Natural Selection

by Jenny

She had waited her whole life for this and now she was missing it.

 “Democracy!”

“I’ll vote for that.”

“One vote! That’s how it used to be right?”

A wave of laughter rippled around the sweaty crowd around her. In the distance the children could be seen digging in the gardens, their little bodies curled over thin stalks of green, tiny pruning shears in their hands. It was for the good of the community. Most of them were too young to realize what other sources those shears could be put to.

Around her were all the other adults. She cringed as they tore into the meat on their plates, laughed at each other’s crude jokes. It was a total fluke that she wasn’t down in the arena with the other selections. Pure luck that she had scraped by the last test.

Now the selections were squished into the arena. Thin bodies, standing unusually close to each other, some fists clenched, other’s eyes wet.

She didn’t want to watch, didn’t want to vote. But she was an adult now.

“Civic duty,” her neighbors nodded to each other. The mouths on some faces were drawn tighter than on others. No one was supposed to know whose child was whose. They took them away after a year, after all. But there are some bonds that go deep. She ducked her head away from a smiling women a couple rows away. The woman was her mother but she couldn’t acknowledge that.

A man finally stood up in the arena calling the crowd’s attention. As always, he gave a brief history. Well, at least she assumed it was like always. This was the first offering she had been to. Usually she and the others only speculated. But it sure did sound like the speech she had been hearing since she was a child in the gardens.

The highlights were as such: there were too many humans in the world. There had been for some time. Everyone had said there would be a pandemic, a war, some sort of natural selection. But it never came. The population grew. The resources dwindled. There was no natural selection.

So they created one.

It was as good a method as any. There were too many people on this earth. But they should each get a chance to prove themselves. No use to get rid of them when they were young and useful. When they could climb into mines or weave with their little fingers. No. Why not leave the selection until later? Once it became evident who was worth keeping around. Who could contribute to society.

And so it was. They believed that everyone had the right to procreate. So they kept having kids. They just knew that not all those kids could live past the age of sixteen. There were just too many of them.

To her great shock, she had passed this year’s test. This year, apparently, they were in need of mathematicians. So she had won the lottery: math was her best subject.

A gong sounded and the announcer proclaimed that it was time to vote.

They had all been selected. Nature hadn’t selected them. But humanity had. They were all going to die. So why was it so hard for her to decide?

Would it be fire, the sword? Drowning, hanging, what?

The gong sounded again and people raised their hands to vote.

Her hands lay resolutely in her lap.

“Raise your hand,” hissed the woman next to her.

“But I don’t have an opinion.”

“You must. Quickly, raise your hand.”

Turning her eyes away from the arena she slowly raised her hand.

It was useful to pretend like it was a democracy.

-J.H.