Nothing could be done. No one remembered, no terms accepted. A grounds unkempt but for its perimeter, braced with steel. Without demarcation to suggest what might have ever lied on either side. Barely smear marks where they’d pressed the bodies till they popped.
Each morning, holograms of children come to the surface and press their faces against it, calling out the names of their parents, the only syllables they could remember how to make. It hurt more to make the sound than it did to hold it in forever. Under the ground, persons continued making further children, training dogs.
Nights of red cessation. Up from the ground the whir of threads connected back to barriers carried beneath it. Plated cells where others cradled their heads and practiced rhymes. Devices that emit radio frequencies designed to implement the feeling of direct communication.
In every throat, a single blade. Glinting and resigning. Asking for no help but please to lock the door on your way out, back through catacombs that mimic malls where we would have wished to spend eternity. Surrounded in dioramas of ascribed pain never felt by anyone they looked like.
Limbs of the stumped. Silver lattices holding infected air in and quelled conditions out. For who else is there to have begotten the conscriptions of what no one else could ever feel. To believe in an end. To find an ending no less suitable than death while also never to have died.
It’s a strain, they’d say, to have to read it. To have to trick the mind, if not the eyes, into cooperating with anywhere so flat. The larded arms. Children deciding not to want to try again, as an agreement praised by all disciples as far back as any pleasure might deceive.
How uneven the lines. Breaded like windows. Scraping. Tongues that cannot taste besides the chewing flesh. Not quite ready to move on; not quite, until the medium dissolves whatever else is left behind it. Nothing else left to be raised. From every rip in every struggle, every number.
Nothing could be done. None else to seed. Across the long edge of the voice described by its own victims as the one and only. Ever a blessing. Held preserved as shine in the larynx of a gold droid scouring the transom for unpaid breathing pockets. In plausibility, as only myth; alive and well. Fully receiving.
Seams of dew. The clasp of an eternal spring clipped to the necks of each who could deceive it, never mind whether they will. Through whom as even the floor yearns to be rescinded, placed on file behind the senses, like a doll. Tickled till the eggs come out, each marred with neurons, never to blame.
