The march out of town was mostly quiet. Not surprising for such an awkward endeavor. Every year, the young lives of all those who had completed all the years of their formal education were evaluated based on how they fit in with the community and the order of things. Free thinkers, with radical ideas were nothing but troublemakers in the eyes of the elders. The community had been ravaged by power struggles in the past and so the elders designed this process to weed out the biggest rebels and misfits. On this day, the misfit in question was a boy named Adam. Despite the warnings of his parents throughout his childhood, he couldn’t help his inquisitive, opinionated nature. And so Adam was being escorted out to the woods miles from the community, banished forever. They finally arrived at the edge of the vast woodlands and stopped. One of the armed escorts asserted gruffly, “The penalty for contacting or returning to the community is death. Good luck”. And then they left.
