Chapter 3 Shiloh
SHILOH
Ididn’t clock in. There was no point.
I wasn’t staying. I couldn’t stay. Not when my choice to do so was no real choice at all.
I didn’t panic. The prospect of not paying rent this month, of having an empty fridge in just a few days, sat waiting for me behind a blanketing veil of grief.
I couldn’t feel afraid. Not yet. All I could feel was a terribly numbing sadness.
And an empty bitterness that men like Rod could do what they did while men like my daddy were dead.
The unfairness of the universe seemed suddenly completely overwhelming, too big to even attempt to contemplate head-on.
If I actually stopped and counted up all the things that had been stripped away from me, I’d collapse.
Or maybe just float away. All the goodness that had once anchored me to this place now gone.
I’d be entirely weightless with the emptiness of my own life.
I wouldn’t even be able to use the time away from work to paint. I knew that by tomorrow, the shock would lift, and the fear would come rushing in. I could work out anger or sadness with a paintbrush, but not fear. Anxiety froze my creativity completely.
I’d have no credits. No job. And no ability to paint.
And no one to even talk to about it. I had some friends, sure, but they all worked here.
I would tell them I’d been fired, and they’d make sympathetic noises and give me hugs, surely.
But then they’d be hurrying off to clock in for themselves, leaving me behind.
There was a number on everything these days, even the minutes you could spend caring about somebody else.
Dazedly, I found my locker and began to empty it.
There wasn’t much to take. My own boots, unfortunately much less sturdy than these steel-toed ones I’d have to leave behind. My comms tablet. My jacket. My hands moved as if they belonged to someone else, unfeeling as I collected my things and closed the locker for the last time.
I was just turning to go when laughter made me halt.
It was such an unexpected sound that, despite everything, curiosity made me move towards it.
Women sometimes laughed on the way out of here.
But before line-start it was usually pretty quiet, everybody sleepy and sore and dreading the twelve hours ahead.
Two women were huddled together in front of a locker, looking at something hanging on the inside of the locker’s door. I caught the sound of flipping paper then the explosion of another round of giddy giggles.
“Holy shit, is that Cherry Dawson? Bitch, good for you!” cried the woman on the left.
She looked to be in her mid-forties, with close-cropped silvery blond hair.
The woman beside her had steel-grey hair in a tight bun and a medium brown complexion.
I glanced at the names on the pockets of their uniforms. Mary on the left, Bhavi on the right.
They became aware of my presence at the same time, both turning towards me.
I was still too numb to be embarrassed about my intrusion into their little bubble of mirth. Luckily, they didn’t seem to mind.
“Look at this,” Bhavi said, pointing at what I now realized was an old-timey sort of paper calendar hanging on the inside of the locker’s door.
That’s what they were so excited about?
“I’ve got it on my comms tablet, too!” Mary added with excitement. She shoved the screen in my face.
On her small screen, I didn’t see the calendar in its entirety, with all the little squares for the days. I only saw the image above, the centre of it stretching to take up the whole screen.
Abs. Lots of abs. Golden abs.
Literally. They looked like they’d been carved from metal.
“Is that a sculpture?” I asked, peering closer, wondering at the art form.
For some reason, this made both of them dissolve into snorting laughter.
“He sure looks like one,” Mary said wistfully, turning the screen back to her own eyes and sighing.
“You could run off and marry him, you know,” Bhavi said teasingly. “You’re not already taken, like me!”
“No way!” Mary cried, her cheeks red. “Besides, this one is Cherry’s!”
The name Cherry really did sound familiar. There weren’t many women named after rare Terratribe II fruit around here.
Perhaps sensing the direction of my thoughts, Bhavi pointed to a small rectangle at the bottom left corner of the paper on the door. “That’s Cherry right there. She used to be in my zone. Now she’s off riding alien horses…And her alien cowboy! Ha!”
More snorts and giggles broke out around me as I leaned towards the paper calendar once more.
The small rectangle depicted a young woman I really did think I recognized, with a pale complexion and long brown hair.
She was giving an affectionate sideways hug to a massive, shirtless male beside her.
