The Meadows by Stephanie Oakes EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Stephanie Oakes
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Girls’ & Women’s Issues
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
I glance up at the eye, a shining black bead atop an old telephone pole. I
walk briskly through pelting droplets, head bent. A cascade of water skims
off my hood.
I show my face again to the bead on the awning of a shopping center,
and again to one on the bus shelter where people huddle like cattle.
Each eye, memorized.
Not to see them. For them to see me.
My face.
I’ve become very familiar with it since I moved to the city. When I
arrived a year ago, I found a book about the muscular system, fallen behind
the desk bolted to the wall in my room. The apartment block where I live
was a girls’ college dormitory once. The book must’ve slipped back there,
forgotten by some long-ago student when women could still attend
universities.
I hid it beneath my mattress, memorized the meaty striations bisecting
my face, the delicate fish fin between eyebrows, the birds’ nests encircling
each eye. In front of the mirror—hours of practice—working each muscle
like a marionette. Now I can make myself look like anything at all.
The face I show the cameras is my most faithful: placid, thoughtless,
empty.
I arrive downtown well before my next adjudication. To pass the time, I
sit in a café, scan my calendar. Colored squares fill the screen—different
adjudications around the city, documents of profiles and background
information on each of my reformeds.
My eyes close for a moment, and my ears range the café—plasticore
plates sliding against each other, clink of utensils. A soundscape I never
could have imagined where I grew up. In the Cove, only the shush of the
ocean, carts on a rocky roadway, the scrape of a tiny knife slipping into the
tight mouths of oysters, occasionally slipping into the pad of my thumb, a
silent gush of red falling through my hands.
Seated nearby, a man some years older than me scrolls through the
endless, bright feed on his screen. I watch his fingers fling past pictures.
Palm trees forking the sky. A baby held in a man’s arms like a loaf of bread.
A woman sitting on artificially green grass in the high-necked, bulbous
dress popular with young wives.
And then, an image unlike the others. A white building, rounded and
hut-shaped, fashioned from opaque material. Against a backdrop of marshy
jungle, the building glows. It makes a light all its own.
I stand from my chair. Water that had collected in the folds of my
raincoat unfurls to the ground. I barely notice. My eyes, transfixed. That
photo. A facility building. Not from the Meadows, but another, shrouded in
overgrown foliage. Above the screen, the man suspends his fingers,
engrossed in the image too.
Can’t believe it’s been well over a decade since I last saw the Glades,
the photo is captioned.
“The Glades,” I speak, and the man with the screen whips his head
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