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What Makes Us
Fiction

What Makes Us

flash fiction | speculative

Meg Oolders's avatar
Meg Oolders
Aug 02, 2023
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What Makes Us
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two person's connecting fingers
Photo by Shoeib Abolhassani on Unsplash

We stopped making babies.

-

At first it was voluntary. A call to action. A service to our communities, tribes, and villages, to our health as a nation and as a planet, to stop making people. To surrender our primal instinct to reproduce, for the greater good.

They tried to make it easier for us. Gave us access to free birth control. The right to safe abortion. Drugs to stifle our libidos.

And some of us stopped.

But it wasn't enough.

-

They made it mandatory.

Procreation was a crime. Punishable. In many places by death. Homes were broken, people imprisoned. There was anger, rebellion, retaliation.

And it still wasn't enough.

-

They sterilized us.

It took a long time, for the additives in our food and drinking water to take effect. Our reproductive systems no longer functioned, but the additives failed to conquer our desires. Our all-consuming need.

To make.

More.

People.

Our desperation led us to terrible violence. Rape, incest, murder.

We were dying. Suffo…

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