The Wrong Party

“Sign it,” he said. That was the first he had said to me since the beating. The beating from him. The others kept beating me. I had ceased to be human by this point. I was treated as an animal, a creature, a living machine. My bones were theirs to break, my skin theirs to defile. I had no native authority left, not even over my own person. My human inheritance was spent, my history annulled. The story of my whens and whos was unwritten. How did this thing that used to be me come to be? I was forgetting.

The food, when it came, was a kind of porridge. Rice, wheat, I don’t know. At first, every third day or so, a piece of fish or prawn or fowl. And at first, I ate eagerly. Would you believe I felt gratitude? Gratitude to be treated as someone deserving. Then after the beatings began, and they still gave me meat, I was sickened by it. For I had become that meat. I was the beast of burden, the yoked and lashed, the chained and whipped. I was in ruins.

I became a brother to them all, to all those who must—what choice is given them?—submit. The beetles who traced the cracks in the walls, my brothers. The spider in her web that daily grew like ripening fruit, my sister. The mourning doves were my only confessors. And my crimes? What of my crimes?

My membership in the wrong party burned brightly in their books. They fed themselves on my many imagined infractions. “Sign it,” he said. Sign this statement I didn’t write. I couldn’t read it. (My eyeglasses were long ago ground into the floor. The lenses were still there, a sick flour.) Still, I knew what the statement said. It said I was wrong. But I was wrong about one thing only: I was still a person. I had one power left to me. I could refuse.