The Value of One Life

September 13, 2021 /
*Trigger warning*- violence against a child (Seriously, it’s disturbing. But there is a reason for it)

My mother grips my hand tightly as we walk on the busy sidewalk, keeping me close as people pass by. She wears a suit, with a briefcase in hand. I’m in my middle school clothes with books loaded into my backpack, my feet avoiding the cracks on the pavement so I don’t break my mother’s back. 

“This way, honey.” She walks quickly. She’s on a mission, like usual. We cross the street before the light says we can, moving with a wave of people that do the same thing. They’ve all got places to be, things to do, and a workplace to clock in to. 

I have school. Luckily for my mom (who’s late), it’s only a block away from her work. 

She leads me into the tall building. It’s the same one I go to every day, with twenty floors and lots of shiny windows. We’re joined by several other mother-daughter duos walking in the same direction. The girls are wearing the same pleated skirts and white shirts as I am. I don’t know any of them. My classmates are surely already in the classroom, waiting for my late arrival. 

We stop at the elevator. A group of mothers hovers around the door, each of them giving their child a kiss goodbye. 

“I love you, darling. Have a good day.” My mother hugs me for a second before lightly pushing me inside the small enclosed space. 

There are too many of us. There always is. We’re all pressed together in a six-by-six-foot room, with barely any space to move. It makes me claustrophobic, but there’s no way I’m walking up fifteen flights of stairs. 

Suddenly, the elevator stops. The main lights shut off, leaving just a faint emergency one, and there’s a small beeping noise followed by nothing. I look around, confused, and realize that everyone else feels the same way. 

“Mommy,” cries one girl. I assume she’s got tears running down her face, but I can’t see her. I can’t really see anything besides the tight braids of the girl in front of me. 

“It’ll be fine.” Another girl is strong. Her voice is unwavering, powerful. It contrasts against the fast breaths coming out of my mouth. It’s getting hot in here. Why is it so hot? 

Twenty minutes pass. Phones aren’t working. There’s no service. There’s no way out.

More girls have started to cry. Their sniffles echo in the small chamber. The girl in front of me turns and gives me a hug, and I take in the scent of her vanilla body wash. We all comfort each other as we wait for help. Surely, someone will come. 

An hour passes. There’s not a dry eye in the room. I’m crying now, too. I picture my mother’s face. Will I ever see her again? I miss her soft blue eyes, her bright red lipstick, her pointed nose. I look up at the ceiling and imagine her face. I squeeze my hand into a fist and imagine her holding it. 

Another hour passes. Maybe longer. I have to pee. One girl already has. She apologized profusely when it happened, and now she’s crying more than the rest of us from pure embarrassment. I shed my backpack and put it on the floor. My back is starting to hurt, as are my feet. I wish we had room to sit. 

Finally, something happens. A hatch on the ceiling of the elevator opens, and a man looks down on us. We all scream with joy and relief, but it fades. His expression is hard and menacing, his jaw sharp. He doesn’t pull us out of the opening. He sprays some kind of orange gas into the room before closing the door again, leaving us alone. 

“What do we do?” 

None of us answer the girl who spoke. It’s slowly sinking in that we might not be saved. Ever. What was that mist? Why didn’t he save us? Are we prisoners now? 

Terror grips my heart. 

“Hey, watch it.” One of the girls is mad. I hear a slap and then another. The movement jostles the rest of us around, and I struggle to steady myself on my wobbly legs. If we hadn’t been so crammed in, I would have fallen to the ground. 

“Stop it, guys. We’re in this together.” 

“She pushed me.” 

“I didn’t mean to!” 

“Don’t do it again.” 

I listen to the exchange and keep my head down. The urge to pee is growing. I’m not sure how much longer I can hold it. I gently lift my foot off the ground and drops of moisture fall from my sneaker and back to the stone floor. Apparently, I’ve made it longer than several of the other girls. At this point, there is no embarrassment. There’s only survival, and whatever comfort I have left. 

The warmth travels down my leg. Some of it soaks onto my skirt, but the rest slides to the floor. I blink back a tear and look back at the ceiling, wondering if my mother would look down on me with shame. 

Hours pass. I close my eyes and attempt to sleep standing up, but it doesn’t happen. My body’s too sore. My heart threatens to beat out of my chest.

