As the pro-choice majority of the Supreme Court has dwindled to a
few old Justices, legal scholars predict a world eerily like America
before the Civil War, with women fleeing anti-abortion states, the
authorities a few steps behind. But there’s nothing like fiction to engage the heart. What would it
feel like to live in the world like the one the law professors coldly
imagine? Catch up and read Chapters One, Two, Three and Four.
Continuing every Tuesday and Friday until the heroine meets her fate, I
will publish at this site an installment of her adventures and an
imagined, terrifying, but not unthinkable America in the time after Roe.

When she woke up again she
felt better.  Maybe she’d pretend to be sick still so she could
stay longer. 

There
was a knock and the woman walked in with a tray. 

"Do
you feel like a little lunch?" she asked. "It’s just soup for
starters."

Perhaps
she did have a concussion; they were saying something to her, but she
kept drifting back to sleep.  The next time she woke, the whole
house was dark. It must be night, she thought.  Her bladder was
bursting, but she didn’t want to bother them to take her to the bathroom.
She swung her legs over the side of the remade bed and tried to stand
up.  Okay, I can stand up, she thought.  She found a lamp
by the bed, but it was just a tiny light and she couldn’t see what
might be a bathroom door. Nothing.  She looked around a little.
She was in a tiny room, just a bed and a chair and the little lamp. 
No windows at all.  She walked to the door and opened it. 
Strange, it opened into another room, bigger and with a window. It was
dark out and the room had no light at all. She walked through the next
door and found herself in a hall.  At last.

She
went into the hallway and slowly walked down, pushing gently on the
doors as she went by. She felt a little strange doing this in someone
else’s house, but she really had to go.  At least she wasn’t
so sick and dizzy any more.

The
door swung open and a man sat up in bed, blinking at the light from
the hall. Then the man in bed with him sat up. "What, what?" Two
faces turned toward her, two short haircuts, one brown, one light.

"Oh,
I’m so sorry, I was looking for the bathroom. I didn’t mean to open
this, I’m so sorry, so sorry."  Two men? In bed? Omigod, gays.
Was she in the hands of gays? No wonder they had "It’s Raining Men"
on their cell phone. She hastily pulled the door closed and made her
way into the hall, walking as quickly as she could.  Of course,
the bathroom was the very next door.   

When
she came out Brown Eyes was standing there. 

Taking
her arm, he walked her back through the empty room to her tiny room
and sat down in the ladder backed chair by the bed. 

"I
don’t care what you do," she said hastily. "I don’t know or
care. Just help me get out of here, please. I’ll never tell anyone,
I never saw anything." She was babbling.  She knew about men
who slept with men of course, from the time before the Agreement when
it was not a crime, but she had never met one.  That she knew of.
It was forbidden in Virginia now. Big time. Reeducation or the death
penalty if you kept it up.  She thought all the homosexuals had
gone to the Blue areas while they still could. She couldn’t resist
asking him, "Why didn’t you leave?"

"What
would you be doing now, if I had left?" he asked. 

Good
point.

"You’re
walking around, so we can probably move you. Tomorrow we will try to
get you out.  It’s gotten a lot harder since they search cars
on the slightest pretext.  They know girls are running away, and
they know someone is helping them.  But we don’t think they’ve
identified us yet. If we can’t drive you out, we’ll have to walk
out."

"Walk
out? Isn’t it really far?"

"We’ll
drive you to another station closer first. Now go to sleep and we’ll
see how you feel in the morning."