MicroHorror

“To the baker’s,” said Senior Kunze.

Milton lifted the cart and walked. It’s only a matter of time, he thought, before my posture illustrates the burden of this lazy system.

The baker, who ran the great farm responsible for the bread in the village, cried to the Senior: “I belted an ox with a large wooden cane. The beast charged a field worker. The boy was trampled.”

“Only repent that you became angry.”

“Must I go to the camp?” the baker asked.

Senior Kunze shook his head, “The death was no direct fault of yours.” Then the Senior absolved the baker. “Perhaps twelve loaves of bread will see this tragedy through.”

As they returned to the Senior’s house, they passed Camp Motivation, a mammoth brick-made cylinder. Milton had never been told by those sent there what exactly it entailed. “You learn your lessons well,” was all he whittled from the reluctant workers.

And so Milton pulled the Senior back home. As he entered the heart of the village, he felt his spine scream in agony. His position in society prevented him from asking the Senior to trade places for the rest of the ride.

“I am a slave,” he mumbled.

“Did you say ‘slave?’”

Milton bowed his head slightly. “Yes.”

The Senior scowled. “Move along,” he said, waving his hand as he might at a dog.

At the house, Milton and his sister continued work on a shelter for the cart. The trade had been drawn like this:

“In winter, work is required to clear the wheels and seat of ice and snow,” the Senior bargained. “Too often I’m in a hurry and demand you pull the cart while the handles are frozen. The summer makes the fine material on my seat unbearably hot, and the metal pieces in the grips no doubt burn your skin.”

Minor irritations did not concern Milton. Neither, by then, did the Senior’s comfort. “So?” he had said.

“A shelter would protect the wagon at all times. Thus, you and I would always travel in comfort.”

It was another task to benefit the Senior more than Milton. He wanted to tell him no. His sister, as always, talked him out of it.

“If you disrupt the system,” she pleaded, “you’ll be sent to camp.”

And so they hammered nails into wood. Milton did not mention the incident on the road. There was no such thing as slavery. Suggesting otherwise was intolerable.

A Motivator came to watch them work. Motivators wore black tunics and said nothing.

“What have you done?” his sister whispered.

Milton saw the thin man standing on the road. The anemic figure rested his hands behind his back.

“You haven’t been complaining by the fountain again, have you?”

“No,” he lied.

Milton put his hammer down and walked over to the Motivator. “Can I help you?” he asked, with a smirk on his face.

His sister passed out in disbelief.

Milton was taken to Camp Motivation that evening. “This is the third time I have heard you speak in such a manner,” the Senior scolded, as his servant was dragged from bed. “It’s for your own good.”

He was rushed through the empty, silent village to the outskirts, to the camp. Once there he was pushed into the court room. There was no one else there but a judge and the Motivator Milton had confronted earlier.

The judge spoke: “A year in the gravity chamber should help you.”

Milton was led through a dark tunnel that opened to the huge courtyard in the center of the construction. There, in the middle of everything, was a stone cube the size of four great buildings merged. The slab rotated with unnerving quickness, due to the prisoners supporting it with their bare hands.

It wasn’t more than five rotations after Milton had been assigned a position beneath the rock that he realized how simple carrying the cart had been, in contrast to the twenty-ton block coming down on his back.