Anj Anja Poem

Anja knows she should be grateful for the man in the white lab taking her blood ever so carefully, for lowering himself to touch her dirty skin, but she’s so hungry that she can’t think of anything else.
Suddenly, the man pushes her off the bed, and Anja lands with a terrified yelp. There’s a plate in front of her though, shaking slightly from the distant bombing. A plate of burgers piled high, buns green and fuzzy with mold, meat bloody and rotten and writhing with hundreds of maggots and shining metallic winking at her with tiny razor blades and needles too many to pick out, cheese black and slimy, ketchup white with some unknown substance she just knows is poison. Her mouth waters.
“Stay,” The woman who found her and took her prisoner orders.
Anja looks up at her, betrayed. “Hungry,” she whines.
The woman laughs, high and cold. “We’ll let you eat, Anja. We’re not as cruel as our enemy. But if you wait, we’ll remove that horrible food and give you a nice, proper meal,” the devil of a woman offers.

The food alone will sicken her for days, the sharps will cut her throat and get stuck in her lungs and make her stomach bleed and they won’t heal her for months because it’s her own fault that she’s injured, her own fault she’s a deserter, and she should know better by now than to ingest a poison they haven’t even identified for her. She’s so hungry though, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll even let her eat by the end of it. The woman doesn’t lie, but she tells a hell of a lot of half-truths, and she can already hear the woman’s honey-thick voice saying, “I said we’d let you eat, Anja. I didn’t say when. Enemies of the Crown don’t get