I am part of a rich American family, in a rich American suburb, full of rich American people.
Life is hell.
Every morning, me and the rest of the Wives get up at 5:00am sharp. Fifteen minutes of jogging around the neighborhood, five minutes in the shower (set to cold), twenty minutes for hair and makeup, and then five to get dressed. If we’ve managed that in time, meaning no later than 5:45am, we might be allowed solid food with our coffee.
We live in suburbia. It’s white, wealthy, and contained. We aren’t allowed to leave. My family are the Rogers: The Husband, the Boy, and the Girl.
Clean, cook, and tidy. Pack lunches. Wave goodbye to Boy, Girl, and Husband. Water the plants. Change the beds. Clean and tidy. Wave hello to children and husband. Cook, clean, and tidy. Pray. Go to bed. Sometimes my husband will gesture for me to get on my back so he can fuck me, communicating with, “On your back. Get on your back. Ye-e-e-e-s. Just like that. God. Yes. God,” like I’m a slow child or an animal. When he’s done, he rolls over and snores.
Socialising with one another isn’t encouraged, but neither is it outright banned. We have conversations with our neighbors’ Wives consisting entirely of small-talk. We might get lunch in the Ladies Café with a “friend”. Or while the kids are at school and our Husband is at work, we may spend a snatched few minutes licking cunt just out of sight of the porch windows.
It’s not perfect. It’s not even good, most of the time, but it’s something. A demonstration that underneath all of those pink lipsticked smiles and chipper voices and perfectly coiffed hairdos, we aren’t alone.
Those pink lipsticked smiles never reach the eyes.
John Rogers likes blondes with blue eyes, snub noses, and beguiling features. He likes them in the 5’7”-5’10” height bracket. He likes them thin, with almost androgynous bodies, and aged between twenty and twenty six years old. If any of these things change, or we grow too old, he calls up the Agency and requests a new model.
They tell me my name is Lana Rogers. It’s not. I don’t know how many Lana Rogers there were before me, but the Boy and the Girl are both teenagers, so there must’ve been a few. What I do know, however, is that I was born on the 19th of November, 1990. I turned twenty six today.
Since my mind was wiped clean during conditioning, I’d say that my first memory is of being inside that plush Agency car as we pulled up outside the Rogers’ house.
“You remember this, right?” said the man sat in the backseat with me. “You do remember.”
“Yes,” I said. They’d shown me lots of pictures of it.
I was let out of the car. I walked up the manicured green lawn to the front door, opened it, and went straight to the kitchen. Boy and Girl were sat in there, doing their homework. They looked up when I entered. “Hi, mom.”
“Hi, sport. Hello, darling.”
“What’s for lunch?”
I knew how to answer this. I’d been grilled on it over and over again. With one of those pink lipsticked smiles, I went to the refrigerator and opened it up. “What would you like?”
My Husband had called the Agency six weeks in advance, as per protocol, and they’d selected and abducted me from… well, wherever I was from. Most of the specifics of the training regimen and conditioning are lost to me now, but I sometimes get flashes of it. Non-stop music, talking, pictures, and crushing hunger.
But that doesn’t matter.
I’d been the Rogers’ Wife and Mother for a week when I first saw Janet Brown. On some coincidence, we’d gone into our back gardens to water the flowers at the same time. Mr Brown likes redheads with green eyes, button noses, and smirks. He likes them in the 5’4” to 5’7” range. He likes them thin, but curvy. He likes them aged between twenty five and twenty nine years old.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” I said.
We smiled. Our eyes met and locked in a stare, and I noticed something that sent a thrill through my stomach: her smile, unlike all of the other pink lipsticked Wives that I’d seen, was red as sin.
I really don’t know if I had the capacity to want a woman before I became a Wife. But after a few days of tentative courtship, though, when Janet hopped the fence, cupped my jaw, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss me, I found myself kissing her right back.
Life became brighter after that. My goodbyes to the Rogers in the morning became just a touch more enthusiastic, because I knew that once they were gone, I’d be able to go out into the garden and be with Janet until they came home. We talked a lot. We’d be there, hidden from sight by bushes and shrubs, and we’d hold each other and speak and cry. We’d kiss the tears off of each other’s faces. Sometimes we’d make love. It was a way to forget, and to feel not alone—Lana and Janet against Suburbia.
Years ticked by. Time. We fell in love.
“Hey,” she said once. “I really like you.”
I laughed, and looked down at the vaguely compromising position we were in. “I can tell.”
