Often, I would daydream to forget about all the bad things that were happening. Always hungry, always in pain I couldn’t look at the others at the table because it would remind me of my own stomach pangs. Their faces were just as twisted as mine, wrought with personal anguish and hunger. Was there ever a day where we didn’t wear grimy and disheveled expressions?

The rationed grubs that sat on my plate were covered in soil; the food preparers didn’t care about cleanliness because John the Exulted didn’t care. Our fingers were also dirty with toil and I didn’t want to have to shovel another bite but the man at the end of the table was staring. They say he’s just a man, the last real man of power, but from so far away no one really knew for sure. He could have been one hundred years old or he could have been twenty. He was our shining beacon, a symbol of our perseverance.

It was said that he was more comfortable with twelve empty rows of seats between him and the rest of the villagers. That way he wouldn’t “burn us with his brilliant, radiant truths.” Truths, of course, that only he knew. And there was his daughter, always sitting to his right, watching the villagers stuff their mouths with pus-covered grubs. She would be wheeled in during the feasts and placed at the far end. The dress was always the same, blue with pink flowers, or rather they looked like flowers. Her face mask was also the same, a blank white that peered at us with two black holes. Edward the Seventh was looking at me again, mouth tightly shut as to not make a peep. And then his eyes would dart between me and the Exulted’s daughter. If she ever ate it was never in front of us. She never moved either.

After the feast Edward would find me in my family’s hovel and go on about how she was possessed, or that she didn’t have a face, or that she was a dummy, or some other crazy theory that he had in mind. He always had an overactive imagination, one that the others never desired.

The hunger became too much, especially hearing and seeing the others dig into their grubs. Blindly digging my fingers in I felt around the carcass, juices spilling onto my chest, and pulled out a piece and put it to my mouth. I chewed apart the rubbery meat and let the tears well when I had to swallow. My mother nudged me to smile. I did as I was instructed.

One of our neighbors coughed violently and could barely keep the food down. This would be the second week where someone came down with the Affliction. Soon the man would be taken away if he couldn’t keep the rations down. The others looked away, as if they hadn’t known him. Tears welled in his eyes but he kept eating.

Several others had toiled in the dirt so hard that they came to the feasts with blisters and open wounds. We couldn’t see them of course because we were made to cover the wounds with the Mud of Siloam, the mud that was supposed to purify the hardships and conceal the ugliness behind them. This was another proclamation by John the Exulted, as he is the rightful heir to all knowledge of the rituals created by the men who came before. I often wondered what the ancients looked like, and some days whether they had existed at all.

At the end of the table John the Exulted had finished his meal, which I swore I saw heat vapors coming from the plate, and spoke through his megaphone. “Villagers, here me.” The voice was distant yet came to us as if he were sitting next to us. Edward once said that it was magic. “Everyone will lie to you. Only I can offer the truth. Everyone has lied to you. Heed my words.” He would often repeat the same mantra, to make sure we heard it. The more he said it the less enthused he sounded. “Heed my words, people, rid yourself of your worries and maladies for they are also lies. The Affliction can only harm you if you let it. Like this man here. Soldiers!”

I saw it coming and closed my eyes. The Exulted Liquidators, in their wooden chest plates, came to grab the Afflicted man and drag him from his bench. I couldn’t bare to watch another one be taken to the gate. We would spend another night listening to his screams as the creatures tear him apart. Another sleepless night wondering what’s on the other side. Only the Exulted was allowed beyond the gate.

We never truly understood how the man at the end of the table became the man at the end of the table. My mother told me, whispering one night while I was in bed, that we had statutes once. That the Exulted one was chosen by the people. But when John was selected, he refused to give up his seat at the end of the table and changed the rules for “the good of the people.” This too, she said, was repeated again and again until the villagers believed it.

Such words were treason. If any of the others found out they wouldn’t hesitate to tell the Liquidators. I couldn’t bear to think of her being taken to the gates. Our hovel was made of foliage, so much so that most of the village, the market square and bathing pool, was simply dirt and gravel. We could see the pines on the other side of the wooden walls. I secretly wished to see what a world full of trees would look like. My mother had known this world once and told me under hushed breath. It wasn’t consumed in brown mud. It was once colorful and green.

She would always find ways to make life easier, giving me leaf greens that fell over the side of the walls and filtering clean water to drink. At night she would tell me stories to calm me to sleep, of imaginary places where people didn’t have to dig for grubs or hide their scars under mud.

The mud wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t cause infections. One of the villagers went blind from the mud and was taken beyond the gate. I would grow anxious when I saw my mother wearing her mud patches, wondering if today would be the day.

At the table John the Exulted was clearing his throat. I cringed and looked at my mother, holding her breath. Until recently she had been stronger than even myself, by carrying my workloads without even a complaint. But there something different about the way she looked at me now, like she was apologizing with her eyes. The others, John the 23rd and Mary the 17th, and even Edward the 7th, had the same expression while staring at her. Then their eyes drifted to John the Exulted. I could sense tension in the room. The wooden boards that contained the feast hall even seemed to breathe with creaks.

Another sounded came from the person next to me. A slight choke or gag, then a full-on cough. I grabbed my mother’s arms when I realized I was about to lose her forever. The Exulted broke off from eating and spoke through the megaphone. The Liquidators pulled her away before I could whimper in protest. Without thinking I stood and grasped at her arm. They pulled her through the door.

“Relax boy! Only I can offer you the truth. Your mother has abandoned you. We must rid ourselves–“

“No! I will not let you take her.” The men dragged her through the mud and I followed, pushing them away with my arms. My mother was crying through caked dirt. She tried to scream for me but all I could do was collapsed into her arms. The Liquidators came up behind me and I heard the quick thud of a wooden club against my head.

