Identity: Chapter 3 by Julia Young

Identity: Chapter 3-- Final
One head to the next, I was part of a machine. Stripped of my individuality, my ingenuity; my body was being used as a tool. Their feet mimicked the conveyer belt, while my hands mindlessly manipulated each object that came my way. The assembly line was further down, where another tool dressed them in uniform attire. Thirty minutes passed and I had already gone through six bodies. My mind was tied. I did this all without my own control. This wasn't me... I was inside this body, fighting for a way out. But instead, the walls that bounded me kept going. Body after body after body: buzzed, waxed, bald. At this point I was screaming, hanging on the hopes that I might wake up from this terrible nightmare. All was in vain, however. No matter how loud or long I cried out for, no one was going to save me. Helpless, I stopped. I stopped screaming. I stopped struggling. I stopped thinking. And I was dead again...
The hands below continued to do their job. Fastidiously creating sublime products; eight bodies this time-- a new record. A mindlessly mechanical routine, done with upmost prowess; The Man would be proud. Yes, The Man. You do know who I'm talking about, right? He is the mastermind behind all of this. Whipping us useless human beings into the largest living machinery in the world.  Every girl in Nebraska at the age of seventeen was to be abducted by a group of men in black, escorted to the warehouse. The Man called it his "Biomachinery Project", saying it would be his claim to fame-- Nebraska's claim to fame.  This was a private operation, and word about it never breached our state borders.
Of course upon our withdrawal from our normal lives this project sounded appalling. Although their names have been wiped from my memory, I am almost positive I had a family: a mom, dad, and two brothers. I suspect that they were good to me, for the girls chosen for the operation had to be in optimal conditions. What I do know for sure though is that like every other inhabitant of Nebraska, I knew what this "Biomachinery Project" was... even before I was actually abducted. Although it was preferred to keep it on the down-low, everybody talked about it. There were many rumors: rumors about the girls being starved, raped, drugged. Yet despite the horrible hear say we were told to go on with our lives as if it didn't exist. So, to cope with our inevitable fate, young girls often focused on the more positive rumors. For example, many said to have heard of girls snapping out of their programmed mindsets; regaining consciousness within their lifeless body, able to escape the system. However no one had ever seen a girl walk out alive, and as to my own experience here, I have never experienced one of these episodes of reality.

The end.

Identity: Chapter 1 by Julia Young

Identity: Chapter 1
The hands were grasping an electric buzzer, maneuvering it swiftly across a disappearing forest of hair. Cutting each little tree at the top of its roots, only little stumps were left in their follicles. These hands went through this motion so swift and skillfully that they almost resembled machinery, a robot even.  Whoever owned these hands-- these tools-- would be proud, for looking upon the landscape they just mowed was like looking at art: a perfectly leveled layer of hair covered the head below the hands, no strands daring to deviate from the height of the others surrounding it. It was entrancing looking at all those little stumps, all arranged neatly on a pale round head. But the hands weren't done. A thick pearly substance began to drown the stubs of hair, followed by a thin white cloth. Suddenly there was a loud rip followed by what sounded like a distant and muffled scream. The hair was gone. All the hand's expertise gone in one quick motion. Strip by strip the cloth was pulled, bringing along with it the wax and the small hairs-- this time removing the roots from their follicles to reveal tiny bright red beads of blood in their place. Who's hands were these? My view shifted from their palms to their wrists, slowly tracing them all the way up to a chest... but who's chest? My frame of vision could not trace this chest up to a neck, let alone a face. I hit a dead end, and was forced to move elsewhere, forced to go across the room. Taking my attention away from the hands, I now saw a white wall, on it, nothing but a mirror; a mirror revealing what could be a barber and his client, only they were both stripped bare of all their hair. I chuckled to myself thinking about what an awful barber this person was, imagining the look on their customer's face when they looked in the mirror. But this customer's eyes were glazed over and expressionless, while the strange excuse for a barber quietly chuckled to herself.

I was inspired to write this short piece based on the picture above. We did a lot of this type of descriptive writing in Brennan's class last year, and I really enjoyed it. This picture, which is actually part of a whole collection of similarly eerie photos, was very intriguing to me; with the minimalist background, the futuristic outfits, the lack of color, and the different positioning and expressions of each of the subjects, this picture portrayed a very creepy, cold, and almost "utopian gone distopian" vibe. The one aspect of the picture that specifically related to my writing was the girl sitting under the plastic and the positioning of the other girl's hands on her head. This reminded me of someone getting their haircut. However, factoring in all of the other aspects of the picture, this was not your normal/ typical hair appointment.
Because this picture included so many other intriguing details, this post is only the first chapter of a bigger story. For my next post, the story will be continued based off of the same picture, but I may add some of the other pictures from the collection.