…..What I saw I might say to you, though the implications, being both coniferous and eternal, promote little means for existence. Commandant Goya, as you well know, is a man of Argus-eyed decisiveness and limitless insouciance. The day his legions paraded in presented extreme discomfort for every stranger harnessing any degree of dudgeon. En règle, systematic culling brought the final number to 21, myself included. Treason, it seems, the most comical of classifications, if humor is the greatest of desiderata. After tendentious processing, the 20+I ricocheted from carriage to ferry to tanker to cell—each serviced with a care package of pistachios and sweet tea. Purgatory was courteously brief; eight hours and already we were squatting along the concrete walls of our factory grave. The most peculiar feature (and as you will soon note, “devastating”) was a cylindrical capsule fettered to each of our midsections. Left alone, we mused over its functionality, theorized on the psychic properties of the spiritual being (“the man internal”, “the spirit man”, “the homunculus”, etc…), and made play of tossing the remaining pistachios into each others’ mouths, Stefan keeping score with the leftover shells. Time eluding me, life began its mystical hatching from each of the capsules. What a sight as the flowers blossomed from within! Fantastic vibrancy, cerise and plum, plumes of vivacity pummeling each of us in the chin. Damn the law of conservation and its obsessive concupiscence for fair trade! Without hesitation, the symptoms bombarded us with hours of ruthlessness, sweating and vomiting and seizures and ennui. To think, biological weapons stemming from the loveliest of flora. At its fastigium, such a spectacle would sell billions. The disturbance ended as abruptly as it had begun; for most, the stillness expunged any chance of ever enduring such a distasteful experience again. The Alexipharmic Sleep. When the arms rushed in, they proved no brutish intent, their malpractice unequivocal. For the six of us left, an acquittal awaited. A mishap in transmission of information from somebody to somebody had led to 21 accused, wrongfully so. For a moment it seemed we surviving six would reside on a pedestal of reparation for the remainder of our days, the legacy of recognized victims, heroes who unceremoniously braved the fire of a tyrannous regime. So sad for selfish sorrows, for the side effects didn’t dare relinquish in shame. Though the nomothetic sentence lay effaced, allochthonous biological components immutably nesting within us would become aroused within a 30 yard vicinity of any moving train (originally produced by the Russians, the weapon has effectively lowballed the German auto industry, accounting for the marked influx of Mercedes and Wiesmanns flooding the streets of Moscow). Our saviors had come only to relegate us to another prison, an unnamed, uninhabited island off the coast of the Isle of Man, where two weeks out of every year when they shut down the railways for the motorcycle races, we would disguise ourselves as rubble and await a cyclist rounding the turn too quickly.
Hh.