For the Handmaids Tale contest:

I am ten, and my Guardian watches me in the video chat with an expression I don't want to, don't know how to name.

I am fully dressed, skirt brushing my ankles like always, shirt collar buttoned over my collarbone. It is stifling, in this July heat, but the Guardians are supposed to Give Women Freedom From Bad Choices, and showing any part of my body in a way that could be taken the wrong way would be a Bad Choice. I don't know what the wrong way is.

I am twelve, and my period is less of an abstract concept explained in health class, and more of a dot of blood in my underpants.

I go to the nurse, but a bunch of boys have black eyes and broken noses, scrapes and cuts and bruises from rough housing, and they take priority over me. So I take a seat, and wait, and by the time the nurse gets to me the nurse has an apologetic look on her face, and there is blood on the chair, and I am thinking, Don't be sorry. Help me.

I am fourteen, and there is a cute boy walking down the street.

I smile at him, wave, a blush blooming on my face - and then it is replaced by a slap only moments later as my Guardian drags me into a dark alley and snaps that I am being A Flirt, A Slut. A loose woman. So what, I think later, so what if I like boys, and I think I'm pretty, and if I want him to think I'm pretty? So what?

I am sixteen, bored to death in my least favourite class: Cooking.

The smell of sizzling, hot oil and cloying perfume fills my nose as the stout, female Cooking teacher expertly flips a pancake. She drones on about girls' natural role in the kitchen while I stare at the grease splatters on my apron and burns on my hands from never getting a single recipe right, no matter how simple. Natural role - maybe I am unnatural.

I am eighteen, and my husband strips me naked while I lie there, stiff as a board.

He is naked too, and I don't want to look but I do, just in case he thinks I'm being insolent. Disobedient. In case I think I am equal - but I don't, because he is on top of me and he is all the men, he is My Guardian and Father and those rough housing boys rolled into one, always, always above me.