Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Annex the Dead

The man’s back shouted “Annex the dead!” with white paint on black leather, the lines of each letter two fingers wide. It sat like a dread warning of a bad idea taken to the point of rabid dedication where nobody would know what to do when they got there but that never slowed the drive.

It scared the shit out of Robbie, sitting there in the alley. She couldn’t help but think of thumbs pressed into soft, rotten abdomens, the complex anatomy that made humans work reduced to pointlessness without its differentiation, complexity, specialization, and focus; just a pile of “guts,” goo sifted through for something identifiable, pawed by the untrained hands of the sort of assholes that split the world into what they could use immediately and what they couldn’t.

Robbie couldn’t breath, she pressed her chest out harder, making it suck cool breathe deeper just so she could feel the evidence of air to promise her panic that it was okay, “See?”

Meanwhile, her brain shouted back waving a chair in her face like a wild-eyed lion tamer, begging in screams to do something about the men trying to kill complexity, turn gorgeous wonderful organs of circumstance and idea into easily comprehendible and therefore dismissible undifferentiated fetid slime.

Robbie sat down and squeezed the tears of rage past her defenses, maybe letting out the hot pressure of every bully she ever knew using their bodies to make the world a lie of simplicity. She wanted to lash out, to find the jacket, to pound her fists into the words and say “you can’t do that!”

They wouldn’t care, they’d say “this crazy girl” and put on a mask of empathy because empathy went soft with the kidneys and all they understood was grabbing the dangerous edges of iliac crest and pulling on hips until they had what they wanted from life.

Robbie’s breath caught in a jaw clenched just barely open in an illusion of control, she pressed both fists into the cement at her sides, seated in that alley, lifting of the ground like a baby crow, propelled by terrified rage and she shook.

They didn’t understand. They didn’t understand. They didn’t understand. They didn’t understand.

She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t. This was wrong.