Difference Is Not a Crime (a Poisoned Iris short story)


Five words above a painting. Nothing more, nothing less. It shouldn’t have that much impact on my life, yet this sentence had been in the back of my head since the first time I’d seen it in my fourteenth year. That was the day I finally had been brave enough to go on our building’s roof, which my brother had made me discover on my birthday several weeks earlier.

“Welcome to our little corner of freedom, lil’ sister,” Memphis had told me before laughing, as he rarely did, when he’d seen my more than enthusiastic reaction.

I’d believed with all my heart that it was true while we were lying down and enjoying the sun before the sky had gotten cloudy and it’d begun to rain.

Even though this place was always synonymous with freedom, something inside me had changed after discovering these words on a Penia 37 building, written in red capitals by one person, then barred in black by another.

“Difference is not a crime.”

A statement. A cry in the world. A truth.

A lie to me. Because I’d realized at this very moment that, in reality, although our apartment and this roof had no bars, if I were in theory free to leave whenever I wanted, I was indeed in a prison and sentenced to stay in it until the end of my life.

Because I was different from those who lived outdoors, and this difference would get me executed if anyone saw me outside.

It was as if I’d committed the most abominable acts when I’d never asked to be born as I was. When I’d never asked to be born on this side of the Styx Sea, far from the city of Elysion where the Non-Infecteds like me were living. When I’d never asked for skin that wasn’t like the Infecteds of Tartaros.

I might not know who the person hidden behind those words was, if they’d lived before or after mankind had entered in this new era, if that sentence had been inspired by their color, their religion, their origin, their sexual orientation, or even because they were born without the Red Plague, like me, but I knew they were wrong.

Because difference should never be a crime. But sadly, it was one.