Traitor

Traitor, William.  Age 17.  Brown hair, yellow eyes.  Citizen Level: 3.
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They changed our name to Traitor when my great-grandfather defected from the City in the Great War.  He was never captured, but his family didn't receive his coded warning letter until it was too late.  The police stormed my great-grandmother's house in the pre-dawn of a frigid winter morning, seized the family, and burned the house to the ground.  They were taken to the refugee housing, where traitors' families were re-programmed into the City files through blood tests, fingerprints, and eye scans.

In the years after the Great War, the refugee camps were slowly converted into Citizen Level 3 housing units.  My grandfather shared a small bedroom with his younger brother and three sisters while their mother slept in the living room on the couch of their tiny apartment, which they were granted seven months after the Peace Treaty had been enacted.  "It was a blessing," Grandfather would grumble, nodding to himself, "We got the rooms just before the year's first snow.  Maddelena would have froze to death."

There used to be Traitor Families all over, especially in the Level 3 neighborhoods.  There are still about twenty kids who carry the name in our Village school.  But most families have been able to change their names back.

Traitor Families are required to send their male heirs to the front, until three of them die in service.  Once they have made their sacrificial contribution to the City, their surname is reversed and they can work towards advancing their Citizen Level.  My grandfather was sent to the front along with his brother.  He was almost killed in a skirmish on the Outer Borders, but the rescue teams reached him in time and revived him from his coma after three days.  He was discharged for injury, though not with honor like the rest of the survivors.  His brother was killed in the same skirmish.

My father met my mother when they were sixteen, here in this same Village.  They wed in secret, an hour after his eighteenth birthday and with a foraged note of permission from her parents, who never would have approved of a Traitor marriage.  He was drafted hours later.

Traitor or not, all draftees are given a week before they are required to attend basic training.  A week after their wedding, he left her, pregnant and nearly penniless. Six months later, he was dead.

I grew up without my father.  I am my mother's only child - my family's only male heir.

I am the last Traitor of our line.  Tomorrow is my 18th birthday.

Story Time

I wrote this at work tonight, when I didn't have internet access.  I prefaced it with "I'm really really bored... :P haha" so don't have high expectations.  Seriously.

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Once upon a time in a far off kingdom there lived a little hedgehog named Phil.  He was a happy hedgehog, who loved eating the wild raspberries that grew outside his little den.  

One day, a big, white, floppy-eared rabbit, named George of course, came hop, hop, hopping along by Phil's house and was stopped in his tracks by the delightful sight of the scrumptious raspberry patch.  Then he kept hop, hop, hopping because rabbits only eat carrots.

Next came a medium-sized blue jay known as Steve.  Steve flap, flap, flapped along, keeping close to the forest ground, looking for treats (as blue jays are apt to do - they are very greedy creatures, after all.)  Steve's small, black, beady eyes almost popped out of his head when he saw the tantalizingly luscious berries.  He quit his flap, flap, flapping and immediately proceeded to gorge himself on the treasures.  Once he was full to bursting, he fell asleep under the thicket.

That afternoon, when Phil came home from work (his job was to meander the woodland paths and be adorable, which he excelled at), he was astonished to see that nearly all of the delectable morsels next to his house were gone!  He began to weep adorable hedgehog tears, crying, "Oh dear me!" repeatedly in this distressed manner for the next two hours.  [At this point I should bring back George the rabbit because one usually should not introduce characters and not bring them back.  But George was really only passing through and was no help at all.]

Eventually, Steve the blue jay woke up, though not from Phil's tears (he's a very heavy post-gorging sleeper.)  However, he found that he was now so fat that he couldn't flap, flap, flap away at all!   He began to weep, cawing loudly, "Oh dear me!"

Phil came trundling (sure that's a word) out of his house to see what was making such disturbing racket.  Upon seeing Steve's conspicuously enlarged abdominal area, Phil narrowed his adorable hedgehog eyes and unconsciously twitched his pink little nose.  "It was YOU!" he squeaked!  "YOU ate all of the raspberries!"

"Yes!" cawed Steve. "And I sure am sorry for it now!"

"Oh," said Phil, expecting the blue jay to be more of a jerk.  "Well, yeah."

"Yeah," sighed Steve.  His stomach was still groaning.

"Well I guess next time you won't do that."  Phil had lost all of his angry feelings.  He is a hedgehog after all - he can only have so many at once.  "Hope you feel better!"

"Thanks," groaned Steve, regretting his greedy, inborn blue jay habits, "me too."

With that, Phil trundled back inside his little hedgehog burrow and proceeded being what he was meant to be - adorable.

The moral of the story, dear reader?  Be like George and just avoid the whole fucking mess.

fin.

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Congrats if you made it this far.  Your prize is the moral of that Pulitzer Prize winning novel.