The prompt was a postcard with a picture to haute couture fashion.
It was just yesterday that she became permitted to sleep is just bedclothes. Before that, she’d wear a straight-robe in bed as well as during the day. But she was 19 and she’d been sufficiently evaluated as being able to sleep in acceptable fashion: arms by her side, on her back, hands down, hands always down. She found herself cooler in bed, which was disconcerting at first, but then more relaxing. Windows were always kept closed, lest a spring/summer/fall breeze give her any ideas. She’d heard some girls had to wear a straight-robe to bed well into their 20s, but this may have been rumors.
She put it on each morning by 7am. She fastened the buckles across her chest, stomach, hips and upper thighs; she pulled the main cord on the inside of the torso flap to constrict her upper arms. They say the binding of the upper thighs also served the purpose of preventing too long a stride in order to avoid tripping, since the arms were not free enough to break a fall.
She sat at the group table, breakfast already there in tall glasses with straws. They sipped slowly, always stopping short of the point of sucking noisy air from the bottom of the glass.
This morning word of her having transitioned to free-sleep spread through the hall and the others gave her quick nods of approval, when not in the monitors’ line of sight.
She had never been naturally small. At 5’10,” her height was considered an unfortunate inevitability given her mother, who’s purposefully chosen a diminutive man to mate with, in the hopes to counteract the heredity of her own 6’1” frame. Both parent and child were broad, with big bones and thick skin. Because of her size, the straight-robe was especially unforgiving, as the monitors tried as best they could to squeeze her down to a more acceptable size. By this time, its removal was accompanied by a faint ache in her ribs and hips that had gotten used to the ubiquitous pressure and holding the robe provided. If the body could talk, it would say it wouldn’t know where it was if not for the straight-robe constantly locating it. At 19, she was surely done growing, and with the damage of puberty done, she’s spend the next few years endeavoring to tighten the robe further and further; shrinking had become something of an endurance sport, if such sport had the consequence of making one at all acceptable to the entire village.
Only the elders were able to operate the windows. They alone had enough experience to avert their eyes from the view. Each morning, it was their job to air out the dining hall, the classrooms, the hallways. It was their last jobs before they were retired to a restful solitude in the upper towers of the institution.
This particular morning, a window was left open by one elder in particular. Rumors abound; some said she was getting old and senile. But others said she left the window open on purpose, realizing that was the time of her life when such oversights would not be harshly punished. Whatever the reason, the window was open and our 19-year-old, who’d just graduated to free-sleep, who’d just slurped her breakfast, allowed her gaze to linger on a pigeon, that had perched itself on the sill, looking at her in the eye, as no one had before.
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