Acquiesce: Short Stories

The War for Antartica

The air was hot and heavy around Maggie. Too hot and too heavy, too humid that her sweat no longer could evaporated off of her translucent skin. All of the girls' off-white dresses were stained with sweat. None of them could remember a time when they were not drenched and smelt off.

            Mary once offered that sweat smelt like onions, back when there were more girls crowded in this room. Back then it was easier to talk, your mouth was almost up against another girl's ear. It didn't look suspicious as long as you kept your words with the flow of their prayer and kept your fingers moving.

            Maggie tried not to pay Mary's comment any ease. She just didn't feel the same way. Her dad was a chef and he used to let her sit in the kitchen on his days off of work when he actually wanted to cook for their small family. It was just the two of them for as long as she could remember and he always let her cut the onions, he said she did it better, that her uneven chops and ragged ends added a certain texture that only a true food critic could taste. Before the war, he had worked at the local diner that had never been visited by a food critic. Now she had no idea where he was.

            Maggie felt an empty pang in her chest out of necessity to feel something for the loss of her father. She was close to him, she missed him. They were the three musketeers if the three musketeers were only two and not three, not four. She felt guilty if she didn't hurt. But now they went through the same thing.

            Somewhere in the plain grey bunker, a baby cried out. Maggie felt a shiver electrocute down her spine. She knew this was bad. She knew this was worse than bad. The soldiers would hear, they always did.

            There was a war going on above the bunker. They were told that it had been going on for all their life. For longer than the oldest girl had been alive, which was Mary; and Mary was only twenty-five. Maggie was close. The third oldest behind Olive. Maggie was just twenty-three, or maybe she was older. She had been taken when she was just fifteen.

            On the day she had been taken her legs were sore. She was sore. Her heart hurt most of all, and even though for the prior three days, she was ravished. From the crack of the cupboard door she had watched everything unfold. Her father was raped by three soldiers, and then killed by three bullets. One in the groin, one in the chest, and then one in the head. Then she waited three days until they were gone and as soon as she stepped out of the cupboard, she was pinned on the floor, then raped, and shot at by three new bullets – but they all missed. She flinched at each one; something her father did not.

            Then she came here. She bled for a day, and then nothing for weeks. She knelt for hours every day, in the middle of all of these girls, facing forwards, in their white, sweat stained dresses, as the war for Antarctica ragged on above. They prayed the rosary, over and over, an unbreaking cycle of muttered words that used to be a chant, but now it just crested above a whisper of strained voices. Every night, they were forced to take a pregnancy test before they were laid to rest in cots, patrolled by soldiers. Maggie was pregnant.

            Four weeks of this went by until Maggie felt her cramps return. Her bleeding was heavier than it had been, and she soiled four of the dresses and then beaten for it. They shaved her head for the waste of their time when she had lost the baby. She did not cry for the baby, nor did she get the empty pang of guilt that emptied her lungs when she thought of her father.

            The baby continued to cry; it was behind her. She counted the beads on her rosary as the girls prayed in unison, not to the home-made deity at the front of the room. Not to the soldiers fighting the war for Antarctica, but for the baby to stop crying.

            The war was simple. The allies and the united forces were fighting the new settlers of Antarctica for their land and the rumoured resources – and a rumoured portal to somewhere undiscovered. The bunker gave the Allies and the united forces a place to stay, women to mate and rape, and hope from the women's prayers and God's protection.