The Fruits of Earth - Part 15
Friday, February 08, 2019
“PSSsst, pssst!”
I can’t help but to crack a smile. I have made myself a new friend. Several, actually. I only know them through one voice, a voice whose name is Broda. She talks to me from somewhere behind the wall and she carries stories from mouth to mouth, to the other inhabitants of this place.
“Yes, Broda,” I answer.
“Have you heard the latest news?”
“How could I?” I reply. “You’re the only one who talks to me…”
Broda is able to speak to me and to the neighbor girl from her right, one named Ploya. Ploya has Rida on her right and Rida has Styssa to her right. To Styssa’s right there is Ewgenya and the last in the row is another girl: the nameless girl. Broda calls her Softy, because she never speaks. Apparently, we live in a row of cells, each with one occupant, one girl who has run out of luck. Seven broken destinies. I can’t hear them all, but I know they are out there: their thoughts, hopes and sorrows reach me through Broda’s whispers.
It calms me down to repeat the names of these new friends of mine. I recite them like a litany, in an attempt to conjure faces of fellow humans, to chase away this loneliness. In the total silence of the cell, they seem to offer solace and support. I know a few things about each of them and I have also recounted my story. Just another horror story to join the bunch.
Since starting speaking with Broda, I’ve heard numerous horror stories. Stories I should have known have I listened to Ladeena carefully. She tried to warn me, but I never understood. How could
I comprehend the entire horrendous truth? My entire life was a lie, a constructed reality far, far away from the real world.
We are nothing but products. The most valuable goods in the world, but still products. We are the produce of a farm, or several, who harvests children and puts them into categories: worthy and unworthy, seeds and fruits, fertile and infertile.
The girls are separated from boys from the beginning and raised within nurseries like the one I grew up in. Those who will become seeds and treated differently, kindlier, but only so that later, they will be sold into a life close to slavery, dedicated only to bearing children.
On the other hand, boys are raised for nothing more than to become human bulls. The so-called parents are actually buyers of the girls and they come to the Farm each year to select another seasonal seed for their next crop. They favor one or multiple boys that they use for breeding purposes, boys like Jull, probably.
The seeds and the bulls are forced together into this carefully constructed reality, in which the girls are attracted with the promise of a better life, while boys are manipulated by using their manly urges. All this for the continuous survival of the human race or for the profit of a few…?
And to think that I did everything in my power to become a seed… Unbearable. Other stories are even more unsettling and I haven’t decided yet to believe them or not.
They say that during the recent history of the humankind, something has shifted inside the normal human reproductive system. The humans have developed a rare disease that would keep them for having children anymore. Before this plague, a man and a woman could have children of their own, through a natural process called copulation. After this act was consummated, the female would turn out to be pregnant and her belly would become swollen with the future child. After a period of nine months, she would give birth to one or two, rarely three, infants and this is how a family was constructed. A family lived inside a home of their own and the parents would nurture and care for their children until the age of maturity when the young would move away and find mates of their own to start this entire process again.
This concept is so strange to me, used as I am with the idea that children come from incubators, that is hard to comprehend. But the worst part is yet to come. As I said, something has changed and humans could not have children anymore. Or the children would be monstrously malformed and would not survive infancy. The population of the Earth plummeted and for many years there was no hope of getting any better. It is said that the humankind once numbered billions of individuals, but that is difficult to believe.
Then, little by little, some of the children survived and started to regain a human look again. From those, many have perished, but some survived and there was hope once more. Only a handful of the children could grow into adults with reproductive functions and they become rare commodities. But the entire reproductive system shifted to something new. In order to be able to bear children, the young women have to be impregnated by men and then planted in soil, a process they call sowing the seed. After the sowing, the woman would turn into something totally different: a tree-like creature that would once again get deformed and consume itself as it gets into blossoming and producing new fruits – the future generation of children.
As I heard this story my heart plunged and I become miserable. Was this the fate that the Villa and Madame were preparing the seed girls for?
As I heard this story my heart plunged and I become miserable. Was this the fate that the Villa and Madame were preparing the seed girls for?
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