Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

The Gardener

I had no idea Big Brother was watching me. Nobody ever told me that there were surveillance cameras everywhere, or that government officials were studying my every move, from childhood on up, in order to determine the job that would be best suited to my capabilities, my interests, and my personality.

My mistake was in thinking that there is such a thing as free will in this country. I foolishly believed that I would have a choice of occupations. I went through childhood imagining that I would one day be a doctor, or a police officer, or a fire fighter. Those are, after all, the childhood dreams of all children everywhere, right?

Imagine my shock, upon reaching my eighteenth birthday, when the Labor Officer showed up at my home to explain to me that self-determination was all a crock, and the government had already decided what my lifelong occupation would be.

I was angry. I yelled, I kicked, and I screamed as they dragged me to the Office of Employment to find our exactly what the government had concluded about my aptitudes and interests, and what career they had assigned to me.

To be perfectly honest, if I'd known this was how it was going to work out, I wouldn't have spent so much of my teen years playing the arcade game Centipede.

More writing by this author

Blogs on This Site