Voyage to Nowhere by D.S. Weissman

Author:D.S. Weissman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: ABDO
Published: 2016-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

STORIES TOLD

JAMES

THE ENDLESS WINTER STARTED FOR FORNLANDERS WHEN THEY first stepped through the doors, not realizing what their lives would become. No one expected an actual winter. James had told Marcus stories shortly after Marcus arrived.

“I’d love to be in a story,” Marcus had said.

“Me too,” James told him. “I always wanted to be a hero.”

“Me too!” Marcus said. They used to sit on Marcus’s bed while James read the hard words and Marcus pointed to the pictures. His favorite was The Little Prince.

Marcus was five when he first entered Fornland. James had moved into his Six-cell. Marcus was a crier. Most kids stopped crying after their first five days, after they made their first friend, after they learned the food was better than the food they ate on the street or at home. When whispers of a crier flittered through the rooms of Fornland, it was a big deal. It meant the same kid cried every night without fail for longer than ten days.

There were three people James remembered labeled as criers. James would have been labeled a crier too if he had understood the truth: his parents weren’t coming back. Instead, for two weeks he lay in bed at night and watched the street lamps shine through the open windows like searchlights at a prison. The dust floated through the light while people slept, until the night Chuck Hayge screamed about trolls and flooded the Corral with piss. James had been lucky. Marcus hadn’t been lucky. There were no screams or lights to distract him from his tears, or to distract the corrals from him.

Criers were easily ostracized, seen as different. The Corral was the first test of a Fornlander’s strength. If you spent more than ten days crying, then you were weak. No corral cared how a kid dealt with his emotions as long as it didn’t affect anyone else. If a kid cried, it affected everyone.

On the twelfth day, James went to the small library and pulled out a ratty copy of The Little Prince. It was flat and easy to hide. Stuffed animals didn’t last long in the Corral. They were stolen, heads torn off, and stuffed beneath the sheets. Contraband was never given up to Bernice; other kids took it. Whether it was re-appropriated or it just disappeared, someone had to earn the right to his contraband. If it was taken, that person hadn’t earned it. James wouldn’t waste his efforts on something that would be taken from Marcus, showing him that he had become the lowest nibble on the food chain. No stuffed animals, no photographs—the photos wouldn’t have been of Marcus anyway. James took the book.

The Corral was empty when James walked in. He had been a six-cell for almost four months now. He no longer had to fear the acrid perfume of piss draped across his sheets. He shared a room and a bunk with Abe. James slept on the bottom bunk because he was too lazy to climb a ladder every night.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.