Happy New Year!
Or should I say, Happy New Congress. I see the news and wonder at the avarice of some people who are supposed to be responsible adults. If the Rabid Right get what they are demanding, the following story might be even truer than my old brain had considered.
Happy Days!
Marianne

29 and Beyond!

My earliest memories are from being bathed, by a kindly person, and put into a bed. I suppose I would have been about ten months old at the time. The next memories were not so nice. I can visualise, to this very day, the time I must have done something bad and was punished by having to run down, and then up, three sets of stairs in the ‘Tower’.

Up until then, I’d never known about the stairs, but some of the other kids had wished me luck when the punishment was announced. My crime was glancing at other kids’ panties as we played. I must have been about two, by then. The going down the stairs was not much of a bother. The nurses had sent someone down in the elevator to make sure I reached the right level before I started back up.

Going up three sets of stairs, dirty and unused, in the semi-dark, was totally frightening and very tiring for a kid my age. I wasn’t to be beaten by them, though, and made it to the top, where I had to recite, “I won’t look at someone else’s panties again, so help me, Don.” I think that it was that day that I set out to beat the system.

By the time I was four, I was considered old enough to begin learning the seven ‘R’s’. All the twenty-niner’s started the classes at the same time. Oh! You’re caught out by the twenty-niner bit? All the kids born in twenty twenty-nine had twenty-nine in front of their number. I was Eighteen Seventy-Five. Known as Five if there weren’t others ending in five in the group, Seventy-five if there were others.

We were all ’kids’. We dressed the same, we ate the same meals. We all exercised together and went on to take our classes together. We all lived on one level of ‘The Tower’, seemingly a very good place to be, if you were a kid. If we were taken outside at any time, we had badges with our number and ‘TT’ on it, to denote our status. Not that us kids had much status at that time.

None of us had parents, just the nurses to see to our needs. Some of them were nice, while others were not so nice. They knew that they couldn’t go too far, because every passage and every room had a camera in it, alongside the speaker that told us what we were to do. When I say we did not have parents, that’s something that I learned more about later in life.

Now, back to the classes I mentioned earlier. We had a strict rota for lessons, one ‘R’ for each day of the week. Monday was reading. That started out being sat down while a screen showed words and a speaker told us the words and what they meant. You know what I mean, the ‘Cat sat on the Mat’ stuff. Tuesday was writing. This was where we had to start making the words on paper and speaking about them.

Wednesday was arithmetic, firstly looking at what we had written the previous day and counting the words, then counting the letters and adding how many letters were in a set number of words. By the time we were all a year older, we were reading from pages on the screen, writing our own thoughts about what we had read, and working with quite big numbers.

Thursday was righteousness. This started in our second year. It was mainly being told how favoured we were, especially in the times we were all living. It was hammered in that we ‘kids’ were the chosen ones. We were, we were told, the second group of ‘kids’ to be living at the ‘Tower’, with later years living in the levels above us.

I had been born in the Second year, of the First term of our first female leader, President Greene. It was in Her First Term that she abolished the Supreme Court and instituted a committee of hand-picked advisors, known by everyone as the “Star Chamber.”

She earned the nickname of “Barging Marge” in the next election, in 2032, by taking a leaf out of the book of leadership. Her large army of armed followers had cleansed the country of dissidents and opposing ideas. We were taught that it had been bloodless, merely guarding the voting machines and only allowing those who voted the way she had demanded. Her second term was a landslide, as was her third, in 2036. It had been a time of great strides and it had continued until I was eleven, when the Next Great Leader, President Boebert, took over.

Friday followed on with republicanism and the history of the great party. That’s where I discovered that the ‘TT’ on our badges was because we were housed in ‘Trump Tower’, where our mighty Don had once lived. We were told about the ‘Terrible Times’ when the despised ‘Sleepy Biden’ took control and gave our spiritual leader, the ‘God Don’ a hard time, a time that had our Don finally falling ill from holding our party together, despite dissention within, and becoming unable to carry on. The hard times had continued with the ‘Hated Harris’, one of the more popular targets that we were encouraged to shred with our gunfire.

Saturday and Sunday became the days we went out. The oldest kids went out first, with our year two busses behind. We always went to a rifle range on Saturday, where we were taught how to handle, shoot, and maintain a gun. By the time I was ten, I could field-strip any handgun or rifle you gave me, put it back together, load and fire at a range of targets. The targets started out as bunny rabbits and chicken shapes, ending up as life-size people, painted to look like the ones we were likely to shoot. None of these looked like any of us ‘kids’ or the nurses.

Sunday was religion day, where we were taken to a big church for a full service and ordered to sing the hymns as they came up, on pain of ‘the stairs’ if we didn’t. As we got older, for every year they added another two sets. After lunch we would have another, more specialised, service on our level. It always started with a prayer, “Our Don, who art now in Heaven, blessed be thy name.”

