We all knew this day would come. When the population outlasted the available resources.

Eventually droughts and storms would tear an irreparable hole in the food supply. Medicines would become far more valuable and precious.

The only hope to prevent a lawless country rising from the ashes is to do the unthinkable : a mandate that one person from every household must be sacrificed for the greater good.

For those that lived alone and had no one to depend on, it didn’t affect. It were the families that would have to sacrifice : a grandmother or grandfather, a mother or father, a sister or brother, aunt or uncle. Didn’t matter so long as everyone participated.

But those that opposed were to be executed without trial. The entire family to be wiped out without any reason other than refusal.

Just like what happened to the nursing homes a year prior. Wiped out without any reason except the elderly were dragging the resources down. It made my family sick knowing the lives that were lost, knowing that my grandmother was apart of those that were massacred.

Now my family had to make another sacrifice. My father, my mother, my little sister or brother, or myself would be gone. We were given 24 hours to make our decision.

I can only imagine how my older brother must be feeling with his own household that contained his wife and newly born twins. It is all so twisted.

“The government has resources but chooses to hoard most of it for themselves.” My father’s words rang loud and clear in our small apartment as he and mother argued.

“It doesn’t matter! If we say anything, we will be all killed!” Her usually calm, sweet toned voice now held a layer of fear.

“We can run,” he began before she cut him off. “We can’t! If we do, we are condemning all our children to death!”

I leaned against that wall hearing the argument ring over and over again in my head for hours. I remember the dread as my father made his decision that he will sacrifice himself. Just like my older brother.

What a sad world to live in. As the military knocked on doors, I noticed quite a few elders being dragged out of the house by their own families, children snatched away from parents that didn’t even flinch. Men kissing their wives and babes goodbye. Mothers tearfully telling her soon to be orphaned children to look to the heavens to find her.

Seeing my older brother kissing his wife and twins goodbye, I thought how much they would miss their father. How much time they would have gotten if this hadn’t had happened. He would never get to walk his girls down the aisle to be wed, never get to have more children with his wife.

Looking down at my crying younger siblings, tears and snot gathering in their faces, I knew then what I must do. For them.

I had a role to play as their older sister.

Taking the distraction of my father consoling mother and the children, I stepped forward when the soldier came to our door. And in a voice that I didn’t recognize in myself, I answered his question, “I volunteer.”

I am not forced. I volunteered.

“No!” Father and mother screamed, trying to reach me, but the soldier had already taken me by the arm and escorted me onto the cold December street, letting me join my older brother who had shocked tearful eyes fixed on me.

I squeezed his hand as with a brief glance behind me, knowing this would be my last time seeing them, I smiled. “I’m sorry,” I told them.

Sorry I won’t be here. Sorry I won’t be able to be there for my siblings. Sorry I wouldn’t have another chance to laugh with them. Sorry for so many things but most especially : sorry that I am not sorry of my choice.

Looking up at my brother of twenty one summers, we both had an understanding. A connection. For our families we will go.

We stayed like that, hand in hand. Even as we were locked in a chamber with hundreds of strangers. I leaned my head against his shoulder as the oxygen was sucked out and we all started to fall to sleep one by one.

I saw glimpses of what could have been but I smiled for what I did have with them. The last words I heard were, “Happy birthday Valerie.”