Chapter 10 — City Life

A serial novel in the form of correspondence among a family while the world as we know it collapses around us. I recommend you start at the Introduction:

https://medium.com/climate-for-change/climate-for-change-introduction-5331d5ab9313

But you can start anywhere you want.

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Chapter 10:

Typed letters, delivered through improvised rural mail:

Dear Grandpa,

Any time I have tried to contact you since the coup, the email has bounced back. For the first couple weeks, I didn’t write anything, since it couldn’t go through anyway. Today Mom suggested that I could just write letters to you, and then when the travel ban is lifted, we could print them out and hand-deliver the letters. She thought it might help with the stress. So I guess here goes:

It is amazing how fast the people have adjusted to military rule. We didn’t have a choice. If we wanted food or transportation, we needed to go register at the polling places. That first day I went in to register with Mom and Melody, Daisy and her family were there, too. It was good to see them. I was worried they might have gone to the border to see if they could find Antonio and his family. It would have been a bad time to be on the road!

At registration, they had us each go into a booth, where they injected a chip under the skin in our wrists. I can’t feel it at all, but now my wrist is both my food ration card and my bus pass…