The sound of another slap distracts me again. This one is closer. It hit the girl behind me, and her body falls into mine. 

“Stop it,” I say to the girl who got knocked into me, surprised at the malice in my voice. 

“I’m sorry.” The girl’s apology is broken up with sobs. I falter. Of course, she didn’t mean it. She’d been shoved. What kind of monster am I for getting angry at that? 

I’m not sure how much time has passed before the hatch opens again. This time, the man drops peanuts. Unsalted, without the shell. They rain down on us. I open my hands and mouth, hoping to catch some before they fall. 

Most end up on the ground. 

The hatch is shut now, and most girls scramble for the food. They shove each other, pushing each other aside, putting whatever morsel they can get into their mouths. They don’t care about the filth it touched. The five-second rule counts even now. 

One girl can’t handle it. The sound of dry heaving causes us to all back up as far as we can, but we can’t escape the vomit. It soaks those closest while little droplets spread to the rest of us. The ground is now a mixture of yellow, green, and brown. 

Brown. Apparently, we’re at that stage of the day now.  

Suddenly, I can’t take it anymore. 

“Here, lift me up.” I turn to the girl in front of me. I gesture to the hatch. Maybe it opens from the inside. Maybe I can get us out of here. 

Her eyes light up at the idea. “Guys, come help.” 

Several pairs of hands grab my body and lift me towards the ceiling door. But there is no handle. It’s flat. I pound on it regardless, screaming in agony, and the girls continue to hold me there. Maybe if I scream loud enough, they’ll let me out. I pound, and pound, and pound. I hit the metal until my knuckles bleed. I scratch at it until my nails break. I keep going until the hatch opens, and I’m faced with the monster keeping us hostage. 

I don’t have time to feel victorious. He’s accompanied by another man who grabs my arms to lift me up. I’m too high now to be supported by the girls below. My legs hang hopelessly into the elevator. 

While one man holds me, the other takes out a sharp device. I don’t know what it is until he holds it up to my fingers, and I scream. I scream as he cuts each nail off, the blade going too deep and cutting into my skin. It feels like he’s taking the tips of my fingers off. I wiggle my body, trying desperately to break free. I end up kicking the girls in the process, and they’re screaming as well.

It hurts, Mom. It hurts. 

When he’s done, he drops me back to the dirty floor. My legs barely support my weight now. I’m held up by the girls. I stare at my fingers. They’ve torn almost my entire nail off of each one, leaving me with ten bloody nobs. I scream and sob. The pain is unbearable. I thought I knew pain when I ran to school one day and fell on my face, ending up with a scratched cheek. 

That wasn’t pain. This is. 

“You’re fine. We’re fine. We’re gonna get out.” A girl mutters this to herself repeatedly, a mantra. She keeps going even when the other ones tell her to shut up. It’s her way of coping. Mine is to hold my hands together, still sobbing, still staring at the ceiling and waiting for my mom to appear. 

Nuts fall again at some point, followed by what looks like raisins. Water comes a while after that. It rains down on us, falling from the hatch, enough to briefly rinse our bodies and hydrate our souls. A vent opens up on the floor below. It’s small, not big enough to crawl into, but it sucks away all of the human waste that has accumulated before closing again.

I feel better. My standards are getting lower. This is paradise. 

They spray us with the orange gas again. I wish it was food. I wish it made me feel better. I even wish it put us to sleep. Anything but this misery.

Maybe I even wish I was dead. 

Mom will be worried about me. She’ll have ended her work several days ago now, I think, and I wasn’t there for her to pick up. She’s probably panicking. I’ve never seen her cry, but I think she would be now. She’d call the cops, the elevator repair man, her own mother, anyone who would listen. I wish I could give her a hug and tell her everything is going to be okay. 

Unless she’s in on it. 

Did she know they’d take us away? Did she know they’d take my fingers off? That I’d have to pee in the elevator like an animal, crowded around so many other girls? 

I shrug that thought away as quickly as I can. I look up and envision her pale face and blonde hair. She’s my mother. She loves me. And one day soon, I’ll see her again. 

Another fight breaks out. This is the worst one. It started with one girl encroaching into the space of another. Space is sacred. We don’t have a lot of it here. 

