Harrison Bergeron

I sit on the couch as I am supposed to after work. You see, this is the only rest time we receive, besides sleeping time. Today was a long one.

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George came home! Oh how I hate being lonely. Lonely, lonely me..

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George is too tired to go out tonight, so we'll sit at home and watch the television. Oh how I wish he could take those weights off.

"You been so tired lately,"

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"You're kind of wore out," I said. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."

"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," he told me. "I don't call that a bargain."

"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," I said. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just sit around."

Im strongly against his formal acts around me. He's no competition to me!

"If I tried to get away with it," he said, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

"I'd hate it," I thought out loud.

"There you are, the minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"

A few minutes passed.

"Reckon it'd fall all apart," I replied.

"What would?" he said blankly.

"Society," I was getting confused now. "Wasn't that what you just said?

"Who knows?" said George.

Poor George. I'm glad I don't have a handicap. I must be perfect.

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Oh! The dancers are so pretty on TV, I wish to be one someday.

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A boy came on the screen, he looks familiar. Harrison! My son, whatever happened to him. I can't remember why he left us. I feel tears running down my face.

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George walked in with a beer. "You been crying" he said.

"Yup," I replied.

He asked what I'd been crying about.

I had forgotten.

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"Something real sad on television."

"What was it?" he said.

"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," I said.

"Forget sad things,"

"I always do,"

"That's my girl," said George. His face shriveled in pain. The handicap did that to him sometimes.

"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," I told him.

"You can say that again,"

"Gee-", "I could tell that one was a doozy."

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