Flashes Of Light

Past - Sveta

The morning, we had our first interview.

I think it is safe to say that none of us was feeling really comfortable, both with the thought that we were going to be interviewed for things we didn't want to do, and both because the afternoon, we would be in a room with the president of the IFM, and Lix had to point her rifle at him.

It was really terrible, in a way, to be part of something so calculated. You couldn't really be genuine, knowing what was the next step Michaim would take.

Logar's hair had almost washed out all of the yellow hair dye, and it was re-growing the natural yellow-ish colour. I think it made him look more tough, somehow.

His hair was already exaggerated the way that it was, this yellow strawberry blond colour, but it was mousy enough to create a contrast with his prominent, angular cheekbones.

Seeing him with his natural hair colour was like the times the public had glimpsed pictures of David Bowie with his natural dirt blond hair through his eras. It was almost as if Logar's face had enough character, with its hollows and its planes, to speak for itself even without the help of his hair.

Even though I was a woman, and much different from him, physically speaking, I was always very jealous that for our Visionary it didn't take a lot of effort to look good. And he didn't even know it, which, now that I think about it, was certainly part of the charm. I was always too self-conscious.

Of course The Anti convinced me soon enough that my curly hair was a perk, and perhaps he was right. We always tried to style it in different hairstyles, and I liked how it looked. That day, we had it styled in big bouncy curls, wet style. I also had a fringe, that, I think, did nicely to compliment my face.

Perhaps that was the problem. I often felt that men could get out of bed looking like they wanted to, and if they were handsome, then it was enough, while I was encouraged to wear make-up and make an effort. That time, I said no to make-up.

Lix replied to the first question. That day, to get her mind off the things we were about to do, she was very talkative.

"Our only advantage," she declared. "Is that we're young. I can't shoot. Sveta can't read. Percie can't talk in public, and Logar... can't do pretty much anything except talk in public. But it could be worse: we could be in our fifties."

The audience laughed. I couldn't tell if they were being polite or if they were having fun. 

"I've lived with my parents when they were that age, and we honestly could never manage to do the things we do if we were older," Lix reinforced the message. "I already don't understand how we manage now. Take this for example. Before we arrived here, we went to a place to eat a slice of pizza. Sveta kept asking one of us to read the menu for her, and the waiter was really short on patience and thought we were taking the piss. Percie complained that his pizza was cold, and kept asking him to microwave it, and the waiter pretended he couldn't hear him. So, there was me asking for the allergens, Sveta making up names of pizzas because no one was helping her, and Percie all the while, going, 'It's cold. It's cold, sir. I want it microwaved.' And then," Lix smiled. "And then, at a certain moment, Logar stood up and smashed his fist on the table. 'Order now, goddamn,' he told the rest of us. 'If I wait too long to eat when my sugar gets too low, I'm going to throw up everything'."

This genuinely made the public laugh. We couldn't help but laugh too. Looking back, it might be the first and only time that we really felt like a family.

Lix' hair that day had light blue highlights, and she was wearing a purple silk jacket on the back of which she had hand-written some quote from a punk rock band that I did not know. I just assumed it had to be a punk rock band, because Percie asked her why she'd written, 'I was a teenage anarchist, the revolution was a lie.'