New Skin

• Hannah Smith, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2013

I am a citizen of Nation Fifty. The Educators who raised me said I can achieve anything - the Realm is my oyster.

I was playing in the Realm after my final day of Education, scanning the topographic vista and wading through the fluorescent green web. It rustled with energy so powerful that I felt at one with nature.

I was interrupted by an anthem that sucked me away from the abyss. The Representative lifted its delicate, sculpted ovoid head and bowed with the grace of a dancer despite being clothed in heavy wire mesh. Its presence was silencing but it permeated warmth despite its featureless face. Prerecorded applause soaked the pod with a sense of anticipation. I was about to become a woman.

The Representative spoke with quiet strength, “Welcome, citizens of Nation Fifty.”
“We thank you for serving us, loving us and helping us grow,” I recited.
I could feel an ocean of voices behind me, chanting in unison, even though I was alone.
“This cycle another cohort graduate. We have prepared rational, strong and independent women.” The Representative stretched out two arms with palms raised to the universe.
“As they venture into the Realm to trade with other nations, they will be protected by love from the motherland. You are my children.”

‘This is the moment,’ I thought. As the Representative’s applause faded away my flesh became fluid and malleable.

I entered the horizon-free Realm, discovering my elongated body. My skin had lightened to a flawless shade of ivory white. A man was walking toward me – my first consumer. I relaxed my newly sculpted muscles.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he told me. ‘Does he want to trade with me?’ I wondered. He continued, “Your mother was a breeder because refused to trade. Breeders are chemically assisted to forget why they were angry. She chose to give up the rights to her body.” He looked into my eyes with concern, “I hope you won’t resist like her.”

As the words washed over me I pulled my spinning head out of the Realm. Human contact gave me a sense, as though stirring an ancient consciousness, of what it means to feel.
I drifted in and out of sleep and saw my dinner, which consisted of the national crop, striking inside my stomach. Lush corn - yellow like the sun – was growing in logical rows. In the adjacent field, black and sunburnt corn was growing sporadically amongst sandy hills. A dark-skinned woman was watering the indomitable crop. Runoff trickled down, pooling at my feet. I bent over, cupped it in my hands and brought it to my tongue – sweet like nectar and warm like sunshine - not flame. I listened to the soothing melody it carried:

My child, go this way a while
and then go that way instead.
Meander, like water meanders,
headed for the oceans.
My child, you arrive home -
Indestructible like the ocean.