Banished

• Sonia Alexander, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2018

Kashton

I can see her eyelashes start to flutter. She’s waking up. She won’t remember anything, but it’s for the best. She had too many ideas. Too many for our perfect world. 100 years ago our founders established rules to keep us safe. They said that we are a danger to ourselves, in many ways it’s true. Humanity is destructive. I am one of the few tasked with watching the banished, the ones with too many ideas. This girl is dangerous. I agree with the rules.

Hazel

I feel myself starting to wake up, where am I? Who am I? My eyelashes flutter. I sit up and look around the room. Four clean, sterile white walls stare back at me. I look down, the floor is white to. As I start to stand up and search for an exit, a voice fills the room, it sounds like it’s been through a scrambler. How did I know that? I frown in confusion.
“Subject 19, you have been banished from existence. Your memories of your past life have been erased, I cannot tell you why. I can only tell you that this is your new home for the rest of your life.”
Banished from existence? What? Why? I decide not to dwell on it. I need to find a way out of here. The room begins to transform. A double bed descends from the wall on my left, a bookshelf emerges from the wall on my right. An entryway appears in the wall in front of me. It’s a bathroom. I walk inside and the entryway instantly fogs. Privacy I guess. There’s another new word. The bathroom has a large bath, a shower, a sink and a toilet. I walk back out. The voice is silent.

Kashton

She walks to the bookshelf, tracing her fingers along the books. All the banished are allowed to have three luxuries from their past life. This girl, Hazel, liked taking long baths, reading and sleeping like a starfish. It seems innocent enough, but I know better. She was the world’s biggest idealist. Back when she was out in society, her three luxuries were breaking the rules, being violent towards the Calmers, and trying to organise a revolution. She didn’t bother disguising her name, in her questioning she said that she was sick of society’s ‘lies’ so she refused to lie at all. Even for something as small as her name.

Hazel

There’s no sense of time here. I can’t tell whether a day has passed, or a year. My only company are the books and the voice that telling me food is here. It comes through a different place in one of the walls every day, three times a day. I guess it’s meant to confuse me. Every day I look for a way to escape. I’m going to try jam the food slot next. It’s just big enough to crawl through. Hopefully if I’m fast enough whoever is watching me won’t catch me in time.