Containment

“Uncle Ben! Uncle Ben! What day is it?” Five-year-old Kip asks, tugging the zipper of the sleeping bag next to my neck.

I groan and sit up. My back cracks in protest. What day was it? What day was it? “To be honest, I’m not sure,” I finally say after a long pause. “But I know that today will be the day.”

Kip yawned and plopped himself onto the forest floor, the red and yellow leaves crunching under him. “But that’s what you always say, Uncle Ben. Today’s the day, today’s the day. When will today come?”

I sigh and ruffle his hair. “Soon, Kip. Soon. Have you brushed your teeth and changed?”

“Yes, Uncle Ben.”

“Okay, good. Why don’t you take my phone and watch some Running Wild With Bear Grylls?” It is our favorite show to watch. Survival skills and yet also old-timey entertainment, what could be better? 

Kip happily runs over to the potato charging port a few feet away from the hastily dug-out well. 

I crawl out of my originally-blue-now-more-of-a-grey-ish sleeping bag, and walk over to the well, grabbing my toothbrush from a carelessly thrown bag along with a tube of almost finished toothpaste. Kip and I use it sparingly as we only have two more tubes left. We started out with six.

“Kip, come over here and help pull Uncle Ben a bucket of water,” I call out to him. He drops the phone to the floor and runs over. “Hey, be careful with that. It’s our only hope for outside communication,” I say. It isn’t. Not our only hope, just plain old no hope. The only way out would be to go through the barrier, and I wasn’t planning on doing that any time soon. I’ve tried late at night after Kip fell asleep, but obviously, failed. I only said that because my phone was our only source of entertainment and our only source of connection to the outside world, even if it wasn’t direct communication. I know, I know, how can I have an internet connection and wifi but still cannot call anyone? I haven’t figured that out myself yet. 

We pull out a bucket full of water, and I quickly brush my teeth and wash my face. I change out of my pajamas and get a fire starting. Kip resumes watching youtube. “Guess what’s for breakfast today?” I ask.

“Mashed potatoes,” Kip says without looking from the phone.

“How coincidental,” I joke. “That’s exactly what I’m planning to make.” Well, what I’m planning to make was the poor version. The version where you don’t have enough resources to get oil and salt and milk. The version where you just mash a couple of poorly grown potatoes, heat it over a fire, and pray to God that it won’t burn. It does that a lot, and I really wonder why (not). We have it at just about every meal. 

Okay, fine. Every meal. 

A few minutes later, we’re sitting on the dirt-with-a -few-strands-of-grass-and-a-lot-more-weeds-but-mostly-dirt, quietly eating the bland mashed potatoes.

“Uncle Ben,” Kip suddenly says. “Tell me about the outside world.”

“Well, in the outside world, we’ll know the date and day for one. We will eat real mashed potatoes and so much more.”

“A banana?”

I smiled. “Yes, Kip. A banana.” We often saw the animals outside of the barrier eating them. Monkeys most of the time, but also deer munching on it from the ground. “And a lot more than just a banana. Try, a banana split. We will go see the places on our globe, riding a real plane.” Our globe was one of the only educational possessions for Kip to learn from. 

“Zimbabwe?” 

“Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Korea, you name it, we will go.”

“Uncle Ben,” Kip stared at me, his big blue eyes staring into my tired, weary, brown ones.

“Yes?”

“Uncle Ben, why do you keep saying ‘we will’? Will we?”

“Kip,” I say, setting my now empty bowl aside and laying down onto the grass. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Kip doing the same. “One day.”

“Why don’t we just break out of the barrier?”

I sit up suddenly, pulling my neck in the process. “Kip, how do you know that? You’re not supposed to travel past the red line.”

“Aw, Uncle Ben. We’ve been here for more than two years now. You can’t expect me to always stay ninety-nine meters away from camp.”

“The rules are the rules, Kip.”

“But Uncle Ben! Rules are meant to be broken.”

“No, they are not!” I can’t help but yell a bit. He wasn’t supposed to know. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to know too, but I found out, and apparently, so did he.

“We can go through it,” Kip protests. “We don’t have to stay here forever. I’m going today and if you don’t want to, fine.”

“How long have you known about the barrier?”

“Five days,” he shrugs.

I groan and slap my face with my hand. “All right, we can try again today.”

“Try again?”

“Yes, I’ve tried.”

Kip sits up next to me. “Uncle Ben, why do you think they put us in a barrier? Who even is ‘they’?”

“I don’t know,” I say emotionlessly.

“Yuh-huh,” Kip says nodding his head up and down vigorously. “I’ve seen your notebook.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Ye-es,” he sings in two different pitches. 

“All right, all right. Well, I do have a theory. What do you remember before we got here?”

Kip taps his head with his index finger. “An explosion. A big one. We were mining coal and suddenly, fire. I was thrown against a boulder and it hurt real bad. People piled on top of me. Dead. I survived because dead people shielded me from the bomb. Then I woke up and was here with you, Uncle Ben.”

