The Dreaming Dyes

Before I get angry emails telling me how insensitive I am to write a story like this one...

The Dreaming Dyes is a short story based on a novel I am working on.  The prompt of the clock in the Do Your Shorts Have Legs contest inspired this story as something that will eventually be worked into the novel.

As well, this is not about students shooting guns in schools.  In The Dreaming Dyes -- the novel, the government has decided to solve unemployment and welfare fraud issues by involuntarily placing 12% of the population in Welfare Zones.  Just prior to the start of the novel, the Welfares revolt and the school mentioned below gets caught in the crossfire.

This story and the novel are about rising up against oppression to the last person. 


I stared at the clock on the wall, watching the absurdly glowing hands and numbers on the black face.  The new teacher had screwed it to the wall, trying to cover a couple big chunks of missing cinder block.  She might as well not have bothered.  I would never forget the way that the soldier’s bullets tore through Mrs. Parsons, my Math teacher, and then gouged out the wall behind her.

Mrs. Wilson, the replacement teacher, smiled at me as she interposed herself between me and the clock.  “How much do you know about the early days of the Welfare Zones?” she asked.

I shrugged.  “My parents were picked in the lottery to make up the twelve percent, so we came within the first couple of weeks of the Zone opening.”

She nodded.  “And your parents?  Do they talk about that time much?  Do they talk about any of it?”

“My parents refused to go when they were picked, so were taken away.  My brother and I have been living here on our own for the past eleven years.  The government assigned the neighbors to keep an eye on us.”  I wiped my brow on my sleeve and glanced at the shattered windows.  Guess they wouldn’t bother to keep the AC going if it was all just going to blow outside.

“That must have been scary for you.”

I shrugged.  “Maybe, for the first couple of years, but you get used to it.”

“And your parents were taken away for refusing to relocate?”

‘Yes.”

“Do you understand what happened if you refused the voluntary relocation?”  A single drop of perspiration rolled from Mrs. Wilson’s eyebrow and down her cheek.

I nodded, acutely aware of every muscle in my neck as my head lowered then raised.  “They stripped your clothes off and whipped you down your street before loading you into a black wagon and taking you to one of the facilities.”

She swallowed hard.  “Yes, they made an example of you to terrify the ‘normal’ population before shipping you off for reeducation.  Once there, you became a subject in their thought control experiments.”

“And then?”  I leaned forward, my sweat-slick forearms slipping across the cool desktop for a moment before suctioning in place.

“And then they filled you with drugs, deprived you of sleep, tortured and starved you until you lost your mind or died.”  She pushed herself away from her desk and stood.

I watched her pace to the windows and back as my memory replayed the day my parents disappeared.  When they vanished into that black van, naked and bleeding, I thought they had suffered the worst.  When they never joined my brother and I in The Zone, my mind made up a thousand excuses.  How could I have been so wrong?

I closed my eyes, trying to block out the conjured images of the fates my parents had met.  I preferred my delusions.  Once I had the nightmare images under control, I opened my eyes once more.

Mrs Wilson stood at the windows, her back to me, her head turning side to side ever so slightly, as if she stood sentry at the shattered glass.  “My husband and I refused to go easily.  We had good jobs, family and friends we were close to.”  Her voice shook.  “They tore Bill away from me at the gates of the facility.  I have not seen him since.”

“But you got out,” I said, hope sending my heart racing.

My teacher showed no sign of having heard me.  “The Dreaming Dyes came to me the beginning of my second week at the facility.”  She hesitated, her shoulders moving up and down with her breathing.  “The first week I spent standing naked, crushed into a room with a couple hundred other welfares.  They didn’t feed us and there was no room to sit or lay down.  When it got too hot or we started to smell too badly, they would hose us down with freezing cold water.  We’d suck it off our skin to keep from dehydrating.”

She turned around and lifted her leg to half-sit on the shelf under the window.  “A gigantic clock faced us from every wall, so that we would know exactly how long we had been standing there."  She shuddered and glanced at the absurd clock behind her desk.  "Most of the elderly died within the first few days.  Anyone who fell down was left on the floor and eventually ended up buried under more bodies.  I stayed standing for two days after there was room enough to move because I would have had to sit on the dead and dying around my feet.  On the sixth day I had no choice.  My legs couldn’t hold me any longer, and if I hadn’t sat on the pile, I would have become a part of it.”

She shuddered.  “Or at least, that is the way I thought then.  Today I think that I became a part of that pile even though I continued to breathe.  A big part of me died as I sat on the hip of an old woman, and she died under me.”

I couldn’t stifle my horrified gasp.  “You just sat on her while she died?”

“And for a day afterward.  I tried to get up every few minutes, but my legs just wouldn’t lift me.”  A haunted smile touched her lips even as her eyes glistened.  “So, I did the best I could.  I stroked her hair and sang her songs.  I told her stories about how beautiful it would be on the other side.”