I woke to a small, dark room, cluttered with wooden dolls and papers. The walls groaned with the wind and the only speck of light came from a crack in the panels. Everything was blurry and numb. A moment ago, I was out in front of the feast hall, fighting in the bitter cold and now I was grasping at my own hands, a rope tied around them. I could still hear her voice inside my head, her feet slung through the mud. It echoed like a storm until I realized I wasn’t alone in the room.

Sitting in her wheelchair was the Exulted One’s daughter, staring blankly behind a white mask in the darkened corner. I tried to struggle but as I started to rock in the chair the door opened, groaning on rusted hinges. My heart skipped a beat when John the Exulted entered. He was no longer at the end of the table. He stood merely a few feet away.

“Stay calm. I am the truth and you have betrayed that truth with your lamentations.” His face was shrouded in shadow but he was not what I imagined. I had never been this close and he seemed smaller, almost unrecognizable. As he came into the light all the grotesque details came into view. There were boils on his nose, which was crooked, and he had an infection on his brow that he did not conceal with mud.

“My — my mother she…” I was breathing heavily.

“Was Afflicted and she needed to be purged from the village. You should know this.” His jaw clenched, even his voice was different, almost shallow, like he struggled to take in air. “You must be reminded of your place. You must know what it’s like to remain silent.”

He turned toward his daughter and breathed out, choked by phlegm. In the beam of light, he appeared more like a monster from my mother’s tales.

“I did not mean…offense. I couldn’t–“

“Enough, you will sit with my daughter until you realize the errors of your ways. Silence is a virtue. You will see.”

I shook my head violently, trying to stop myself from saying something I’d regret. The door slammed behind him, leaving me alone with the dark-haired girl. The hair was long and dirty, covering her shoulders and most of her faceless mask. Smooth and shiny but also stained, the cut-out holes stared back.

As time passed so did my willingness to speak. Even at a younger age I was always more talkative, more free-spirited than the other children. The dread I felt, knowing that she would eventually speak or move or twitch, made my skin crawl. But she never would. The constant stare, pale skin, and odor of spoiled meat made me whimper and shake. No matter how hard I tried I could not make a sound. I was being taught to become an obedient servant. And the awkward hush of being so close to her, never moving, bent head and limp arms caused me to gasp for several hours.

With hunger and delirium, I started to see my mother’s face in the mask. The empty spaces were filled with expressions of anguish. Even when I closed my eyes shut there were still the hollow yelps and panicked screams. The screams became distant, like the man’s voice at the end of the table. Everything felt so far away, like a tunnel that went nowhere. I rocked the chair towards it, pushing off the floor so that I could break through the barrier in my mind. The chair tipped back and then forward, causing me to fall forward onto my face. I cringed with the smack of the floor, the chair cracking and breaking. My hands were free. I scrambled to get my feet but I was wobbly from sitting for so long.

Noise came from outside the room. Someone was coming. My heart raced with the anticipation of seeing John come through the door. There was a shovel near his daughter. I tip-toed towards her, hands shaking and perspiring. When the door flew open my throat seized. The majesty of seeing my leader, our leader, when he entered the room had been spoiled when I saw the look of hate in his eyes.

I reacted, in a state of tired fury, and brought the shovel to his chin, knocking him back into the hall. His presence had been filled with falsehood and I only had myself to blame. The Exulted One fell into the wall and had a furled, confused brow.

“What is this?” He shouted, his arms out. “Somebody!”

I still couldn’t speak and only swung wildly, knowing the guards would come soon. The third strike struck his forehead and knocked him to his knees. Blood spilled over his eyes and lips. The image of our defeated and deflated leader was pathetic. He crawled away on bended elbows. All of his supposed power and reverence were gone. He was uglier than he had ever been, or ever thought he could be. The table between us was gone and I was alone with him in the hall.

“I am the truth —the truth. You –you are an insect. I am the shining —” Blood was splattered on the wood below his neck.

The shovel burned in my hands. I wanted to swing as hard as I could. I imagined his lifeless body and froze, never having seen a dead body. There was no desire left to find out, no desire to stay. But that didn’t stop me from pummeling his back until he could only inch along. The shovel fell to the floor, my hands becoming numb, and ran the other away, desperate for escape and the arms of my mother.

Around the corner was a series of steps, I had never seen anything like it. These led to the second level of the feast hall. It was no wonder no one was allowed back here. The walls were filled with wonderfully colored images. Places unlike I could ever imagine. Large towers of metal with brilliant lights. Down the hall was a door, cracked open. I went inside and found the dwelling of John the Exulted. Around the chamber were trinkets the other villagers would be jealous of. Gems and technology that shouldn’t exist. On the table at the center of the room was a series of thin, square cloths with tiny symbols. I couldn’t make them out and when I flipped the pile of cloth over there were the symbols “M-A-N-I-F-E-S-T.”

But I didn’t stare long. What caught my attention next was the clear wall behind me. It wasn’t wood. It wasn’t metal. Instead there was a barrier of a glistening substance, much like water, that I could see through. My heart sank when I saw everything before me. Outside the clear barrier was an entire world, the place beyond the gate. Looking down I nearly fell to my knees from the terrible height. Below the village, far, far below, there was a floor that was shiny and clean. Cleaner that anything I had seen, the massive floor stretched on for miles. The outside…it was huge. The outside was a room that was empty but filled with brightness. Then I realized…we were in a container, a small container that held our entire village. We were small, all of us, and the world was bigger than we could have ever imagined. I fell to my knees, knowing there would be no escape. We would be trapped in this miniature state, forever.