On Orphanage

The ceiling upset him. Painted skillfully in hundreds of bright colors it mocked him as he glanced up at it from his bed. Its theme was that of a circus and he saw it now in detail as he never had before, though for as long as he remembered he had awoken to the same sight. The canvas stretched to all edges of the pentagonal arch, its many concessions and brightly lit attractions outlined against a twilight sky speckled with stars. Worst were the clowns, a group of them surrounded by an intrigued crowd of parents and their smiling children. One in particular stared down at him with wide cartoony eyes, pupils dilated and kooky. The entire panorama was teasing him, drawing out his anger pent up over his repeated failure to escape. Though he had known nowhere else as home, he knew from pictures such as this gigantic collage on his ceiling that there was much more happiness in the world outside this facility.
What he didn’t know is that once, the complex had served as a high school, catering to the hundreds of children living in the neighboring towns. It was a decent enough suburb, full of a middle class of people who served the city. Unremarkable it was in theory, yet notable in a sense that everyone in it had fled. Everyone, that is, except the employees of this facility.
It was they who taught him only what they wished for him to know, and that was very little. The school had been turned into a prison. A colorful one as to confuse the children entrapped there…. But a prison none-the-less. These ‘prisoners’ came as infants, born unwanted and without the privilege of being adopted. The government had become corrupt and although they funded this facility to entertain and educate them, they were destined for nothing more than selective slavery. It was selective in a sense that although they were paid, they had no real motive for collecting money. No hopes or dreams of being placed into a society that pretended this wasn’t happening to them. For this reason the children were never allowed leisure outside the walls. Society saw them as a tax; undesirable yet necessary, yet not something they wish to gaze upon. Therefore they spent all their life within this converted brick high school. The painted walls and smiles on the ever present attendants were anything but soothing. The pleasantry projected by the place rendered as false as their promise of freedom. No one had ever gotten out; no one ever tried… no one except him.