The Machine

What it was is that I thought I had found the way.

“Ladies and Gentlemen.” That’s how I started off, just to lure them in; just to get them going. Isn’t that how all great presentations begin? A brief and subtle allusion to their humanity before wisping them away on the phonetic piecings of a plan—and this was it, the master plan if you will.

And Glorvina, who had been in the audience—a lady, one of them—Glorvina standing up on her chair shrieking in earth-shattering plumes and blue eyes that burned with some kind of hatred.

Aghast, I watched as she was carried away and presumably shot.

“Ladies and Gentlemen. What is it we’ve been sent here to do? to say? We’ve been sent here against our will to carry out orders that have little matter in our lives.”

Of course this was a lie. What could matter more than this? True, they will die. We all will die. Horribly. Perhaps Glorvina chose the easier path. At this point she is little more than a smoldering carcass in the alley beside the putrid dumpster, that’s how I imagined it anyway. For what?

“Stay with me people,” I said.

I said, “Tomorrow morning you will wake up. You will rise from your sleeping places—where ever they may be—early, very early—and you will be led to a machine.”

Outside it was beginning to snow. The wind was howling and whipping up against a windowpane behind me—there must have been a loose piece of vinyl because soon there was a violently subdued creak intermingling with the vibrato and cracking of the windowpane.

“Do not be alarmed—this machine has a function, it serves a purpose. And when you get down to the bottom of the hill, you will strip your clothes and bury your name and your face and your wife and child deep down in the mud. You’ll respond to its achy squeal with pride and dignity. You are not dogs! –Do not act like them…”

Here I paused. They needed to soak that in; try to anyway—they’re not very bright. The room was silent. I watched a man’s gaping face expand and contract with the noiseless creak that permeating his deaf ears—all of their dead ears. I watched—as his face began to melt—his deformed fervent lips pucker together and then pop propelling through the room an ancient utterance like a noiseless and omnipotent whisper submerged and echoing across a pitch black lake: “Why?”

“Stay with me people.”