NftM #13: Delete

Alienor hated being home on a Monday afternoon, but a quiet HR employee informed her she no longer appeared in the system and was not allowed in the office, effective immediately. Her things from her desk, she told her over the phone, would arrive within the week but she knew she’d never get them. She knew it always started this way. No wonder she felt faint that morning. 

With the blinds shut and the lights off, Alienor sat in darkness on the small couch of her one-bedroom apartment, white walls and brown furniture, identical in all apartments in her district. She could have resented Gideon for her fate, denounce her love for him, her public grief after they erased him and her reckless attempts to defend him even though they declared him a traitor and a thought criminal. Instead, she stepped into her room and reached under the bed for a thin, tin box containing a photo. She didn’t fear disappearing as much as forgetting. The tingling in her hands worsened, the palms and prints ironed out from the sickly, pale skin. 

Agitated, Alienor pondered what to do. Could she run away? She’d be gone before she reached the border. No, she thought, she would die on her feet, like a woman, in the home she briefly shared with him. His voice still lingered in the living room, an echo from a warmer, more colorful past. She remembered what that was like—burning with love, kissing him behind close doors where the cameras couldn’t reach them, making plans to escape together and live in peace, unobserved.

She imagined a somber office worker, locked inside a small, gloomy cubicle just like hers, painstakingly erasing her life one document at the time—her birth certificate, her school records, the diploma she won at a spelling been at 10. She pictured this person covering her face in photos with black paint, removing her from group photos from work and at party meetings, striking her name out of reports and payslips, deleting every email she ever sent to her colleagues.

The tingling on her hands crawled up her neck and to her face, numbing it, turning the skin into clay. They would not recognize her when they found her the next day. She would be a non-person. She’d be no one.

Shaking, she ran to her desk and grabbed a sheet and a thick, felted pen before her hands lost their grip. It took her a while to remember how to make up the letters, one by one, like a child just learning how to write. The effort left her breathless, dizzy as she got up from the chair to lay down on her carpet, still holding on to the photo of them together and the handwritten note.

The undertakers would be there in the morning. By then she’d be unable to say her name and his for the last time, so ever if she was purged, her faced removed from all records, at least get the photo and the note burned in their memories, where no censor could erase it. “My name is Alienor, his name is Gideon,” her note read. Moments of their brief life together came to her in flashes of warmth light, of smiles, of faint sounds of laughter, of the vows they shared to each other the night before they erased him.

She dragged the memories of him to the front of her mind—the taste of his lips, his brown hair waiving in the wind, his slow, precise gait, the way his hands shook when anger took over him. In her mind he was next to her, lying on the carpet, waiting for the escape they longed for, transported into a world where they existed, they remained, they remembered.

That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed this story or would like to read something in particular, let me know by commenting on this post or giving me a shout on social media. I’m always keen to read opinions and story ideas.

Thanks for reading. Until next time.