“Who do you think the explosion was caused by?” I say, getting up and washing the dishes in our bucket full of water. “Kip, get over here and help.”

He skips over happily, oblivious to how gruesome and horrible his last few words were. “I think that the explosion was caused by a bomb.”

“We’ve already established that, but why?”

Kip’s eyes widened. “Do they want to kill us? Are we here to suffer eternal torture?”

“Not exactly.” I walk over to our tent and sit down inside it. During the daytime, the sun gets to an unbearable temperature and only the shade can suffice our temperature needs. “Let’s start with the basics first. Our surroundings. We are in a forest surrounded by animals, but weirdly, we never see any inside our barrier. Only outside. They’ve never came into our one hundred thousand square foot land.”

“Really?”

“Kip, You’ve really never noticed?”

“Nope.”

“Well, now you know.”

“Let’s go then,” Kip says.

“What?”

“I want to go out of the barrier. I want to go home.”

“I haven’t even finished telling my theory yet!”

“You can tell me when we’re back at home, sitting by the fire and drinking a nice cup of tea.” Kip gets up and grabs my phone. “Come on.” Then he walks away.

“Kip, come back!” I yell in panic. “Come back this instant!”

“I’m not. What are you going to do about it?”

I just sit there. Surely, he wouldn’t go without me. He will come back. I know he will. The sun shines down hard onto me, and even under the shade, I can’t resist the calming effect it has. . .

A piercing scream vibrates through the air. Kip. 

I open my eyes and see that the sky is darkening. How long was I sleeping? Where’s Kip? All of a sudden, that night’s vision comes back to me. 

*

I walked past the red line, careful not to make any noise. I keep walking, shining my flashlight at my surroundings. I just want to take a midnight stroll. One hundred feet. Two hundred. Three hundred. The markers on the trees told me. I’ve never thought the markers were strange. Just made by hikers probably. It felt good to be on my own for a while. I’ve never wanted a child and Kip had only proved my point. They are too much work. Sure, I love him and all, but if I had a choice to restart my life, one hundred percent would I choose to not have met Kip. I’m almost at the four hundred mark when a jolt of electricity shocks me from head to toe. It doesn’t stop until I step back, something definitely not easy to do during that time. I try again, the same thing happening.

I double back and walked to the opposite end of our land, and once again almost at the four hundred mark, a jolt of electricity is sent down my spine. I’m confused yet reluctant to give up. Giving a running head start, I manage to run a few feet into the electricity barrier before the pain makes me back out again. 

I bend down and set my flashlight onto the ground, allowing it to shine a path close on the dirt. Then, I grab a stick and a leaf. I slowly set the leaf inside the field of electricity, feeling the energy tingle my fingers. The leaf jolts wildly inside and I push it more forwards with my stick. More and more, more and more, until suddenly, poof. It’s gone. Burnt to dust. 

A hoof appears in front of me. I stand up until I’m looking directly at a deer, but not just any deer. This one had huge antlers and my head only came up to his neck. He wrote something in the dirt with his hoof and disappeared.

Stay.

*

I get up frantically and race to the barrier.

“Kip!” I gasp, and oh god. Kip.

He’s floating six inches of the ground, jolting violently. 

“Kip!” I scream in horror. “Kip!”

Without thinking, I run inside, grab his hand, and pull him back out. Only he doesn’t come back out. I pull again harder, but he stays firm. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the great deer observing curiously.

“Help,” I yell at him in desperation. “Please help.”

He tilts his head.

“I promise we won’t make any more attempts to escape. Let him go!”

Nothing.

“Please! I really promise. Let him go! Let him go!”

The deer sighs and runs into the electric field. He grabs Kip by the shirt and flings him back into the barrier where he collapses, unconscious. Then, the deer runs off.

I carry Kip back to our campsite and heat up a few warm towels for his forehead. He doesn’t wake up. Not the next day. Or the next. It’s only one the third day does he finally crack open his eyes.

“You’re awake,” I say, relieved.

“Uncle Ben,” he moans.

“I’m here.” I grab his small, soft hands with my rough, calloused ones and squeeze them. “I’m here.”

“Uncle Ben,” he says again. “I know what this is.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. We’re in a human zoo, aren’t we? We entertain the animals.”

“Now Kip, why would you think that?” I ask, even though deep down, I know it’s true.

“You know it too, Uncle Ben,” he says, and lets out a sob.

“It’s alright. It’s alright,” I try comforting him as he hugs my neck, his wet tears streaming down my neck and dropping onto the collar of my shirt.

“No it’s not,” he whimpers, and we both know it’s true.

We’re never going to make it out of here. Never going to see the outside world. Never go to Zimbabwe. Never eat a banana. All we have left is each other, and that’s what we will have to make out of. I cling to Kip and he clings to me tightly like the world is ending. It is for us. When hope ends, so does our sense of the meaning of life.

At least it’s quite a show for the animals outside.