When I turned twelve, I was starting to feel odd. When I started bleeding, I asked the nicest nurse about it. That’s when I was taken to a private room and told about the difference between the sexes. All my life I had lived with the other kids, all dressed alike – smocks until we started school, and jump suits after that. All the same shape, all the same color and all with close-cropped hair.

For the next year, I lived two levels down, along with a big group of ‘kids’ that I now had to call girls. We were allowed to grow our hair long, paint our faces, wore clothing unlike anything I had seen before, except on the nurses and some of the people we had passed when we were out. We did our lessons as a group, went to the range and the church as a group, and learned how to be ‘girls’ as a group. The biggest difference that struck me was that some of the targets we shot at looked like nasty versions of the other kids. That, we were told, was because we had to now protect ourselves from the nastier ‘boys’ within our own ranks.

On my fifteenth birthday, I was taken to an office on the floor below, where the nurses and administrators lived. There, I was told my future. I was to be sent back to my home state, Kentucky, where I would join a family to live on their horse property, grow to be a responsible republican adult, marry a man they nominate and have good little republican children.

I was given a suitcase which had all my clothing already packed, a travelling coat with an inner pocket for a pistol and ammunition, and a briefcase with a lock. The case, I was told, contained my paperwork and the family I was going to already had a key sent to them by post. After that I was taken to the bus station and put on a bus going to Lexington. For the first time in my life, I was alone in the big world, no other ‘kids’, no other ‘girls’ and no nurses to make sure I did the ‘right, republican, thing’.

The core within me that decided to rebel on those stairs, all those years ago, came to the fore as we left the place that I had called home for as long as I remembered. In my learning about taking guns apart, and my teachings on make-up and hairdressing, I had put together a nifty little kit of handy tools. As we travelled away from New York, I opened the kit and started working on the briefcase. It was getting dark as I managed to open it and take out the folder it contained. That’s when my whole world imploded and I sat there for a long time, just sobbing with frustration.

Before I had been sent on my way, I was shown a list of suitable ‘names’ to choose from as, I was told, I was not to be known as Twenty-nine Eighteen Seventy-Five any longer. There was a long list of approved names, from Anna, Betsy, and Cathy, to Ronna, Sarah, and Susan. I had chosen Susan Jean as my name. I had been told that my other name would be the name of the family I had been allocated to.

There, in the file, my mother was listed as Susan. Her husband was Robert, and my birth father was called Ted. There was a short note to say that Ted was a highly placed member of the party who had raped my mother, an attendant at an NRA Convention. When she made her accusations, she had been placed in a secure facility to have her child. She had died in childbirth, because she had problems, and Kentucky was a no-abortion state.

When she died, I was sent to the ‘Tower’ because of the status of my father. Her husband was, according to the file, re-assigned to a remote part of the world by the new administration, and given a raise. The ‘Tower’ I now found, was called the Republican Rearing Center for Special Children and was just one of many that had been set up to take the unwanted children of mothers who would have normally murdered them by abortion.

The rest of the bus was quiet as we carried on, but I was a mass of conflict. Should I carry on meeting my new family, now I knew the truth, or should I try to escape the shackles that had bound me for nearly sixteen years. It was the name of the family that brought me to my decision. It was the son of my father who was going to take me in and give me his surname. That, I could never take!

I needed to think fast! We were approaching Pittsburgh and would be approaching Cincinnati by morning. If I was to get out, it had to be at the next stop, just outside Pittsburgh, or else I wouldn’t have the time to get away far enough. The family horse stud was just outside Lexington, much too close to the next stop.

My mind made up, I went to the front and asked the driver if he could get my case out of the storage when we got to the rest-stop. I told him that the bumping up and down had brought on a problem for me, and my supplies were in my case.

The plan worked and I had my case with me as I went into the female toilets. In the stall, I changed my appearance and left there without going into the restaurant. Ten minutes later, I had thumbed a lift to anywhere else, other than Kentucky. The driver had told me he was heading for Saint Louis and that I was welcome to join him if I helped keep his two children in line when they woke up.

The boy and girl were called, so I was informed, Michael and Michelle. When he told me that I knew I was travelling with one of those radical lefties. The names Michael and Michelle had been banned by the good old party in 2016. I kept my cool as we went further away from the bus route and found, in conversation with Ed, the driver, that he had some ordinary views about the world, some things he said I had to agree with.

The longer he drove, the more I realized that much of my schooling had been propaganda. His take on the history I had been told was more from a victim viewpoint than a victorious leader. I had enough of the rebellious streak in me to start believing his words.

Just so he knew who he was driving, I told him, up front, that I was running away from a life of wealth and privilege and wanted to keep clear of the ‘Keepers’ and any of the other militia bands.

Of course, that was too much to hope for and we ran into a roadblock some six hours later. I told Ed to stay quiet and to make sure the children kept silent. I got out of the car as the men approached. Drawing myself up to my full height, I called out.

