Rumor was in Alt-Cor, first they juiced you, knocked you cold. Eloise expected this and wanted this. Hobbling in her orange jumpsuit, head down, sentencing over, she craved the needle, the oblivion and reprieve.
They took away her jumpsuit and sad gray undies, lined El up with others against damp green tile. One side, a pink elbow accidentally knocked her ribs. Other side, the curve of a brown shoulder, somehow familiar.
Maybe Jilly from Block Two-Alpha—wouldn’t it be wild?
“Eyes up and straight ahead, ladies!”
Like a line-up.
The CO turned a hose on them, full force, drenching cold, playing it across their bodies. And El’s jaw went like the wind-up skull in her dorm room, jittering, teeth chattering.
* * *
So. No juice, no fleeting relief.
But the dripping braids and hunched shoulders trudging ahead, this was indeed Jilly. First on the block who’d been kind to Eloise, showed her the ropes. And El had to snatch up hope, whatever butterfly form it took. It’s how you kept going. Those who hesitated, protested, or stumbled faced swift corrections.
“Changing Room,” someone barked. “One. At. A. Time.” El expected something humiliating and uncomfortable—clown suits, hair shirts. Alternative Corrections was known for their creativity, each new season broadcast on Channel 9.
Instead, what greeted her was a curious machine. It churned, pumping something like gray soft serve from its spout into a trough. Freaked to the core, El giggled.
“Shut your face.”
Two men, no windows, no camera. They could do whatever they wanted, and she’d be blamed. Eloise swallowed her scream and held still, so still, playing statue.
They came at her with rubber gloves slathered in glop. Mud, only mud. Warm, obnoxiously comforting after the freezing water. Slapped on starting with her neck. Breasts and navel and hips and thighs and legs, until she was caked, encased, her body heavy with it.
* * *
Ponderous, shackled, earth-laden, El stood before the appraising eyes of two female COs.
“Can I ask what’s happening to me?” she said. Surely a woman…
A boot to her bare toes.
This, the closest Eloise came to passing out. But she held on, pictured clinging to a cliff overhanging a valley split by a river. White torrents. A cruel sun spangling granite boulders. A lizard warmed itself on one and winked at her.
Snapping to, Eli realized they were poking her. Prodding deftly. Almost as bad as the medical exam, the wand that proved she wasn’t pregnant and thus an eligible candidate.
Dots on their fingertips. Small, dark, like periods at the ends of sentences.
Seeds.
Sentenced to seeds.
Pushed into the soil she wore, planted all over.
* * *
Jilly next to her, one small-but-huge good thing. They can’t converse during the day, can’t even turn their heads excessively, lest it break their soil “cast.”
Day and night were relative conditions, controlled by banks of floods. Lamps glowed like fireplace embers, a warmth without cheer. At intervals, showers misted.
A warehouse, like where El worked, driving the forklift same as any man, shifting pallets of goods. An endlessly consuming public meant endless shifts. Eventually they’d pay for some college, if you lasted.
But here, only women, bodies smothered in clay and loam, wheeled in on daises. Enough room to carefully recline on their platforms, or sit, or stand facing the dictated direction. Each serving her time this way. If she lasted.
Today’s direction was north. Like the compass needle standing tall and true, back when El hiked alone (“so brave!”). Probably when she was initially flagged for observation. A woman like that…
Ten rows total, ten mud-caked people per row. Faces: black, brown, white, freckled, sunburned, blanched, every shade of fearful and enraged. Hair: coiled, kinked, frizzled, lank. Cropped or left long, disappearing into earth-suit collars.
At night, they whispered. Everyone did. El inclined her head towards Jilly’s, and Jilly did the same.
“Wanna go home.”
“Never touching anything with a dick again.”
“Not worth it.”
“All this being filmed.”
“Cameras everywhere.”
“Cautionary tale for the girls.”
“Poor things. Horrible world, this.”
“Imagine being raised, only knowing this.”
“Gotta scratch. Itching. I’m going crazy.”
“Hold it together. I know people on the outside organizing something. Promise?”
“Okay. Okay. You, too. Promise, Jilly?”
“Promise.”
* * *
Feedings came in two varieties.
By hose three times a day, rubber teats along its length. Chalky, lukewarm. If you refused to latch, you starved. Refuse three times, and they’d punish the bits of you that showed. Noses, lips, nipples, soles, toes. Twisted, pinched, shocked, smashed.
The other nutrition wasn’t for you. Robotic sprayers wheeled overhead, and you clamped your mouth and eyes tight against the poison.
Fertilizer to nourish the seeds pushed into your earth coat.
Coax them to break through the crust.
Which they did. On everyone, by day five, six, or seven: tender shoots like unlucky clovers.
* * *
Jilly broke her promise. She slipped into a madness like falling in a fast spring creek.
“No,” El said. “Shhh! Come on, Jilly, don’t do this to me…”
“Tickles! Itches! Never stops!”
All of them, together, a field bristling with green growth.
“Please, then, for the little girls watching,” El said. “Be strong for the girls of Channel 9.”
Jilly fell to babbling, raving.
That night, under red nightlights, Jilly went Hulk. Everyone turned to see, like petals tipping toward the center.
Small red globes dropped from her cracking soil-suit like fat pearls of blood. She snatched one, bit it, laughed. “Radishes, my friends! We’re growing radishes!”
Alarms blasted. Floodlights. Back to spouting nonsense, Jilly staggered through the waste on the floor. Before they reached her, she kneeled by El’s dais, saying to her ear only, “Lexington and Main, 202, basement.”
* * *
These words kept El going.
Despite new loudspeakers at night: “Sluts! Whores! Sluts! Whores!” So many broke, hauled off to Mental Lab or worse. A bumper crop.
Despite the live-broadcast harvest. Hoedown music, fat ruby roots plucked triumphantly like sins.
Hope tucked in an envelope with a cryptic address.
* * *
Ⓒ Jennifer Lesh Fleck
Originally published in Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic, Cosmic Horror Monthly, June 2023. Reprinted here by permission of the author.