You don't even manage to say a single coherent word. You choke out a single syllable and then your stomach churns and seizes, spikes of incomprehensible pain jutting through your body. You want to scream. You want to hit the wall, over and over again until your hands splinter. You want to find the Reds and demand answers. You want to find the men in black and see them rot in prison. You want and want and want, but none of those crazed impulses have an effect on you.
Instead, you do something perfectly sensible and collapse on your knees, sobbing with grief and shock and horror. The world vanishes behind a veil of tears, making shape blur and wobble chaotically. Whatever else your mother had to say is rendered incomprehensible by your wails. You shiver and shake and tremble.
You break. There's no other word to describe it. You just completely fall apart.
And your mother abandons whatever anger or worry she had to hold you together. She takes her shawl and wraps it around your shoulders and holds you up, guiding you to the couch.
She doesn't ask any further questions, she doesn't say another word.
You curl up against her, seeking comfort in her arms, and you don't say another word either.
You stop crying after a while, but nothing else changes. She still holds you quietly and lets you choose what happens next. You want to tell her about what you saw, but you are too wrung out for the explanations and arguing that will ensue.
So you close your eyes and simply try to enjoy the peace of the moment.
And then you are awake. Your mother is gone, but someone has laid a proper blanket over you. Your head is aching, your throat is sore, your eyes are puffy, and your stomach is growling. On shaky legs you rise and make your way to the kitchen, where the butler is cooking bacon.
The smell makes you choke and gag, and you can barely force out your request for something else to eat. He gives you a quizzical look but obeys your request, bringing you some buttered bread and an apple.
You go elsewhere to eat. You don't taste it. You simply chew and swallow, all the while trying as hard as you can to think.
If you stop thinking, you will begin remembering. And you would pay any price to have those memories torn from your skull.
You wonder about Sylvia, how she is doing, how she will explain things. You wonder what your other friends would have said if you had invited them along. You wonder what the weather will be like. You wonder about school. You wonder about everything you can.
Perhaps an hour has passed. Perhaps more. You retreat to your room, still trying to think about anything except for those sounds and that stench. Your desk beckons, and you grab a sheet of paper and begin to write on it.
Words spill out of you like blood from a wound.
"I don't know what this city is anymore."
"I don't know why it's like this."
"I know people are asking for things, things that can't be given easily."
You find yourself getting hungry again and head down to the kitchen, requesting the butler to bring you a meal, something without meat. He agrees and you keep writing.
"But we are founded on the idea that people should have a voice. So why are those who ask for things being murdered in the night?"
You pause, wondering how many more nights have seen those horrible men in black appear.
And you keep writing. You let every thought you have spill out of you, covering page after page. You only stop when your hand is cramping too badly for you to do anything more.
The results are messy and untidy. Your handwriting is erratic at best, the ink is smeared in places, sentences and fragments are crossed out or marked with arrows saying they belong elsewhere. A cursory readthrough of a single paragraph reveals dozens of spelling errors.
You wouldn't show this to anyone whose opinion you valued. Quite aside from the quality, it is the most political thing you have seen, at least before the past few days. It's full of questions about things you haven't quite asked about before, about the way people sneered at Sylvia and the way people never seem to respect your mother's intelligence, about why the Negros stayed in the South after the Civil War, about where those men in black came from, about what was happening in the less peaceful parts of the country, about why people in Britain were so determined to overthrow the monarchy and democracy that was so good to them...
And not only do you ask questions, you make them barbed and pointed, like a volley's worth of arrows. One section, in particular, stands out...
[] ...the one about the "recent unpleasantness" in Great Britain, where you use quotes from family members who told you about their experiences, and not all those quotes are negative.
[] ...the one about women's rights, where you ask why a supposedly equal society is full of structures openly intended to keep women from having any authority, right down to the lessons you learn in schools.
[]...the one about the price of order, where you ask about the brutality being used to suppress the supposedly very dangerous groups threatening the nation.
You plan to rewrite that section into something more legible and less horribly spelled (and to add in enough to make it clear you are not advocating for strikes, civil war, or anything like that), and then see if you can get anonymously published somehow. But you are interrupted.
[] Your other friends have come by to see if you available to go shopping with them.
[] A young man from school has come calling.
[] Your mother has managed to find some time again, and she still wants to know what you did last night.
