There were maggots in my dinner that night. I think she put them there. I saw one writhing around on the tip of my spoon and I nearly went into convulsions. No, not nearly, I did. I threw up all over myself and the smell of it was so unpleasant that I threw up again. The smell. That along with what was inside the bowl, hundreds of small white maggots with brown tipped heads or tails or whatever, worming their way through my rice.

For the life of me I can’t see why I didn’t notice them in the first place. They weren’t hard to miss. So hungry, I’d been, seeing as how I hadn’t eaten in days. So hungry and it smelling so good and all. Her being so fucking sweet and all. But I should have known. When my stomach felt empty enough after all the retching I got to my feet, covered the bowl with an old pillow case and stuffed it in a corner, there was nowhere else to put it. I curled up in my bed; a moth-eaten blanket and a pillow that smelt of saliva.

I tried to sleep.

I couldn’t sleep.

I hadn’t slept in days.

So I just lay there with my eyes wide open, thinking of smiles and laughs and hugs and songs. This place was Hell. That’s what they called it. That’s where they took kids like me. Young kids that didn’t know what was good for them and needed to be taught a lesson. We needed to be taught that we were dispensable, that we didn’t contribute not a goddamn thing to society and therefore we were just fucking dispensable.

We were maggots, we were.

I’d been in Hell for so long it was almost all I could remember. Since I was maybe seven or eight, maybe nine. There was no such thing as birthdays, so there was no such thing as keeping track of your age as the years flitted on by. I’d grown up knowing that I didn’t deserve the air I breathed and the clothes I wore and the life I lived. And there was Mom and Pop to always remind us.

Sometimes they reminded us with acid words that stung like hell and made you feel like maybe giving up, they did. Sometimes with other things. Sometimes with blood. The new ones always cried the first few days, cried for hours on end. And Mom would smile her little smile and you knew she was very pleased, you knew she was breaking them and before long they would be broken for good.

That was the point, see.

But for us older ones, it had come to be expected. If you were good, you could block it out. You could hold on, maybe, a little, to those old memories and those smiles and laughs and hugs and songs. You could hold on to your mother standing over your bed at night and telling you that she loved you, and that you were the most special boy in the world. You could hold on to before you fucked everything up, fucked up your life. If you were good.

You see, it had been almost nine years in Hell and they hadn’t broken me yet. I think that’s why She did it, see, put the maggots in my dinner. To remind me of where I was and where I would always be. To remind me that the fighting wasn’t worth it. I lay there thinking about all of that, thinking about how much I hated Mom and Pop and this place and remembering what my mother used to smell like and remembering what it was like Outside.

I don’t know how long I was lying there, thinking. Maybe an hour or two, there was no clock to tell the time. They did that on purpose. So that every second felt like an eternity. Well, one or two or three hours later, the door to the room unlocked, and I heard the sound of her boots against the surface of the floor and I didn’t move or look up to see what she was doing. Everything was silent in the room, but I could hear someone somewhere far off, screaming.

And then her footsteps got closer, closer, and then she crouched down beside me, the rough surface of her palm grazed my cheek. It was Mom, she had come to check up on me, she came twice everyday since the incident a few weeks before. Everyday.

“Did you like your dinner? I made it especially for you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Feeling sick, darling?”

“Yes. Yes ma’am.”

“Take off your shirt.”

“I…hope you don’t mind my asking ma’am…but why?”

“Because you’re a filthy rotten pig and I’ll need to clean up that mess you’ve made. That’s why.”

I sat up, warily, and peeled it off. I gave it to her and wondered what she might do next. You always had to wonder what she might do next. Her moods changed. She was vindictive as all hell. You always had to wonder. Mom stood to her full height and stared at me keenly with something strange in her eyes that I couldn’t quite place. And then she began pacing, paced about the room, stringing long fingers through greasy brown hair. Whoever had stopped screaming. Each time she took a step, the heal of her boot would cast a deafening sound all throughout the room.

“You know, Tristan, I don’t appreciate liars. In fact,” she stopped pacing, “I detest them. Filthy, nasty human beings. Liars.”

The way she talked, she made quite an impression. Quite. She made sure to enunciate every fucking word and make it hang thick with a sort of double meaning, so that whenever she paused to take a breath you were just dreading what was coming out next. And when the room went silent, you could still hear her voice in your head. Clearly.

“If you don’t mind my asking ma’am, what do you mean? If you don’t mind my asking.”

She walked to the other corner of the room, where it was darker and cooler and where I had left the bowl. She picked it up and I felt all the muscles in my body tighten and that organ inside my chest that keeps me alive begin to thumpthumpthump like mad.

“When I make you something to eat, Tristan, I expect you to eat all of it.”

Her voice was so light and airy but I tried to pay it no attention, I made an effort to pay attention to her hands and what she was doing with them. She’d removed the pillow case, revealing my uneaten dinner, and those maggots, still squirming all over it.

“You told me you liked your dinner---”

“I did. I, I did, I just---”

“You. Told. Me. You. Liked it. Now, Tristan, if you liked it, this bowl would have been licked clean. I don’t appreciate liars.”

“Mom…”

She crouched down to my level again and smiled. “Now. Darling. Eat.”

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Oh, I think you can. And I suggest you do. Or there will be consequences. Pop has been awfully restless these past few days. Awfully restless.”

She placed the bowl in my lap. I looked down at them and up at her. She wasn’t smiling or frowning. Just looking. Pop has been awfully restless these past few days. I took a handful because the spoon was still somewhere on the floor, and felt them squirm all over my fingers. It was a terrible, terrible feeling. I brought my hand, trembling uncontrollably, up to my lips. Then I ate, and ate, and sicked all over myself as I was doing so. Some were still alive and trickling down my torso. And she watched the whole time with that satisfied fucking little smile on her face and I ate and ate. I handed an empty bowl over to her, still gagging and shaking.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

I stayed silent.

“What do you say, Tristan?”

“Thank you ma’am. Thank you very much.”

She stood and threw my soiled shirt in my face, ordered me to clean up the mess, left saying,

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Ma’am. I do.” The door locked, once again.

And I didn’t sleep at all that night but just let ideas roll around my brain, wondered why I’d let her make me do that, and wondered if I’d lost. If I’d given up and just hadn’t realized it. Why didn’t I take that fucking bowl and make her eat its contents? Why hadn’t I ran, the door had been wide open. Why, why, why.

One time, Pop had beaten a boy till he was broken, and made us all watch. He’d left the body out there in the courtyard and no one had said or done a thing. That boy, he was only ten. He’d told Pop to go fuck himself, or something like that. He didn’t know. He didn’t know that in Hell you had to play a part in order to survive. I can still remember his face and his hands tied up behind his back. He was only a child.

There were things they could do to you in this place. Decades ago, these things would have been unthinkable, unspeakable. Mom and Pop would be the ones rotting away in some prison, not the other way around. But times had changed since Back Then. The new Government and the new World didn’t think fondly of us children. We were just fucking dispensable.

I wondered what would happen when Mom and Pop were dead and we were the ones in charge. Would we do these horrible deeds too? Or would they have succeeded in killing us off by then? I didn’t like thinking about that so I averted my mind back, back, back, back to happier times and a loving smile and a warm bed, stared at a crack in the wall till morning.