Long room memories have invisible elephants

In human nature you find the drive to overcome. This may manifest as an individual’s slow, mistake-prone plodding against the cards he’s dealt or, in the case of the group, through war, to take. I haven’t asked about my sentence, haven’t needed to. This place, where the stone gray walls slime at dawn, where open windows have rusted brown bars that’d allow me to escape were I less an arm, it’s got legible history, in fine script, scrawled through green grime on the floor.

“I must have saved everything,” one starts. No date given. They don’t want you to know what time or day it is but I’ve at least kept track. It’s been thirteen days since my arrest, since my swift internment in this cell.

“I must have remembered everything, and they were able to read it out. They know.” The penmanship, masculine, is surely from a learned hand for handwriting, as an art, has been long lost. We few writers who’ve kept that fire lit are now sought after as political enemies, as heretics, as witches and warlocks.

The cessation of applause

He who shall now not be named
The time has come
For me to forget
I cared
Third rails are deadly
Somehow you live
But your mask has fallen off
You've poisoned the argument against the evils of war
Against state abuse of power
With your own evil
With your own perverted and selfish sense of liberty
That I can no longer countenance
My biggest regret is that
I helped you fool others
And by doing so
The Devil's work

Tragedy, then farce

Oh America
Soft
Benighted
And on your last knees
But there's the other self
The one with the knife
Glad for the lifted restraint
Here we are saying, "Death! Death!"
Shock and awe wasn't for them
It was for us ...
Here we are
again
screaming
"To the cross!"
When it is we who shall be nailed

TSSD: antares

Dwellings in the Wind: Infamy

The General rests his arms on the concrete ledge of a third floor balcony overlooking the Ruby Nation's capitol city. Sleek, metallic domes line the landscape like perfect beads of water, punctuated by wispy tufts of lush green. In the distance to his left stands the capitol building itself, a grand mosaic of water beads, rising high as the defense complex he's working from. To his right, structure and civilization give way to brush laden plains stretching out to the horizon. The sun, setting, looming blood orange, prepares to crash land on those dusky edges of world.

     Hands to jacket pockets--the familiar cigarette case profile protruding from one rightmost. Solemn cadence of ritual attaching itself to wrists; thumb crossing the box's scarified surfaces, bursting synapses, evoking memories of the last war--of men sacrificed to it. Cigarette finding way to one palm while the other paws for lighter. Fag twixt thumb and forefinger, rolled up then down its length. He studies blindly the bumps and troughs neath thin flax wrapping. The tobacco bound within, a marvel in itself, ironically harvested by swarms of specially grown, specially programmed locusts. Everything was like that now. Insecta tech, once a top military secret, had finally made its way to the private sector.

     Butt pushing way through lips; a coolness felt. A flick of the lighter's chromic hood releasing once more a jinni of incandescent flame, in turn discharging that redolent smoke he seeks. Paper burning, crinkling, waking him from reverie. He sucks, in, a fierce ember to life, a faint microcosm of the rippling red disc touching down on the outskirts--out there.

     He salivates and then evacuates initial, paper rich vapors through the left side of his mouth. "Like junk threats," he thinks, "like those constantly and namelessly transmitted over Insecta antennae channels since the end of the last war. You have to pull them in, taste for substance and spit them out in the same breath if they're found void of it." Just that was taking place behind him now, behind the convex, prismatic glass.

     Again he hears a crinkling, not from his smoking but the desert beyond, completing the illusion of celestial collision. His eyes adjust to the glare and refract an image of something new, long, silhouetted--moving fluid across the horizon. Air raid sirens warm their many throats and the portal door behind him slides open.

    "What is it?" he says, removing his jacket, handing it to an aide.

    "Provenance unknown, sir. It appears headed for the capitol building. First squad is positioned to intercept."

    "Suit me up."

    

The initial, mucky feeling of the quick suit he'll never get used to, when the genetically engineered bug-head helmet locks in place and the foreleg gauntlets connect with graft sites on his arms. He closes his eyes to access those of the first squad; to witness their annihilation at the hundred hands of the invader: a gigantic, red centipede.

    Undeterred, he coordinates the positioning of a better equipped second squad, just before the Nation's impermeable northern gate. He informs them of the enemy's strength, of its uncertain weakness and that a third squad will be there shortly to reinforce. He opens his eyes and is returned to the defense complex balcony. "I need R&D on the horn, now!" he says.

    "There's no one to pilot the new suit, sir. All test subjects have been rejected by the host."

    He's half hearing this as the aural feeds from second squad seem severed by screams of pain; as his staff gasp in horror at the sight of the Pede, something entirely new in Insecta development, surmounting with ease the northern gate and crawling mercilessly over water bead buildings to reach that of the capitol. It seems to writhe and bulge from within before detonating in a blinding white flash ...

Oh broken

Oh, oh, broken, you will think me that which bit you.
Wrote my words down so they’d bleed more than before.
Read the random tome in tongues of bitterness.
The horror that I’ve borne.
Out of my hands.
The hatred that I’ve met.
For it.
Hell hath made me, and by me you.
Relief. Sweet God, relief.
Come, we are in need.

TSSD: less changes made