He, I realized, was the owner of the golden abs.
He wasn’t human.
“Where is she?” I breathed. She looked so damn happy.
“Some ranching outpost planet,” Bhavi said.
“Zabria Prinar One, it’s called. Apparently, all these alien cowboys want human brides.
And they’re getting them!” Bhavi flipped a few pages, showing me more of the small rectangles at the bottoms of some of the pages, and more human women embracing these big alien men.
Another white woman with pink hair beside an orange male.
A Black woman with a dark blue man. A freckled redhead and a pink guy.
A woman with medium brown skin and long black hair beside a male tinged emerald green.
The women were all smiling. Every single one of them.
Bhavi released the pages, and the calendar fell open to the original page it had displayed, the one with the tiny Cherry at the bottom. For the first time, I took in the large image at the top of the calendar in its entirety.
There were the abs again, but less zoomed-in this time.
They were a part of the torso of the golden-skinned male.
He was seated astride a saddle atop a large four-legged creature with curving horns.
The wide brim of his hat – which very much reminded me of an Old-Earth cowboy hat – shaded much of his face, but his body, with its impressive musculature and obvious strength, was on full display.
His hands held the reins in a relaxed grip that indicated he was totally at ease on his mount, and the dusty, worn leather of his boots showed a life of real work.
This wasn’t some model. This was an actual farmer or rancher of some sort.
I let my gaze move beyond the man astride the not-horse.
Rolling hills of yellow-green grass were lit up by softly dazzling sunlight.
Beyond the fields were what looked to be mountains, such a stunning rose-gold shade that they seemed more like jewellery – a glittering decoration – than a part of any natural landscape.
And above all of it was the biggest, bluest sky I’d ever seen.
Even within the confines of the small paper calendar on the narrow strip of metal that was the locker door, it was so wide and clear that it took my breath away.
I looked at that sky, that sun, all that blue and gold, and my heart hurt.
There was no other way to describe it, this sensation of pure longing that tightened in my chest.
“Cherry lives there?” I asked, my voice so quiet I barely heard it in my own ears.
“She sure does.” Mary pointed at a tiny structure in the background – a little yellow house.
“Pretty sure she lives there. I think that’s his place.
Their place.” Mary lifted the hanging part of the calendar and let the pages flip beneath her fingers, giving me a fluttering slideshow of more images like the first, with more men posing in various spots out in nature or on farms.
I barely noticed the men, in all honesty. I was entirely swallowed up by that sky. That light. The gentle roll of the hills and the awesome spike of the mountains.
I wanted to paint it.
I wanted to go there and paint it.
“It’s some kind of awareness campaign, I think,” Mary said, releasing the pages so that the calendar once again displayed Cherry with the big, golden man. “There’s some fine print about it being a penal colony.”
“Uh huh,” I said, barely registering the words or caring. Penal colony? That was the prettiest damn penal colony I’d ever seen.
“I’d be willing to forgive a lot…a lot,” Bhavi said, widening her eyes meaningfully, “if my criminal husband looked like that.”
Husband. These women had married the men there. Had gone to live in a penal colony.
And in turn, had gained what looked to be like the most beautiful sort of life I could imagine. They spent their days looking at that wide open sky instead of the grey, smog-ridden slate that hovered oppressively over New Toronto.
Shakily, I realized that I wouldn’t have to try to find a new job in a place like that.
If I had a migraine, I wouldn’t have to worry about missing a shift.
I could paint. Simply for the pleasure of it.
The idea boggled my mind. Left me feeling strangely bewildered. What would it even be like? To create art for art’s sake alone? Without hoping there might be some monetary reward at the end of it? To paint only for myself, and not for whoever might deign to one day pay me for it?
That was exactly the sort of life Daddy had always worked so hard to give me. A life that was unmarked by the slogging, constant churn of labour for someone else. He’d hoped that painting could bring me freedom.
Now, I saw it could be the other way around. Freedom could let me paint.
Freedom.
On a penal colony.
I took out my comms tablet and downloaded the data from the code on the calendar.
Whatever the deal with this weird, idyllic, cowboy-jail-planet was…
It had to be better than here.