Fifty-two: Shaun

"Get working, you traitors," a soldier snapped at us, poking at us none too gently with the butt of his rifle. His long nose seemed to wobble. "Stop dawdling or I'll teach you a lesson, I will."

The army soldiers looked down on us none too fondly. The recent new prisoners, like the rest of us, kept their heads down and reapplied to the hard ground with their spades. They were the Prisoners of War, the POWs, who had been caught during battle. Unlike those of us who lived permanently in the Solitary Block, they lived in one of the smaller apartment blocks. Funny that.

Due to the rising cost of food and the scarcity with which it could be found in the city, we were turning the Field into farmland. Unfortunately for us, the past few weeks had been dry, sunny days and the ground was as hard as fired clay. This soil didn't seem like good soil for growing anything. We were making little headway. We needed rain to soften the ground.

Please God.

I'd taken to talking to God and praying a lot more these days. There was no one else to whom I could appeal. The only reason someone might want to appeal to the Scumbag Officer who ruled the Compound was if they wanted a harsher punishment.

Please, God, make it rain, so they'll stop blaming us for getting so little done in the Field.

It didn't help that we only got one meal a day lately. The soldiers had been stealing our other meals or something. I guess they hadn't been getting enough themselves, but it was really hard to do hard labour with less than one meal. I'd forgotten what it was like to not feel hungry.

"If you don't get a move on," the soldier jabbed at the dour former accounting woman who lived two doors down from me, making her stumble, "none of you will be getting any dinner."

Not that it made any difference to the dry ground. It was just too hard to dig.

"You're not even trying," the rifle knocked me amidst ribs. I went sprawling and the spade was snatched from me. "You've got to put some back into it, like this."

The soldier tried to dig the spade into the ground, but it bounced off the hard dirt, surprising him. He tried again in multiple ways. I didn't smile, though I wanted to, but the woman from two doors down did and the soldier threw my spade at her, knocking her down. She was as thin as a broomstick.

"Don't laugh at me," he snarled. "All right, I get it," he waved his arms at us. "Go put the spades away and get to your other duties. At least you'll be able to do something there."

I picked up my spade, helped up my neighbour and went to get my bucket of soapy water and rags. A cloud covered the sun, giving us some respite from the burning glare and a cool wind blew.

Probably I should learn the names of my neighbours, but we didn't really talk. Never really had. I don't know why, but there was just an unspoken agreement not to talk to each other beyond the necessities. We were the most taciturn prisoners in the Compound. Even the POWs didn't seem to understand us. There wasn't much point keeping it up now that we had truly become prisoners, but somehow we couldn't seem to break out of the habit. It was just better to keep your mouth shut.

"I don't know why they make us try everyday when they know it's useless," complained a chatty POW by the name of Shaun, who had become my work partner. I carried the soapy bucket and soapy rags. He carried the clean water bucket and the drying rags. He didn't seem to mind that I didn't talk much and seemed to know who I was from the start. Perhaps he was a friend of Kiran's. I didn't know and didn't ask. I wasn't curious enough about anything beyond surviving through the day these days. What was most on my mind was the fact that I worked, I got to eat at least one meal a day, got my cup of water and lived to see another day. We had different priorities. "We need rain or else we'll never get anywhere. We might even starve when they run out of food, because we couldn't plant anything. That would be horrible. Don't you think that would be horrible?"

Nodding, I washed the car, moving methodically, while Shaun followed behind, rinsing and drying the car behind me. After the car was washed, we'd get the wax out and polish it until it shined.

"Come on, Jean," Shaun said. "Talk to me a little. It can't hurt for you to just have a little chat."

There was yelling in the distance and I saw the woman from two doors down talking animatedly, almost agitatedly, to another POW. A soldier stood nearby, smirking, enjoying the scene. She yelled at the soldier, who did nothing but watch her with that smirk fixed on his face.

I put my head down and worked.

"Isn't she a solitary too?" Shaun asked. "She's breaking the mold. I wonder what's got her all in a tizz. Now if you talked to me, even yelled at me, I'd still take it better than silence, because between you and me, partner, this is torture. I feel like you're mad at me for no reason and then I keep thinking of all the things I've done that might have made you mad with me."

That made me smile.