She reached forward to brush a lock of hair out of my face with her thumb. And then, with that devastating red smirk, she said, “Not like that. You’re so beautiful. But I’ve done things with a Wife before, and you’re different to her. I’ve known you for this long, and I actually really, really fucking like you.”
Our expiry dates came closer.
One evening, a van pulled up outside the Brown house. It drove away not long after. And the following morning, when I went into the back garden to meet her, Janet wasn’t there.
“Good morning,” I said to the green eyed brunette with the button nose and the smirk who was watering the plants.
She gave me a pink lipsticked smirk. A fucking pink lipsticked smirk. “Good morning.”
Janet had been Replaced. She was gone. She was gone, she was gone, and I was never going to see her again. Stood there in that moment, I could have fallen to my knees and retched up the coffee I’d had for breakfast.
But that wouldn’t do.
So I picked up the watering can, and I forced myself to say, “How are you this morning?”
That evening, it occurred to me that I was more than halfway done as the Rogers’ Wife and Mother. I was twenty three years old. Slowly but surely, I was becoming old news. Sour milk. Dead meat. John Rogers, whom had once left me sore with the urgency of his fucking, was beginning to grow tired of me.
I burned dinner that night, for the first time in history. John got to his feet, slammed me face first into the dining table, and screamed himself hoarse as the Boy and the Girl sat and watched. “Useless slut, ugly bitch, stupid fucking dumb retarded cunt whore!”
Later, when everyone else was sleeping, he went to use the telephone. I remember lying there in the dark, clutching my bruised face, curled up into myself, trying to breathe. What if he was calling the Agency? What if he was going to have me taken away and Replaced like Janet?
Then John came in and got on the bed beside me. Together, side by side, we lay there and stared at the ceiling. The silence seemed to last forever. And then he finally said, “Don’t do it again, Lana.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t, John.”
Though it might have made life a little easier for me, I couldn’t bring myself to pursue the new Janet Brown. No matter how much like my Janet she might have looked, she was too different. Or perhaps she was too much like everyone else, with her pink mouth and her dead eyes.
Our neighbors on the other side were the Millers, and they were small and fat. Fat Husband, Fat Boy 1, Fat Boy 2, and Fat Baby. The only member of the family who wasn’t fat was the Wife, Susan. She was practically an Amazon. I guess Mr Miller must have specified his liking for strong women.
Susan’s the only Wife I’ve ever known to go crazy.
About a year ago, John and I were woken late at night by shouting. We looked at each other, united by our confusion, before rushing downstairs and then outside to see what was going on.
The Millers had an annual hog roast you see. Every family on the street was invited. We’d all gather round the charcoal pit, after a couple hours of forced laughing and socialising, and Susan would carve us slices of salty pig flesh to eat. It always tasted so good.
The meat that was sat on their manicured lawn looked a lot less appetising than usual, though. Fat, sweaty flesh, greasy brown hair, and round glasses that had somehow remained on his face even through the ordeal he’d been put through: a skewer had been pushed up through his ass, the end of which stuck out of his mouth in a glistening red point.
“You should’ve ordered the stupid thing in advance!” Susan was screaming, as she paced up and down in front of Mr Miller’s skewered corpse, running her hands through her hair and gesticulating wildly. “It wouldn’t come in time, you stupid pig! I had to do this! I had no choice! This is your fault! Embarrassing the family in front of everyone! It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!”
About a minute of this passed, John and I watching in stunned silence, before a white van pulled up outside the house and four men in black came rushing out. Susan was tackled, cuffed, and then hoisted to her feet and dragged into the back of the van. She kicked and shrieked all the way, “no! No, no- the roast’s today, I’m the hostess, I’m a good hostess, put me down”. We could hear her even as she was driven off down the street.
The body was taken away. The Fat Boys and Fat Baby were taken away. A new family moved in about three weeks later. John muttered something about screenings for mental illness in Wives, and the methods of conditioning needing to be changed.
I never saw Susan again.
Now it’s my turn, and I can only sit and wait. The local police are in the Agency’s pocket, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their influence spreads even further than that, because money is power. But they don’t have you all, do they? They don’t have your minds.
And even if I can’t remember who I am, somebody out there might. You’ve got my description, my date of birth, and you know about when I went missing. If that connects up with anyone, or if you knew someone that could be me, then tell my family I love them and that I’m sorry. I bet I thought of them a whole lot during the Agency’s conditioning. Or if I didn’t have family, then tell my friends the same thing. I must’ve had something. I must’ve had someone.
The van’s just pulled up outside. They’re here I have to go