The Creators

All the lights in the city were extinguished at 10:30 PM. In fact, the Creators made it impossible to turn them back on until 6:30 AM. No one knew why, they just knew it was that way and accepted it  without question. You aren’t supposed to question anything. It’s an unspoken rule. You never ask. If you were supposed to know, you’d know. Accept everything, question nothing.

    A dark house on 15th Street had a faint yellow glow from the upstairs bedroom. This glow had inhabited the room for at least ten years. No one had noticed it. If they did, they never pointed it out. The Enforcers had never burst through the doors or the windows. They had never barged in and they had never tore up the floorboards of the old house.

    Ella was flipping through the pages of an old, yellowed book. Something about ‘psychology’ and why humans behave the way they do and how. She was soaking up things about dopamine, how art is like therapy. The book had taught her how human’s behaviors form, how it differs person-to-person. It was her favorite book, and the long worn pages had been turned many times.

    Art. Art is a weird concept, she thought. Art is technical, nearly mechanical. Not like the free-flowing, therapeutic exercise that the pages had described to her. Her art classes had taught her shapes, that blue and yellow make green, that red and yellow make orange. There was no expression. Just necessities. Everything was precise, clean, perfect. There was no room for error. Nor was it a stable career.

    She shut the book, not tired, but knowing she would have to sleep. She slipped the book back under the floorboard before switching off the small light. Crawling into her cold bed, she had wondered if the old books told the truth or not. If they did, a lot had changed. Maybe not for the better, but how could she be sure? She was told that the way everything is now is the right way. The best way. The way to optimal life expectancy and happiness. Whatever that meant. She forced her eyes shut, trying to lull her loud thoughts to sleep.

    When she woke, she stumbled to her wardrobe without a second thought. Get up, get dressed, eat, walk to school. A repetitive routine she had grown used to beginning when she was 5 years old. Every person between the ages of 5 and 17 years old did this. The younger ones received help from their parents, naturally, but Ella was 15, she was left on her own. Only two more years of this, she thought. Only two more years of that hellish place.

    She sat at her desk, scribbling down whatever the teacher wrote on the chalkboard. She had gotten into the habit of this, it helped her focus. None of the classes interested her, but she had to take them anyways. Why she needed a class on how to take care of a newborn child while the males did not, she had no idea. From what she had read, motherly, nurturing instinct kicked in and you had a pretty decent idea of what you were doing. She couldn’t voice this fact, either. It would show she’d been reading outside of school work and that she was more intelligent than her peers.

    The goal of school was to bring all people of a certain age group to a similar intelligence level. Everyone had to be around the same level, typically a low number, or they would not be accepted into the society. They took tests each year, and Ella had to try to dumb herself down some for it. They were easy for her, she had to slow herself down. If I write this answer, will I seem too smart? I need to try to seem like I know less.

    The other goal of school was to make sure that everyone thought the society in which they lived was perfect. The American dream. Having everything a person could ever need. Everything was technical. There are no inequalities, every being was equal. Ella wasn’t really too site about this.

    Reading books not approved by the Creators was strictly forbidden, you weren’t even supposed to have them in your home. Ella did, so did her father. No one knew that, they had learned how to mask it well. Her father told her to keep them under the floorboard, that’s where they wouldn’t look if they ever came to search. Every room in the house had at least 3 or 4 loose floorboards with piles of books under them.

    Ella had starting sketching on the corner of the paper, forgetting the fact she was in one of the most important classes. Or at least, that’s what she was told. She blocked out the teacher’s droning, and continued drawing the person. It wasn’t anybody she knew, it was someone who she had thought up. Created, even. It was sort of messy, she had never drawn things like people. Only circles, squares, and triangles. The teacher looked away from the board and Ella crumpled up the piece of paper. That was a close call.