The Orientation Package

Or where and who am I?

Welcome to Building C. Your room is ready. It has everything you need.

Maya read the words on the orientation packet twice. Then a third time, searching for the part that explained where she was. There wasn’t one. Instead, it explained other things.

Your schedule will be posted each morning on the inside of your door. Please consult it upon waking.

So she did. The schedule read:

Breakfast. Communal Room. Walk (Supervised). Dinner. Rest.

It didn’t say who would be supervising.

There were twelve people in the communal room, and every one of them wore the same smile. Not fake, exactly. More like a smile that no longer needed a reason. A man named Gerald told her the food was excellent. A woman named Sarah said she’d stopped counting the days, but in a good way.

“In a good way,” Maya repeated.

“Yes,” Sarah said. “It gets easier not to.”

The walk followed a path between two fields. The grass was green and unnaturally even. Their supervisor walked behind them, humming something that had no real melody. When Maya stopped to look at the fence at the far end of the path, the humming stopped too. She started walking again. The humming resumed.

There was soup for dinner. It was good soup. She wanted to ask what was in it, then found, strangely, that she no longer wanted to know. She noticed the not-wanting and made a point of remembering that she’d noticed.

That night, using a pen she had found tucked inside her sock, she wrote in tiny letters on the inside cover of the orientation packet:

I did not choose to come here.

She stared at the sentence for a long time. Then, because she didn’t know what else to do with it, she closed the cover and went to sleep.

In the morning, the schedule was waiting on the door.

Breakfast. Communal Room. Walk (Supervised). Dinner. Rest.

She ate the soup again. It was still good. This time, the not-wanting-to-ask came a little faster. She reached for the bread before anyone offered it to her and only realized afterward. When Gerald smiled at her, she smiled back.

She was learning.

That was the part that frightened her most.

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Author’s note

I’m Sacha, a writer based in Switzerland, currently working on my first full-length novel. Fragments and the Dark is my home for the shorter pieces: stories, fragments, experiments, and a chance to connect with readers who share a taste for the darker corners of fiction.

I’d love for writing to one day become my full-time work. If you’d like to help me along that path, you can buy me a coffee or become a paid subscriber using the buttons below. And if that’s not for you right now, a like, comment, or restack genuinely makes a difference too.

Thank you for reading. 🖤