At last month’s writers meeting we were given the title – I, Nausea of Yellow Sun. We had to create a story inspired by this title. I am sharing mine. Let me know what you think.

As I stand before my fellow Yellow Sun inhabitants after so many years, I note the repugnant glances, and feel their loathing as a physical sensation. My departure all those years ago has been modified, moulded and contorted into something so extreme that even I do not recognize the tale.

 It was not always so, of course, I was one of them blindly following the regime’s laws and rules without question. Our status within the regime is set at birth by factors beyond our control, or comprehension. A mechanism of parental achievements, societal experiences and ancestral heritage dictate our life course from birth to death with no diversion or exceptions allowed by law. Once you are assigned your role that is your life – mapped out ahead of you day after day, month after month, and year after year.

Of course, as a child and a youth, I never questioned this pre-ordained path, I accepted it as my role as did everyone else around me. My friends and family all congratulated me once my assignment was made.  It is the way of our world. Everyone in their place, doing as they are expected without resistance, or question. Although, when I chose the name Nausea, at the tender age of three, many found it disturbing, odd or extremely strange, but it was how I felt in the moment and maybe it was a precursor to what happen years later.

The faithful day happened when I was twenty years old. When I saw another way, the chance of freedom from enforced constriction and my mundane existence. As I look back, I remember the shock I felt, as the fundamental disturbance of my belief and knowledge of what I thought life was all about disintegrated. The moment crushed me physically and mentally to such an extent, I fell to my knees and held my head as I squeezed my eyes shut. I wanted to forget what I saw, banish it from my brain, my memory. I bellowed so loud my throat hurt as my voice became a rasp of anguish.   

Eventually my voice lost, I rocked back and forth on my knees and peaked through my finger tips. It was not a dream or an apparition, but real. There before me at the edge of the glowing sea was a large craft floating and gently undulating on the waves. Standing on deck were ten or twelve men and women smiling and beckoningto me. Upon shaking legs I rose and tried to call out. A raspy sound uttered from my throat. I shook my head, but could not turn away. No one went into the water or manned a ship upon it, it was forbidden.

The boat floated closer to the shore with no visible means of propulsion and the people aboard held their arms out to me. One man taller than all the others called out to me.

                “We come to save you and any who wish to escape.”

                I replied, “Escape from what?”

                There were shared glances and then the man stated, “Your incarceration on the island, of course. We can take you away; you can live as you wish across the sea.”

That was when the world I thought I knew crumbled and for the next hour the mechanism of Yellow Sun was explained to me. Not a country but a long ago forgotten prison colony where the original inhabitants were marooned to fend for themselves. A hierarchy of the strongest and cruelest soon ruled and the laws they formed ensured compliance and obedience. After generations those laws changed little and the hierarchy became set as a way of life.

I chose to leave that day forsaking my family, my country and my engineered life. I found true purpose away from those shores, but the guilt stayed with me. Now, fifteen years later, I am returning with a specific mission as the commander of a fleet of fifty ships. We will release the hundreds of individuals from their enforced isolation on the island and over the months, and possibly years ahead, educate them on the true nature of the island of the Yellow Sun.