from taking a woman away
from her child, from attacking and assaulting the woman right in
front of her young daughter. And he was shot for it.

I have never forgotten that young soldier.

It was ten years ago, but I never forgot. How could I?
That child, that child who watched her mother being dragged away and
assaulted—that was me.

The scene flashes before me, the edges blurred but the
faces vivid.

The light of the setting sun is dull and gray over our
town, instead of warm and golden. The smoke from the heavy military
vehicles and rifles shroud the streets like a pall. Soldiers spread
out through the town like a disease, invading shops and houses,
grabbing anything and everything and hauling their loot into their
military trucks. Their loot include property and persons.

Outrage and terror hang in the air as people cower away
from the soldiers and quietly drag bloodied bodies from the curb. My
mother and I are hurrying home when the first truck rolls past us.
My mother jerks her head up and in that terrible moment, those cold,
hungry eyes of the Commander smoking in the front passenger seat lock
on her. Lock on her like a choke hold.

With a screech of brakes, the Commander strides over and
tries to wrench my mother away from me, but I refuse to let go of
her. I cling to her, pleading and crying, as she tries her best to
shield me with her body.

The Commander roars orders to the soldiers, and they fan
out to begin their rape of our town. Those who are vocal enough,
reckless enough, brave enough, are brutally broken and killed.
Wailing and screaming become painfully muffled, as those who rush to
the aid of the injured are themselves bludgeoned to death.