Short Narrative Essay On Dystopian

Dystopia Creative
For as long as I could remember it had been that way. It was hard to keep track of time – of the memories before the dissidence brought our freedom into alliance with the wisdom of the government. Had we known the tests were all a ruse we wouldn’t have done them, but the promises of a better life drew us in – all of us until it was too late.
‘Institute of Psychometric Coaching’, the posters flashed from billboards all over the city.
Prepare and Improve your Aptitude
Personality and Psychometric Test Results.
Even just one day with our professional preparation will align you with the perfect job!
Excel! Impress! Prosper!
Your dream job awaits!
No more hard choices, just direction. That’s what we were promised and we listened. Just like naive children, we listened.
Before the test, I worked under the crisp blue
sky forming beautiful landscapes that surrounded the stark buildings that grew perpetually upwards. I wanted to nurture the people who lived in each building, feed their spirits. It took a year, two for some, before the results were given out and we were assigned our new careers. We had begun to hear whispers that the Government wanted us to shift our focus from the unnecessary to the necessary and my job was deemed one of the unnecessary.
Now the sky was swallowed by a dark, damp basement from first light to last kneading dough and rolling it into buns. A long narrow window lined the wall, with its panes caked in an impenetrable layer of flour dust, with the sun struggling to pierce its way through the stone prison. The bricked area where we worked, a cracking, green and mouldy mass, which was only ever illuminated by the great oven sitting in the corner with its single flickering light. I tried to inhale, before puffing out gasps of dust. As we moved through this dungeon, we were strangled by the weight of the low, soot-stained, cobwebbed ceiling which hung like a storm cloud overhead.
Aching, and with the weight of exhaustion still clinging to our limbs we would rise in the early hours of the day, dragging our husk-like bodies from the bunks to the brick table. Until out fingers were numb, until our eyes glowed red with fatigue we sat around the table, moulding the soft paste into small mounds and kneading the seething mass of dough. All the while, the sound of the baker’s shovel crunching and scraping harshly against the walls of the oven filled the room, while he scooped the slippery balls of dough onto the hot bricks.
As the hands on the rusted clock moved round and round, the wood burned in the oven with it casting a red glow around the chamber as if it were silently laughing. The deformed heat of a beast, stood glaring, with its jaws wide and blazing with fire as it blasted the hot around the room. The crevices in the stone work glared back at us, its cold and cruel expression seeming to bore into our hearts. Its eyes, traced our path and followed our every movement, betraying a dark light into our misery.
Escape! They were only words that drifted into the world of our imaginations. No, we gave over to the time, twenty years before another test and then if we were lucky a rotation forward. If not a rotation back. That was one thing that never crossed our mind. Our legs creaked and muscles ached. We lacked the strength to climb the narrow set of stairs in the corner of the cellar, no hope waited for us if we tried to leave that grimy hell. Outside the door, stood two men, each dressed in wrinkled uniforms armed with rifles. Once every hour, one of them would thump down the steps and glare into our dim chamber. We were hostages. The two men occasionally brought done half-rotten meals of rice and beans, in return talking away the large baskets of buns we left at the foot of the staircase.
In truth, the guards were no longer necessary; The Party knew that it had broken us. Our lives were all but over, no one possessing any motivation to live. Now everyday, in the suffocating miasma of dust and sweat we rolled the dough incessantly, dampening the mix with our own perspiration. But never once did we eat it. We refused to. It was the only way we could protest against the work that we disposed with smouldering hatred. The one day when a man quietly picked up a bun from outside the oven, we all surrounded him instantly. Frothing and screaming, with our eyes bloodshot and our words violent, we cursed him until, trembling and fearful, he dropped the bread and returned to the table.
We barely talked to each other. After sitting across from one another for fifteen hours each day, we had memorised each other’s faces down to the last hair and wrinkle, but we did not talk. All topics of conversation had been exhausted long ago, long before we had lost all feeling, all emotion. For we were now more stone than flesh, kneading the dough so mechanically that we barely noticed we were moving.
Sometimes we sang.
It would begin with a mournful cry rising from the pit to swirl weakly in the smoke. We gathered around and listened raising our faces to the ceiling and adding our voices to the growing wave. As the tide swelled the melody changed, becoming a roar of anguish, until everyone was in voice and our booming song pounded at the filthy walls, beating them until they shattered into crumbling blocks. Then we would grow quieter, and sing of days long gone, awakening memories of lost dreams and loved ones. I thought of my son, who had been just six years of age when I had last seen him, and must now be a young man. Where was he now? Was he in one of the factories? I clung desperately to the hope that he had escaped before they came for him, and closed my eyes, letting the sweet sound of our music carry me into the visions of happier days.
But all the while the flames from the oven made wicked shapes against the stone, and the baker’s shovel continued to grate against the bricks. Inevitably the heavy ceiling would descend to crush our song into wisps drifting aimlessly to the floor, and we would return to rolling our
dough.
My time now due, I walked broken from the bakery, a lifetime lost to heat and dough. The sky was blue, but not the blue I remember. It was a duller blue yet too bright for my maladjusted eyes. I walked across the road and into one of the gardens I had created. It was broken like me, broken and reformed with artificial grass and silicon trees.
My mind couldn’t help but wonder if nature had failed its Psychometric testing too.