6
In my old life in the factory, there had been a kind of rhythm to the long, gray days. Lessons with the Big Book, singing, playing memory games, and preparing whatever food we could find, scrounge, or occasionally kill. That was the life I’d known until now.
Every so often, there’d been a problem, such as when new exiles came through our part of the ass-end and didn’t know the rules, like not stealing and not leaving your droppings in our factory yard, and once Daddy had come back from a scrounge with blood on his shirt and hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Mostly, what few people were left there respected squatters’ rights and let us be, and one day was pretty much like the next.
I knew now that this rhythm hadn’t been by accident, that Daddy had arranged it this way to keep my mind