The violated girl punches the other. Not slaps. Punches. The hit sends her into a wall. Blood pours down her face. She gets hit again, this time by another girl, one who wasn’t even impacted by this altercation. Several more join in. She gets hit in the face, the chest, the stomach. She’s used as a punching bag, a way for us to get our frustration out. They don’t stop until she’s crumbled up on the floor, a bloody mess. 

I don’t know what to do. I didn’t hit her. I couldn’t. But now that her face is by my feet, I’m panicking. What if I try to help her and the others riot against me? 

I discreetly nudge her head so it’s on top of my sneakers instead of the disgusting ground. She sleeps, which I’m secretly jealous of. 

Time passes quickly. The days all look the same. The dim light is constant, so I don’t know when it is night. I’ve gotten better at sleeping while standing up. My skirt is a mess of bodily functions, both from myself and the girls around me. I’m filthy, and my fingers still hurt. I think the orange mist is the only reason the tears aren’t infected. 

“I wish I knew magic. Hermoine would be able to get out of this. She’s good at spells,” one girl states.

“Gandalf is better.” 

“What about vampires? I hope Edward Cullen comes here to save the day.” 

The conversation goes on. We talk about fictional characters, books we’ve been reading, plots we wish we could be in. It’s one moment of normalcy. The best one. One I wish would last forever. 

It would have if we hadn’t been so tired. 

When the hatch opens the next day, whatever day it might be, I expect food, water, or mist, but receive none of those things. It’s a different face peering down at us. A woman. 

“Come on, let’s get you out of here.” Her voice is warm, like chocolate cake. I feel the relief in the air. It’s intoxicating. A few girls yell in joy. A few cry happy tears. We all look up at this angelic person with every ounce of hope we have left.

It isn’t a fictional character coming to save us. It’s her. 

We all scramble to be the first ones pulled up. Our short arms are raised towards the woman, like we’re in the painting of God creating Adam. As every girl disappears into the light, my smile grows. The woman keeps pulling us out. She’ll take every single one of us, and then we’ll be free. 

Finally, her hand latches onto mine. She’s still smiling as she lifts me through the opening. I feel like a baby born into the world, shedding my previous identity and morphing into something brand new.

I’m alive. I’m free. 

As soon as I’m on my feet, more hands are grabbing at me. They’re men. Strong, big men, like the ones that were looking down at us before. They push me towards a menacing machine in a large warehouse.

How did we get here? Was this a secret floor on the building, hidden but here the entire time? They flip me upside down, latch my ankles in metal shackles, and I’m carried away. 

There’s a line of girls in front of me. Their arms are flailing. I try to get out too. I reach for the shackles but I’m too weak to make it even halfway. My body is frail, and without nails, I couldn’t get myself free anyway. 

Blood rushes to my head. I glance at the girls in front of me. There’s a man standing beside the assembly line, maybe seven girls away from me. He’s wearing thick rubber overalls that are covered in blood. There’s a knife in his hand. As each girl moves in front of him, he quickly slides the blade across their throat before moving on to the next one. 

Screams fill the room. Not from the ones with cut throats. The rest of us. The ones who see our fate. The ones who desperately try to escape it. 

There is no escape. There is only death. 

The last thing I see before I feel the cool metal blade is the face of my mother. She’s my life, my love, my entire world, and I am hers. My screams are cut as deeply as my skin. I hang there, body swinging, lungs gasping for air, but I can’t breathe. Mommy, where are you?

Then I still, and there’s nothing.

If this story made you feel something, I beg you to reconsider your eating choices. This is only a small example of the cruelty that factory-farmed animals face (which is 99% of meat eaten in the US). They’re crammed into small spaces, their beaks cut off, unable to socialize, separated from their parents, and unable to live a proper life. It’s an entire lifetime of torture traded for one single meal.

Documentaries for more info:

Veganism is compassion. We spread the word because we feel as angry about cows being killed as you do about dogs.

“The most ethical diet just so happens to be the most environmentally sound diet and just so happens to be the healthiest.” – Dr. Michael Greger

Credit to Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer for the inspiration. Link is for an online used book store (cheaper + better for the environment). Also, this is the most unbiased book on the subject I’ve read so far.

Feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you think or if you have any questions!