Sacrifice: A Narrative Fiction

Looking through the dusty back window of the 1998 Volkswagen we were in, I sat and watched the colony disappear from view as the dark night began swallow it whole. I had wanted to leave for forever, but there was always a firm grasp which kept me there, my family. A single tear slips from my eye, rolls down my wind-burnt cheek, and clings tightly to my chin before its final descent into the open air. As a child, I too clung tightly to familiarity, but now, with my future at stake, it's time to flee, to leave behind everything, and embrace the rush of the unknown. I reach my hand across the center console and rest it on the back of Ethan’s soft hand. The warmth of his love momentarily fills the lull in my heart where my family once resided.

She is my daughter. I couldn't take away the person who my daughter loved and trusted the most.. I just couldn't. After all the other people she might have trusted, her parents, were a lie. She doesn’t know that I am her mother. As a nurse, it's considered a conflict of interest to have any children. So, as far as anyone knows, I don't. Well, anyone except Ann's foster mother. She had helped fabricate the entire conspiracy, just so I could follow my dreams. I had no idea that I would be randomly selected to be a E.P. nurse. I knew Ann's foster mother wanted nothing but happiness for her, and I as well. So I helped Ann and Ethan escape from the colony and start a new life. Well, I tried to at least. I left them a tranquilizer gun and the keys to my Volkswagen which parked outside the window I had left open. Inside the car I left a map that I had stolen from the conference meeting of the colonizers a few months back. The map contained specific directions to this new civilization. But what they did with it, if they escaped, I don’t

I quickly opened up the folded scrap of paper and began to read.
“What's that?” Ethan interrupted.
“It's a note… from my mom?”
“What?”
“The nurse, she's my mom? It's all in here. She left us that stuff.” I said offering the note to Ethan. He grabs it and makes confused faces as he read it. It all made sense now. Why I had never felt like I belonged in my own family, or really anywhere.
“Are you okay?” Ethan asks after he finished the letter.
“I don’t know, but I will be,” I tell Ethan as I reassuringly grab his hand.
We finally arrive at the new colony. Except, it isn't colony at all. There are no armed guards just standing around intimidating others. No walls that keep them in isolation. It’s just an average town, like the ones I had read about and dreamed of growing up in. I begin to cry. I have never seen anything as beautiful as this.
I walked into the doctor's office, clinging tightly to the familiarity of Ethan's side. It was quite different from those back in the colony. The hospitals there might as well have been called slaughter houses. After all, the entire goal of the colony was to repopulate the earth with the healthiest, virile species of