The First Rule
Alex Morrow
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Hélène stares blankly out of her suite window at the fortified steel cage that sits at the edge of her compound. It has been nineteen days since her prisoners were locked away, and six since the stronger of the bunch had begun to consume the flesh of the weak.
“Don’t you think that this has gone on long enough?” Serena, her closest aide, asks as she strides into the room, the heavy oak doors falling shut behind her. Her hands are clasped behind her back, a habit she developed after being told time and again to quit fidgeting during meetings.
“They must repent,” Hélène says flatly.
From up on the heavily guarded third floor of the central temple, she can look down upon the glass roof of the box and at its pile of occupants—climbing over and clinging to one another in the midst of their torture. She wrinkles her nose in disgust—the least they could do was quiet down. She might consider releasing a few of them if they stopped griping.
“Each of these beings is your kin—surely they didn’t mean to bring a traitor into our midst.” As she speaks, Serena steps to the window and glances down at the man whose name they had never cared to ask, hung between two posts with his limbs pulled taut by the ropes that bound them.
“They begged me to let him stay—the whole lot of them—and I denied their request. They did not listen.”
“Surely you can forgive their foolishness—”
Hélène turns to address her consultant directly, her dark eyes entirely devoid of any emotion.
“What is the first rule that Absalom has given to us?”
Serena sighs, though she does not hesitate to answer.
All children who disobey must be punished.”
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Alex Morrow is an undergraduate student currently studying English at Albion College with a focus on Creative Writing. They have been writing short stories and personal novels since elementary school and take great pride in their work while still acknowledging that they have a lot left to learn. Their pieces mainly focus on the development of strong queer characters and breaking gender norms, and work to build the kind of representation that they wish they had growing up.
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Posted in Vignettes: A Literary Photo Album : JUL '26 and tagged in #boudin, #fiction, #flashfiction, #microfiction, Fiction