Year 10 English Assessment: Dystopian Short Story
Frank Daly
The Room The small dull-grey clock on my desk read 8:30am. I rise from the simple white linen and I look over the suffocating space around me that I have lived in my entire life. The room consists of a bed, old and rickety, a chair and desk, both are brown and worn, and a small toilet. I find none of the qualities in these objects beautiful because they are not mine. I have only ever known the dry dusty room that is laid out so precisely before me. I move through my room with a sense of nostalgia that finds me at the beginning of every day. Eyes on my ceiling monitor me like old owls. I feel trapped under their gaze. At 8:40 am the desk in front of me materializes food on a shiny transparent plate and as I eat I weigh my past against my future. Both are without change. I try to think about who I am and where I came from but these thoughts lead me to the fact that my identity is defined by the confines of the space around me. I feel isolated and alone, lost in this space and trapped by the walls around me. I stare up into the eyes again. My whole life I have been under their withering gaze, stripped of my humanity, a captive and dying prey. My Clock shows 9:00 am and I begin the next part of my day. The struggle of staying sane. I have no concept of years, months, weeks or days but only the time that I get from my old clock. I have no control over my life, that is in the hands of creatures that watch me through their mechanical eyes. Time is transcendent, it proves to me that I exist. Do the white eyes control that as well? Out of the corner of my eye a silhouette emerges, moving slowly. A spider crawls up over the chair looking about occasionally as he makes his way up to his web. The hairs on his legs shine silver and his black eyes reflect the grey room around him. I walk over to the chair to find the empty plate and I place it over the spider. At first the spider notices nothing of his new enclosure but he eventually realises. He didn’t notice the plate or the change in air pressure but the spider noticed my piercing gaze burn through the plate. He felt surveyed and it was only then that the spider found his incarceration. Panic and claustrophobia enclosed the old grey spider like suffocating smoke. His black eyes darted about, his legs thrashed against the walls of the glass. Eventually the spider will die, but until then he would be stuck in a world fixed by the spaces around him. But I will never let that fate befall anyone and I release the spider. At 9:30, something different happened. I was talking to the eyes in my ceiling when tears or fury and fire filled my eyes and I wanted the creature in the ceiling to feel justice. A fire started, I felt incensed and betrayed I wanted somebody to understand. I wanted to communicate to the monster that what they were doing to me was wrong. I moved quickly across the room to use my strength against the worn chair and the brown desk. They were part of the reason that I was alive and trapped here. I was a fire, screaming, yelling and overcome with hatred. The sound of my voice became distorted and monstrous as it echoed from the walls. I was distraught and I wanted to become violent. A fire needs oxygen and I was running out of it in my enclosure.
After that it all changed. The light next to the eyes in my ceiling died. The light over my head burnt out. Everything around me was like infinite night. There was no sound but my racing heart and my rapid breathing. I am going to die. I had angered the creatures that kept me here. I had made them upset and there’re going to kill me like I was going to kill the spider under the plate. A part of the grey wall slid open revealing a long white clean open corridor. There was a wave of fresh cool air and smell that was intoxifying compared to the rancid stink in my room. I expected to die but nothing happened. I realized that just outside of was another world, outside of this room represents change. By stepping out of the room I would never go back. Somebody had released me. Somebody had felt enough pity or strength to free me of from my cage. Like a baby taking its first steps, I walked out of the Room.