Children of Omelas

Children of Omelas

by Asikea Ngansuril 

When his existence was first described to me, he was named only as the Child. The Child was not he; the Child was it.

I was one among few who had seen the Child with their own eyes. I matured a little faster than my friends, many of whom were told about the Child years after I was. Early in the morning of my eighth birthday, I was escorted by Council bureaucrats to the city plaza. There, at the heart of Omelas, stood the Mausoleum of Prosperity. It was a monument to the happiness of Omelas; the happiest city in the world, so we all said. I was led silently into the Mausoleum, through corridors and down flights of stairs, until we came to a little door somewhere in the basement of the building. Wielding a set of keys, one of the adults flung the door open, and there it was.

What first stood out to me was not the smell, not the festering sores on its backside, nor its abject nakedness; it was the fact that it wasn’t much younger than me, if at all. With a wordless strike, it was encouraged to get up and, drawn up to its full height, it stood several inches shorter than me. The Child looked longingly at its seat of excrement, which the adults now swept away. Its bowl of food and water was then refilled. All the while, no words were uttered, and its eyes never did meet my gaze. Encouraged now by a kick from a steel-toed boot, the Child went back to crouch in the corner, its back turned to its unwanted audience. On the back of the Child’s head, I noticed streaks of red standing to attention around a crown of absent hairs as the door was shut once more, the Child now out of sight, but very much not out of mind.

Upon returning home that day, I was told by an auntie that the Child, though malformed and possessing ill habits, was once a person like anyone else. It once spoke, and played. This auntie played with it – once upon a time, when she worked at the hospital – and she was there to witness its final cries of protest, before it had learned that help was never coming. ‘I will be good,’ it said. ‘Please let me out, auntie, I will be good.’ The people present that day were not permitted to respond to the Child’s protests – not even with harsh words – and the auntie was not permitted to see the Child again.

The auntie showed me one of the Child’s toys which she had kept – a little wooden train – and she told me then that the Child was not born, but grown. There was no mother’s breast for it to suckle when it emerged from the amniotic fluid, no face that greeted it that day that would grow familiar. It was kept in hospital for some time and, just as it had come to know some small warmth – a soft toy on its cheek, a kind voice to soothe it to sleep – it was taken to the little room in the basement under the Mausoleum of Prosperity. I later learned in my early adulthood that many hands exchanged money that day, as the company tasked with creating and confining the Child was paid an awful lot to do so. But that would’ve been over 20 years ago now.

The official story – the explanation we are all given when we come of age, and the story many come to accept without much further thought – is that the Child under the Mausoleum is one person; one wretched martyr, locked away in perpetual childhood for four-hundred years, ever since the city’s founding. This is our religion, our way of life; just as the people of Katib have their rites of wine and bread, we have the Child. But we all know that this is not physically possible. As those of us who have seen the Child with our own eyes will tell you, there is no way to survive for long under its circumstances. With constant exposure to infection, and a diet of nothing but grease and cornmeal, the Child’s body would likely give out in a matter of years, if not months.

Last year, people came to the Mausoleum of Prosperity to carry something away. I saw them leaving with their cargo as I was walking home from work. I followed them, down perfectly straight foot-roads, past street performance displays, under railways and across tramlines, until they reached the cemetery. A freshly-dug grave was awaiting them. There was no cleric to give the interred its last rites – the priests had been hung and beheaded hundreds of years ago, during the city’s founding. Instead, once the package had been lowered into the hole, one of the pallbearers spoke up.

‘Now we say farewell to thee after thy 7 long years, and we pray that the next world shall be kind.’

‘Alë ruidha,’ said the rest; so it shall be.

The pallbearer then named the deceased: Ssenrë, a gender-neutral word, meaning the unfortunate one, the one who suffered. My cheeks turned cold as my worst fears were confirmed. This was not the burial of the naked, festering creature I was shown on my eighth birthday – that Child would have been around twenty-five by now. This was a different Child, a different Ssenrë, now dead and buried in a section of the cemetery that bears no headstones.

Later, while playing cards at the market, I learned from an old uncle that there had been others who were buried in this part of the cemetery – at least seven over the last thirty years, and a hundred or so over the last four-hundred years.

The same day Ssenrë’s corpse was removed from the Mausoleum, the replacement was procured. I watched from my apartment as it was carried, under cover of night, to its new home. It did not struggle, as it had no way of knowing the pain awaiting it. The next morning, I put in a request to move to a different part of the city. I stayed inside for most of that week.