“Let us through, I am on the way to Lexington and my future husband would not be happy if I am delayed.”

“You’re a little off course, little lady.” This from a brute of a guy, armed to the teeth and with eyes that undressed me as he spoke.

“We have two children in the car that we are taking to the Rearing Centre in Columbus. They are from the Trump Tower in New York. They are both very special children with very special, and well connected, parents. I have been tasked with the job of making sure they get there before I end up in Lexington.”

They looked at each other and I put the boot in.

“Can I have your names and the group you are from? I can put in a good word for you when I see my father-in-law, Ted. He is a Senator and can give you good lads some help to move upwards in your defence of the party.”

That clinched it. I spoke to Ed to write down the names as they called them out. He kept his cool, although I could see him shaking as he did so. That done, I walked up to the guys and gave them each a kiss on the cheek before they waved to their companions to raise the barrier.

I got back in the car and quietly whispered, “Smile as if your life depends on it.” Then we were through and away.

Ed was sweating as he tried to continue at a normal pace until we were out of sight.

“You know that if I had been alone I, and my children, would be fruit on the roadside tree by now?”

I nodded, having noticed the tree with vacant nooses hanging, alongside some that were already occupied.

A little way further on I came to a decision.

“Ed, how set in stone is the Saint Louis destination?”

“It was somewhere to go after my wife died, last month. We pretended to be followers of the party and she had a good job. She was killed in a drive-by shooting. Some drunken party members ‘having a good time’.”

“I can see how you would want to get away from the city. Over the last few years, I’ve been taught how to shoot at people just like you. In the last few hours my life has been turned around and I’m scared to be living in this country. I think I’ll try to get into Canada and start a new life, without the danger and the lies.”

“They tell me that Canada is totally crazy, with people who live free lives, and unwanted babies are aborted before birth. Sounds like a fun place to be!”

He thought for a few minutes and then made his own decision.

“Mind if I come along? We can go north. The easiest way is through the tunnel in Detroit, but I think that we should go through Chicago and up to Winnipeg. Maybe your fancy attitude will get us across the border.”

In South Bend we changed cars, my lock-picking skills getting us into one. After transferring all his things, we torched his old one. The children thought it was a great time and wanted to stay to watch it burn, but we kept going. In Minneapolis we repeated the trick and kept going north, only stopping to allow Ed some sleeping time or to get food. The two children and I were great buddies by the time we neared the border.

At the border crossing I played my Trump card, telling the guards that the two children were from a woman that my father-in-law had fathered, some years ago, and that I had been charged with making sure that they were taken out of the country before I married his son. My folder, with its official seals and several respected names, plus my loaded pistol, which I surrendered at the office, and my paperwork as a TT baby, was enough to let us through. I told them that I, with my driver, would be coming back as soon as we had dropped the children with their new guardians in Winnipeg. Ed was questioned but I told the officers that he was a trustee, the children having leftist names being a smokescreen. Surely, someone who had been indoctrinated wouldn’t be doing something silly, like escaping.

We were given twenty-four hour passes and crossed into Canada. We didn’t stop in Winnipeg but headed west until we reached Calgary. There, we disposed of the car and caught a train to Vancouver. When we reached there, we were all ready to drop.

It wasn’t easy to get me a new identity, and I took on the job of nanny to the little ones while Ed went out and got a job. The company he worked for was liberal thinking and his ability to escape from the US was taken as proof of his skills. We rented a place and the children enrolled in school, much to their dismay. The fun times were over, but we often spoke about our road trip in later years.

Michael and Michelle were good students and graduated with high marks. By the time they went to college I had become their new mother. Ed and I had bonded from the stress of the trip, and we married two years after we had settled. A year later I gave him another son, a Canadian liberal.

A couple of years after that, Lauren, now the first President For Life, suffered an unfortunate accident. It seemed that she had been near a strange, and deadly, substance. The local papers talked about a similar incident in England, many years ago. The person who took her place (quickly and without any dissent) was the man I had been expected to marry. He turned out to be more dictatorial than those who had gone before, and it wasn’t long before there were running battles in the street and my country of birth became embroiled in a civil war which continues today.

Whatever had been expected by the leaders of the past, it was now total chaos and the church leaders who once supported them are now burying them. Word is that Canada was thinking about entering the conflict to support the left. Who knows, perhaps a well-trained army may be enough to oust the militias.

Our government is also talking about getting the EU to enter the fray. The strangest part of the whole thing is that Russia and China have offered to send troops to help the US Government win the battle. From what I read in our newsfeed, there would be plenty of troops to not only win the battles but take over the country as well.

The difference between the very far right and the very far left can be written on a pinhead – alongside the wisdom of the God Don.

All I can say is. "Be careful with what you wish for."

Marianne Gregory © 2023