Margaret Atwood
Husband and wife Stan and Charmaine are among thousands who have signed up for a new social order because the old one is all but broken. Outside the walls of Consilience, half the country is out of work, gangs of the drug-addicted and disaffected menace the streets, warlords disrupt the food supply, and overcrowded correctional facilities churn out offenders to make room for more.,The Consilience prison, Positron, is something else altogether. The very heart of the community and its economic engine, itâ€™s a bold experiment in voluntary incarceration. In exchange for a house, food, and what the online brochure hails as â€œA Meaningful Life,â€ residents agree to spend one month as inmates, the next as civilians, working as guards or whateverâ€™s required.,Stan and Charmaine have no complaintsâ€”until the day Stan discovers an erotic note under the fridge of the house he and Charmaine must share with another couple while theyâ€™re back inside Positron. Itâ€™s a missive of erotic longing, pressed with a vivid lipstick kiss: â€œIâ€™m starved for you!â€ it breathes. If Stan rarely thought about the houseâ€™s other residents beforeâ€”theyâ€™ve never met them and donâ€™t know their names; itâ€™s not allowedâ€”now he canâ€™t stop thinking about them, especially the noteâ€™s sex-addled author, a woman apparently named Jasmine, so unlike his girlish wife, Charmaine. He HAS to meet her, but in this highly ordered and increasingly surveilled world, disorderly thoughts are a risk, and breaking the rules has dire consequences.
Fiction,Science Fiction,Dystopia,Science Fiction,Short Stories,Cultural,Canada,Speculative Fiction,Science Fiction Fantasy,Contemporary,Novella,Novels
I'm Starved for You