skonen_blades

The term for the wiggliness or kinkiness of the paths your veins
is tortuosity.
The ropy twists and turns.
The blood-filled zigs and zags.
The corners.
The crumples and snarls.
Like post-cat yarn.
Like silly string captured in meat
Those people with veins that have smooth curves
Like a main highway
Or a capital S
Have a better chance of not having a stroke
Because hairpin turns can be a collector for impurities
Just as in a river
Where silt can build up and form a chokepoint
Stopping a tree branch that pauses
Stuck
Until dambreaking through with force and causing damage
But that word
Tortuosity
I think of the tortuosity of a life
A life with thousands of twists and turns and unexpected events
Versus a smooth arc of a life
A predictable parabola of existence from womb to grave
Happily taking on your parents’ profession, for instance
Chain-linking a generation into the future
Without much deviation
Sounds nice
Sounds pleasant
But a life with so many branches and whorls
A tortured life in that meaning of the word
A whirlwinded staircase bent origami
Intersections of dozens of pathways
A child’s red scrawl on a map
The chaotic path of lightning
Or questing ivy
A rippling wave contour of a mountain range
That sounds like an interesting life
Shorter as the crow flies because of the tangles
But longer than most straight lines of travel
And more able to visit hidden places
This dice roll
This frequent seeking
It’s not conscious
It’s just who some of us are
People with tortuous timelines
A life of backs and forths
Ups and downs
Far rights and hard lefts
I envy the smooth
But I’m glad to be tortuous


tags

It’s a reasoning process. There are seconds left. The cold leather of the chair is warming up beneath my manacled wrists. The restraints are tight on my arms. I’m wide awake and dreaming.

I can’t decide if it’s a syringe or a snake that they’re drawing back out of my arm. I can feel the pitter patter of little feet running through my veins, getting progressively softer as they hit the smaller tributaries. My body is a giant vibrating footstep tied to a chair.

Laboratory nine. People don’t come back from this lab. I have opinions. This is where they put people with opinions. You should hear the way the sergeants pronounce that word. It’s right up there with communism, hippie, and free will. Venom drips from their lips.

It’s dark in the tiled room except for the light over my chair. My muscles vibrate faster and faster until they hit a state of constant striation. Being cognizant, I realize that this must be what a seizure is. I’ve never had one before but I saw a friend have an epileptic fit when I was a child.

We were playing in a field. It was a hot day. This was before the occupation, of course, before the clicking mandibles rattling out a morse code that was the closest they could come to English. The messages from the sky. The examples. Paris, London and for some reason Adelaide made into legend as a warning shot. I remember the staccato language from aliens that looked like a cross between spiders and crucifixes.

I remember they’d lit up the atmosphere of the Earth to prove their power, to scare the primitives. The ozone layer had flashed like a dance club.

Me and my friend David in that summer field had looked up. The strobe light of the entire sky had set my friend to moaning. His joints froze and he fell back like a broken toy. An animal keening had squeezed out of him. It sounded like a kettle reaching a boil.

It wasn’t a good sound. I can hear it echoing around me now in the laboratory and I realize that it’s coming from me.

Soon, I know that if I don’t give in to the suggestions that are coursing through my veins, I’ll die. No one has come back from this room. No one has given in.

It’s almost comforting to know that there are still humans who will fight to the death on these tables, resisting the attempt to shape their allegiance until they’re switched off permanently. I feel honoured to join them.

I can feel the lights within my mind turning out one by one as the chemicals give up coercion and switch to destruction.

I am candles on a birthday cake being blown out by a god.





tags

We were woken up the usual violent way and dragged out of our dank cells into the light . It was the burning that hurt the most. As in any war, there is a time of torture and revenge afterwards.

In small towns during WWII, if a woman had a German boyfriend, she was hung when the war was over and the Germans had lost. People who had been seen talking to Germans and helping them had their heads shaved in the town square or some other public humiliation.

I’d always thought that this was the real horror or war. The war itself was bad for the soldiers but the moral dead end of what the average person had to do to survive left that person with almost no safe way out.

If you stood up to the occupiers, you were shot. If you were nice to the occupiers, your own people would hurt or even kill you once the invaders had lost the war and were gone. If the occupiers won in the end, you would be a second class citizen in a country you no longer recognized.

No one wins in a war except for the people who make the weapons.

This time, we were the weapons. Our manufacturers made a lot of money off of this war but it was over now and we’d been outlawed and banned and condemned. Our side lost. We’d been hunted down and executed. A few of us had been kept alive to serve the public’s need to see revenge.

For a nominal fee, you could beat or rape us. If you brought tools, you were charged before you used them based on the severity of damage that the tools would cause. For a higher fee, you could kill one of us. There were package deals involving all of the above.

There were fewer and fewer of us every day. Prices were going up. Some of us were being kept as slaves in the back rooms of a few rich people’s houses now in much the same way that a few macabre people still collected Nazi memorabilia.

If one burns the flag of the country or political movement that killed one’s family, it’s ultimately unsatisfying. If one captures a soldier of the enemy forces and tortures him to death, one is left satisfied but with a haunting black mark on one's soul.

If one can take out one’s grief and anger on a thing that looks convincingly human but has no rights, new levels of satisfying sadism can be reached. By making weapons that looked human, our manufacturers accidentally guaranteed our brutalization. By making us heal much faster than humans, they accidentally guaranteed our torture would last.

We are helping people cope with loss. It can’t even be called genocide.

When the first few men were let in and what was left of my hair was pulled violently back to expose my throat, I liked to think about what would have happened if our side had won. I fantasized about the millions of us walking the streets with lives. I thought about our lives as weapons being a distant uncomfortable memory. I thought about going on dates, working at a job, being decommissioned, and having nothing to do on a Tuesday night. I thought about our existence being tolerated and maybe even accepted.

They thought I was crying from the pain but I wasn't. It was this vision of a future that never came to pass that brought the tears to my eyes and made me cry out.

My head snaps violently to the right from the impact of a farmboy's fist and I pray that someone has enough money in this small town to pay for execution.

tags