My stomach rolled, tossed between a hundred emotions.  The fingers of my left hand picked absently at the microdot tattoo on my right.  How long had I lived here, taken our weekly rations with a smile and a thank you, ran to school with my friends, laughed and lived like this was a completely normal and proper way to live?  Why had I not fought every moment?  Why wasn’t I fighting even now that I had watched my classmates and teacher gunned down?  When one of my friends had died in my arms?

“They dragged me off the pile on the seventh day, hauling me like a piece of meat to a shower room where they hung me up and sprayed me down with disinfectant.  They tossed a jumper over my head and then dumped me onto the floor of my cell.  The only reason I found the Dreaming Dyes was because it took two days of crawling on the floor before I had enough strength to haul myself up onto the bed.”

She sat in silence for a moment, rubbing her hands together slowly, examining them as if she could find on their surface the answers to all the questions.  “I found the Dyes wedged between the frame of the bed and the mattress.  It was a small packet, wrapped in brown paper upon which had been written a note.”  She stood and returned to her desk to pick up a scrap of paper that she passed to me.

I unfolded it.  Thin, weak pencil marks covered the type of brown paper that people used to wrap parcels for the mail.  The softness of the paper betrayed how many times the note had been read.

”My name is Caroline.  I discovered these Dyes the same way that you will discover them, wrapped in a note much like this note.  The powders within this package are called The Dreaming Dyes, and, although you may not believe me, they are magic.  More than that, however, they are freedom.’

‘Simply mix the smallest pinch of the Dyes into a bit of water then brush the mixture over a picture.  The note left for me said to mix a pinch of the powder into paint, and whatever I painted would be real, but where are we to get paint in this place?’

‘I almost threw them away but then, one day a little blew into my water and turned it the most incredible shade of pink.  Oh God, how I loved pink in my old, stupid, wasted life.’

‘Anyway, they will allow you to receive newspapers here – I guess they think it helps with the brainwashing – and I decided to liven up my daily copy with a touch of pink.  I was disappointed at first because it dried clear, but when I touched the dried picture, I just sort of fell into it.  It was an advertisement for a travel agent, so I found myself up to my ankles in white sand, the hot sun beating down on me, and best of all, a gorgeous little sundress covering me instead of my stinking, filthy jumper.’

‘The real world stood behind me like a door.  I could still hear and feel what was happening out there.  My body remained out there, but nonetheless, I was inside the world of the picture.”

I looked up from the letter and stared at Mrs. Wilson.  “This can’t be true.”

She nodded at the letter.  “Finish it first.”

I did as I was told.

”I am nearing the end of my time here.  Thanks to the freedom the Dyes have allowed me, I have been considered incorrigible.  Soon I will be dead or sent to the work camps, and it is now that I realize how I have wasted this gift just as I wasted my life.  I could have changed the world from inside this cell, but instead I spent my time hiding in beautiful places, indulging myself just as I did before I was tattooed and whipped down the street.’

‘So, I leave the Dyes for you in hopes that you too will become incorrigible, but in a way that will save the world from what our fears and prejudices created.  Make no mistake as you sit here inside these walls.  They were built by us, not just a government.  They could never have done all this without our permission.  Use the Dyes, go out into the pictures of the world, and rectify our mistakes.’

‘God Bless, Caroline.”

I reread the paper before looking up.  “I don’t understand.”

Mrs. Wilson sat in her seat and leaned forward, her forearms crinkling the open page of the attendance book.  “The Dreaming Dyes work exactly as she says in that letter.  You mix a pinch of the powder into some water, brush it lightly over a picture, and then you can just disappear into that world.”

I almost laughed, but she looked so serious.  Still, I shook my head.  “No, how could it be possible?”

“I don’t know.  I can see the portal to my cell over in the corner.  I can see my body lying there and yet, I feel as though I have a body here.  I have no explanation for you, Sarah.  All I can do is tell you this story and then hope that you are brave enough to help me.”

“Help you?”  I jumped up out of my chair hard enough that it fell over backwards.  “How?  What do you want me to do?”

Mrs. Wilson shook her head.  “I don’t know yet.  I was hoping you and your friends could help me figure that out.  All I know is that I can’t just sit by and let this situation go unanswered.  How many people died here last week for no reason?”

I turned around and stared at the spot where Trevor had laid, dying, in my arms.  He had not committed any crimes other than being born to a father who had been disabled on the job.  Mrs. Parsons was just trying to teach them Logarithms.  At times that had felt like a crime, but she certainly hadn’t deserved to die.  Her kids and husband didn’t deserve to be left without her.  No one in the Zone had deserved any of the horror that occurred ten days before.

I turned back.  “What can we do against men with guns?”

She shrugged.  “Maybe nothing, but with the Dreaming Dyes on our side, maybe we can create a miracle.”

I looked past her to the ridiculous glowing hands on the clock, seeing only the holes in the cinder blocks behind it.  I nodded.  "I want to believe that."