BHS Inkwell 2017-2018

TheWorldWithout Stories By Rachel Poteet

have an assigned living place? Perhaps that was the nature of the Unnecessary. She hasn’t pried further. She is going to graduate school with honors from the district governor. She will make the Republic proud. You’re strong. You could work with the Censors, even. You have a powerful mind, powerful enough to stay clean. There she is. She found out about the alleyway from the boy who gave her the story on the transport three years ago.That boy was reassigned last month. She doesn’t know where to. For a thousand years and more men labored under the yoke of Unnecessary Knowledge, of the Story. This is all you need know. This is all you ever need know. Of all the criminals in our society, no one is more evil than a storyteller. She swallows a lump of fear.The greatest evil known. Wholeheartedly she wills herself to return, to go back and forget, but her feet do not move. She walks to the maw of the Story Alley, looking for a door. It’s locked, and at its feet sits a woman, aged, her fingers ringed with scars. She opens a black eye. “Password.” “Vanity of vanities,” she says uncertainly. The woman makes no move to open the door.The girl wasn’t told what to do beyond the odd password. People used to have so many things they didn’t need. That’s why stories are evil. Stories eat up the other space in your brain. They make you forget. They make you think and do things you don’t Need. “So, what do you want?” “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.” She feels a prickle on the back of her neck. “Are you new?” “Yes, yes.” “Well, I can’t show you downstairs.That’s what they call Schedule B stuff.”The old woman laughs without teeth. “All you’re going to get is me. For a while. So, what do you want?” “That doesn’t matter,” she stammers. “What do you mean?” “Wh-why are you asking me what I want?” “Ah…”The old woman grumbles. “I forget. They tell you that wants are half as evil as stories. Well. I’m not in the business of unravelling that sort of thing. I’ll just decide what I want, and then give you that, eh?”

She steps into the alleyway.The day is cold, a breeze skittering across the gray street, blowing a dry leaf into a broken drain in the middle of the bleached-out asphalt. She hugs her coat tighter. Her school papers are stuffed into a bag slung over her shoulder.The cold, which holds her bare, chapped hand, bites past the skin of her chest into her ballooning lungs. Once, when she was on the transport bus to the school, one of the other children gave her one. She was terrified to hear it, but she told herself she would have found out anyway what Unnecessary meant. Her mother and father wouldn’t tell her. Whenever she asked, they looked at the open transmitter and swallowed deeply. When that boy said he was going to give her a story, she put a hand on the metal seat of the transport and shut her eyes up tight.The boy leaned in close and whispered in her ear, his hot breath against her face. Once there was a woman who had three brothers. She went into the grocery store. She gave a token for a loaf of bread. On her way home she met a man who had not been assigned a place to live. She gave him some bread. She went home. Utterly Unnecessary. A story. The boy sat back, looking satisfied. She sat in school the whole day, quiet, thinking of the boy’s story. A story of day-to-day events not Necessary to hear. Schedule E stories, of course, are commonplace. After she came home and told her mother that the boy on the bus had given her a story, her mother explained as much as she dared, all while glaring at the transmitter. A Schedule E is when her parents would exchange harmless things about their day at the factory, or when she tells them about her lessons at school. Harmless things, says the pamphlet, harmless, and necessary for family bonding, things that pertain to the hearer, but only as much as they need to hear to understand. Anything beyond that is a story. An infraction. A horror with the power to warp the mind and tear families apart. She wondered, when she was away from the gaze of the transmitter, why the story said that the woman had three brothers. Why did that man not

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