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Your Sacrifice Moves Us Forward
Your Sacrifice Moves Us Forward
By Miguel Bribiesca A.
The phone rang three minutes before his alarm was supposed to sound. Not that it mattered, he always woke up earlier and just lay silent on the bed until the sound of the radio announced that it was time for him to get up. On the other side of the line was his mother, with whom he had not talked since his last birthday. She had called to let him know that his aunt, her sister, had gotten the email yesterday and had just been found spread across the wall of her living room. She had wanted to keep the matter private and asked his mother to not tell anyone until afterwards, as she found the goodbyes and fake sadness to be completely pointless. He did not speak throughout the call other than to say "uh-huh" twice and "thank you, goodbye" in the end. He hung up the phone and lay again in his bed. After just over a minute the radio turned on with the morning news, telling him it was time to get up.
As every morning, he opened his laptop and checked his homepage. He read a summary of the day's news only to find that, as every morning, they were the same as the ones from the radio. He checked his email and reviewed the list of chores he had for the day. It was a Tuesday, which meant he had to go to the supermarket and buy food for the week. He closed his laptop and headed to the bathroom. As he washed his hair in the shower, he ran his fingers along the scar at the base of his skull. He had had it since he was a newborn, as had everybody else. His mother said the scar made him connected to everyone on the planet, made him part of something greater. He disagreed, it was just a scar. He finished showering and ate a plate of cold instant oatmeal. As he rode the train to work, he absently listened to the government propaganda, picking up some of the same phrases he had been hearing since he was a child: "Your sacrifice moves us forward.", "You have been chosen to lead the fight." and "It is your honour to serve humanity". As he got off on Abidance Square station he had already forgotten about that morning's call.
He got on the elevator and pressed the button for the twenty-seventh floor, where his office was located. He worked at a firm that edited the mandatory textbooks for primary students. At the weekly meeting there was a discussion between two executives on whether the drawings explaining the function of the government mandated anti-overpopulation implants were too graphic for children, and another, more heated argument, on whether including that amount of red ink could raise production costs. In the end they decided to redo the drawings with less colour and increase the text description in the chapter. He spent the rest of the day updating spreadsheets with the costs of materials, production, and distribution for the textbooks and found a zero point four percent decrease in total cost with respect to last quarter. He sent this figure in an email to his supervisor, who was pleased and told him he could go home early.
The elevator had broken down during the morning, so he took twenty seven flights of stairs to the floor level and headed back to Abidance Square. Next to the entrance of the station was a small café. He sat down at a table and ordered an iced tea without any sweetener. After a few minutes the waiter came with a tall glass filled with amber coloured liquid and four ice cubes. He took a sip from the glass and discovered it was sickeningly sweet, but drank it anyway, leaving payment on the table before going into the station.
The train back home was emptier than usual, but he didn't notice as he listened to the propaganda without paying attention. He had not gone to the supermarket. He arrived home and took off his shoes before sitting in front of the television. When it got dark he made himself a plate of instant oatmeal before undressing and brushing his teeth. As he lay in bed, he tried not to think much about anything, but he couldn't help but regret not sending back the iced tea. Next day the radio turned on with the morning news, but he didn't hear it, as he was spread across the bedroom ceiling.
