We don’t talk about the women in the stocks. Not openly on the streets. Not openly in our homes. Not openly in the most intimate of settings with our spouses. It’s never safe to talk about them, and how they got there, because if we ever discuss, it could be seen as questioning. We can trust no one. The women who ended up in the stocks made that mistake. So we say nothing, not to each other, not ourselves. We simply avert our eyes as we pass, and move on with our daily business.

Every child learns this at a young age. I had to teach my own children not to ask long before I was ready to have “the talk.” Granny used to tell me that before the laws all changed, “the talk” was explaining sex to kids who were getting close to the age where they would want to start having it. Now, “the talk” was much simpler. Don’t ever ask about the women in the stocks. They are there because they deserve it. Inevitably, this would lead to more questions- why Mommy? What did they do? The answer is like poison inside me, but I couldn’t tell the children the truth without risking ending up in the stocks myself. So I gave the standard, government approved answer, “They didn’t follow the rules.”

I had twins, a boy and a girl; although I had a suspicion that maybe I actually had two girls, and that one of them just happened to have a different physical body than my other one. That used to be legal. Granny said they used to call it Trans. Her sibling, Matilda, had been that way. I remember Untie Mat (that’s what we always called them, back when we still could), and sometimes it breaks my heart. Untie Mat went into the stocks too. But that was a long time ago. The tears were all dried out, just like my ability to feel anything.

We didn’t live in one of those big cities, like New York or Boston. No, we lived in a small town in western Massachusetts that was perfect for a movie set, with a main drag that was only about four blocks long. Anybody could walk anywhere, and that was a good thing now, because gasoline had become so expensive that only the super rich could afford to have a car. Some of our neighbors had a horse or a mule, but they were expensive too. For most of us in Fulbright, we walked. There was a big town square, with a park and a courthouse and a fountain, and it was always full of people walking here and there.

That’s where the women in the stocks were. Right where everyone could see them.

“Mommy,” my daughter Mira said, tugging on my arm. That’s all she had to say. I followed her eyes to the newly imprisoned woman. I had known her all my life. Her name was Gilda Hughes, and she was married to one of the most rotten, abusive men in Fulbright. He was always accusing her of infidelity, or disloyalty, or disobedience, or a host of other invented vices. Everyone knew that Gilda wasn’t any of the things Victor said she was. But it didn’t matter. Whatever men said about you was true, and into the stocks you went. Gilda’s face was swollen with a black bruise on one side, her eye squeezed shut from the trauma. Her hair still had blood in it from where she’d been struck on the head. If she hadn’t been moaning, I would have been afraid that she was dead. Someone walking by took a moment to offer her a drink of water (we weren’t allowed to do that; a government man came by around noon every day to do that on behalf of the city). I didn’t get a good look at who the kind stranger was. I wondered if it was someone who was involved in the letter writing.

The letter writing was the only way that information we could trust got to us. In the wake of the complete collapse of the federal government thirty years ago, each state became it’s own sovereign territory. The political battles had turned to actual battles. That’s when Massachusetts set up it’s own standing army. I’m fuzzy on the details of what happened after that. I think everyone who was alive then is too, and that’s why we don’t have a true record of events. All I know is sometime after the standing army was established, it took control of everything, turning Massachusetts into a police state. That’s when they brought in Cotton Smith, and set him up as the puppet dictator. Cotton Smith couldn’t have possibly been his real name; it was supposed to make people think about the old Puritan colonies, and religious figures like Cotton Mather. He wound the clocks all the way back to the 17th century and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do to stop him by the time he took power.

He wasn’t even a good governor, or so I’ve been told. He was a bafoon who had a lot of connections and money with absolutely no walking around sense. But you can’t argue with the rich when thy decide to do something. And for some reason, they wanted Cotton Smith, backed by the Army of Massachusetts. We all had to either get out, or fall in line.

Untie Mat and Aunt Jill made a plan to get out, but they never made it. They took Untie Mat in the middle of the night, raiding the house while they slept. Mat went into the stocks. Jill was shot trying to fight off the soldiers who stormed the house.

Granny told me that story through a letter before she died. She wrote it all down, and stuffed it under my mattress. When she was dying, she whispered in my ear that I should check there for her last gift. That letter had bits of the history she had lived through, and it passed on the information for her one contact within the letter writers: Gilda Hughes.

I looked longingly at Gilda, hoping that she’d get out of the stocks in a day or two like usual. I did not want to have to go hunting for another letter that contained her contact, but I would if I had to.

“Let’s go,” I told Mira, as I ushered her away from the square.