Chapter 1
The road to the house usually took twenty minutes. Twenty tiring minutes of a monotonous and never changing landscape. Gray, black, white houses. Gray, black, white clothes. Gray, black, white thoughts. The only thing that diluted this gray scale of shades, plants under the dome of our glass city. The green foliage has become our sky. The working day ended half an hour ago, I waited ten minutes for Zarina, but for some reason she did not come. Strange, their department ends the working day, as well as ours, exactly at 19.00. She always came out of work with me at the same time and together we went home. Today she was late. I’ll have to find her tomorrow, ask what happened. I went to the house. The gray twenty-five story building, without the elevator and balconies, which I saw in history books. Box with windows. Rising to the twentieth floor, I met Roland, a courteous thirteen-year-old boy, who has an exam tomorrow, and a week later he will receive his lifetime work schedule. He smiled sweetly at me and hurried off somewhere. I opened the door of our apartment and sighed softly. As usual, I was greeted by empty gray walls.
- Mom, I came - I said out of habit. There was no answer.
I went into the room, she’s not here. Through the room went to the kitchen. Mom sits at the kitchen table. She looked at the table blankly.
- What happened?
I squatted down and looked into her eyes. Cheeks moist from tears, eyes red and swollen. I sat next to her, and I put my head on her shoulder.
- Mommy, what happened? Can you tell me?
- Look, Sila, - mother whispered, and mechanically tucked a lock of my silver hair behind my ear.
She took the console from the projector and turned on the news channel, there was no other here. The announcer was repeating the news of the day.
“We regret to inform you that a law on long-livers has been adopted since today. As you know, we now have 232,567 people in Parronat. But when our city was under construction, it was calculated on 200000 inhabitants a maximum. We began to miss food, water, and the most dangerous - the air. Frequent dizziness, this is exactly the problem with our inner atmosphere. In two weeks, a series of liquidations will begin for all citizens of our city, who are over 50 years old. More precisely from 50 and above. I would really like…”
He continued to say something else, but I did not hear him anymore. I scrolled in my head the terrible news, afraid to look towards mother. She is 51 years old. All I could say is, “I’ll think of something.”
