Read Online -Worlds Apart- Ruination by Amanda Thome - Free Book Online

snare but eventually she’s mastered it.
    “Let’s try it out” I say. She looks at me like I’ve grown three heads.
    “But that’s against the law. We aren’t hunters…we’d be poaching.” She says.
    “I know silly, I meant we’d set it off ourselves.” Game’s only for the hunters, everyone knows that.
    I lay on my belly in front of the noose. I know where the snare is but we’ve concealed it so well that I have a difficult time finding it. I run a thick branch through the noose and just as it would with a rabbit, the snares triggered. The branch goes flying into the air. It dangles, swinging like a pendulum. For a moment my mind morphs it into a rabbit and I recognize that our snares are effective and deadly. I hear Emma hooting and hollering behind me. She leaps in the air doing some silly celebratory dance. I teeter on my heels for a few seconds, laughing at her display.
    “Alright, alright. Let’s head back, third line’s coming and we both missed the first two.” 
    She stops her little jig. Freezing momentarily the same way a wild animal does when you first stumble across it. I lunge for her and just like a startled creature, she takes off. We race home to clean our mud-coated bodies. We weave and dance between the trees as we chase each other. It carries me back to times with Garrett. Days spent chasing each other by our streambed. It usually started innocently, a simple game of describing clouds would morph into a foot race in no time. I’d see a rabbit while he’d see a groundhog, before we knew it we’d be arguing and ultimately end up chasing each other around.
    I run now with Emma in front of me, twisting her way through the brush, her hair swinging all the way to our front door, right up to the bath.
    The dried mud forms crevices along the length of our skin. We look like scaled brown beasts as we stand in the bath. Flakes of mud drop to the tub from our furious scrubbing. We dress, giggling as we leave the house and our tub coated in a layer of filth. 
    We walk to the pavilion where all meals are prepared and delivered. It’s a large faded grey and blue rotunda just a short jog from home. Each sub has their own pavilion where three meals a day are provided. The food’s always simple but its filling and nutritional. Central designs a balanced diet plan so nobody has to worry whether they’ll eat, or be distracted with preparing food like they did pre-divide. When I was young I’d imagine eating the way they did pre-divide. If I focused all my energy I could smell the food cooking, the smell of hot meats and vegetables drifted through the house, permeating. My ears would perk-up as I’d hear pots and pans scraping and Mama shuffling. I always pictured Mama there, making dinner and singing to herself. She was already dead but she was still in my imagination. She’d sit with us, we’d eat together in our own home, like a real family.
    Four lines run through the left hemisphere of the pavilion where we eat. There’s a line for citizens five and younger where swarms of children in grey grab at food haphazardly. Then there’s our line for the school aged citizens six to sixteen, all of us wearing blue. 
    I glance to my right toward the third line looking for Papa. My eyes trace the trail of green uniforms until I find his worn face. Sensing eyes on him he lifts his head, meeting my stare. He signals to a table in the corner, I nod. The hunters must’ve taken down deer for tonight’s meal. The retirees in black dish the venison onto our plates in appropriate proportions. I smile and nod as I go down the line collecting dinner.
    Emma and I take our seats next to Papa. His worn face reminds me of the mud we rinsed from our skin earlier, the wrinkles wind through his face like the crevices the mud made just before it flaked off. 
    “How was education today?” His voice is tired.
    “I couldn’t go. I was sick.” Emma sounds guilty. She shouldn’t, I can vouch for her.
    “Hmm.”