Colours
Blue sky. Endless days spent working under the blinding, white,merciless sun and that perfect blue sky that kept reminding her, painfully, of those idyllic summer days on Bajor in her mother's stories. Yellow Sand. Hot, yellow desert sand that crept into your clothes and stuck to your skin, skin that was clammy and itchy and permanently damp from your sweat. Blackness. The blackness of the night, visible through the force-field of the dormitory; inside, in the dark, the sleeping grey bodies of Cardassian women, huddled together in melancholy for warmth and comfort; outside, blackness and the white light of a tiny moon. She hesitated and, faintly irritated, shook her head. No! No it hadn't been like that. It had never been completely dark in the dormitory, she recalled as she eventually continued with her work, correcting her mistake with a couple of quick brush strokes. For security reasons there'd always been some diffuse, dull lighting. Always. Winter and summer. There'd been barely any difference. In the winter, the nights would come sooner and sometimes there would be storms. Those nights had been the worst. Grey bodies tossing and turning restlessly to the eerie howling as cold, hostile winds from the Northern continents tore across the desert, chasing black clouds over the tiny white moon and hurling sand up in the air. Like angry demons they were, she used to think in those nights when she couldn't find any sleep and sat at the forcefield watching the spectacle of nature unleashed. And then, often - though by no means always - she would feel emotions rising inside of her, emotions that sent pulses of pain through her body and soul: anger, rage and hatred. Emotions that she could not control and that directed themselves against everything and everyone she'd ever known. Against the Breen who'd captured them when they'd been at their most vulnerable, immediately after the crash. Against the other captives who tried to cope with their fate as best as they could - and failed in whatever method they chose, their defeat utter, their humiliation absolute. Against her mother who had died and abandoned her the moment she'd needed her the most. Against her father who had betrayed both her and her mother by sending them away and who had so become the one ultimately responsible for her mother's death and her own suffering. And against herself. Most of all, against herself. Too young and too small to work in the mines like the others, she had, by a cruel, ironic fate, become almost a burden to her captors and to the other captives alike. Too young. Too small. Too skinny. Too Cardassian. Too Bajoran. No good at work, no good in bed even - or so her Bajoran rapist had told her. Red blood when she had lost the baby. Half-bred women more often than not were sterile, and even if they weren't they were rarely able to carry a child full term. In most cases, the foetus was spontaneously aborted within the first few weeks of pregnancy. That was nature's way of ensuring that the Cardassian race was kept pure, the women in the dormitory had told her when they'd cleaned her up. Then, when she had started crying, one of them had just put her arms round her and held her and sat with her until the morning had come and the pain and the storm had subsided. A shadow fell over the canvas. Her father's hand touched her shoulder. "Why are you doing this, Ziyal?" he asked, his tone of voice tinged with genuine concern. "This is so ugly!" She looked up at him, seeking his eyes, but his gaze was fixed on the canvas, on the tortured, naked grey bodies, withering on the ground beneath tangled swirls of blue, yellow, white, black and red. His profile was to her and she sat and watched as he studied her unfinished painting with an expression of abhorrence and revulsion. Then, suddenly, a look of profound distress crossed his face as he started to comprehend: Look at me, Father. Look at what I was when you deserted me. Look at what I am without you. Coolly, dispassionately she watched for a few seconds, then decided he'd seen enough. "You're right," she said, getting to her feet and reaching for the canvas. "It is ugly. Let's not look at it again." With one brusque motion she tore her painting in two. He opened his mouth to say something, but she wouldn't let him. "Do you want to see what they taught me at school?" Out from a drawer underneath her desk she pulled a scrapbook, and together they sat down to look at the pages. "What about this?" "Hm. I like it. It looks... nice." "Or this?" "Yes. It looks almost Bajoran." "It's pretty, isn't it? And what about ...?" ~ The End ~ |