Presentation

The previous group was gone by this point and the balding man was trying to shoo us toward the curtain. When we were all there, he pulled it open and the six of us stepped out onto the stage.

As with the light that shone into our basement prison this morning, stepping onto the stage caused me to stop and blink my eyes in discomfort. Perhaps it was fortunate that I was in the middle of the line, as I would have stood there dazed, but the girl behind me, one of the girls I hadn’t met who wore an equally revealing dress, gave me a shove and I barely kept my balance as I took a pair of unsteady steps forward.

There were eight screens hanging overhead and I followed Christy as we walked until I was standing under a screen that said seventy-two and my mind reeled at the thought of over seventy women, no, seventy girls, given that I hadn’t seen another woman over twenty, would be led here to be auctioned like cattle.

When each of the girls was under her own number, we turned to face the audience.

Whereas a theater or opera house, which I had initially thought this replicated, would have an orchestra pit with row upon row of seats in the stalls and a mezzanine behind, there was no pit and only a half-dozen rows of seats and they were spaced so that an abundance of aisles provided easy segregation of the audience into what appeared to be distinct groups of people. More importantly, where the gallery would normally provide additional rows of seating, it had been completely replaced by widely spaced boxes with walls completely segregating their occupants from each other. The boxes were dimly backlit in such a manner that nobody outside the box could see anything but vague silhouettes of any occupants.

A voice announced over the speakers I hadn’t noticed, “Comenzad,” which I took to mean that we were to begin the four minute performances that could determine if we would live or die in slavery.