Defining Eras

…and I looked into the screaming fire inside the gap, pried open between the two weight-shuttered doors of the machine room, molten industry a plasma in the corium fire, white to orange, flames flickering faster than the eye’s framerate at an unnatural chop chop chop, like a slideshow spinning too fast to keep up.

What else could they be seeing? I wail against the guard, mute and imperceptible to anything beyond the first two feet in front of him. I brush his rifle and he pushes me aside, struggling to keep stability, stock still, fused into the wall. His body slurps under bubbling hot concrete outside the city days later, memorialized, spitting poison into the air until the end of time.

Gun falls from its hands, clattering as it hits and bounces off the ground, bruised plastic-metal-wood settling pregnant with ambition as the man kneels and slumps, gurgling and moaning. He’ll be remembered, most likely, and the body takes up more space than the most seasoned feel it does, most unable to step over the small obstacle without pseudo-climbing the emotional weight of the still-warm, still-bleeding.

In a dark corner, the basement of a building long turned over to be an inanimate fact of physical space for the street-to-street fighting, the born-neuter, hairless and null, draped in a flag, has cut a gash between its legs. A long knife clutched, bloody down to the elbow, deep organ blood pouring out below it, an ink-stained fetus clutched in the other hand. It rips from its own body, flesh tearing inside as it drags out the tumors deep inside it, hoisting them in the air to shine negatively, flashbeams of darkness shining on the wall in the dancing dust, the clouded sunlight, the muzzlesmoke and burning fire.

Condemned out of time, he clutches the gun in the trench and sobs for his mother. He freezes to death on patrol, two others starve and the fourth shoots himself. Disease runs rampant as the bombs fall and a war hero goes home from his pilot’s chair. Atop a tiger, the duke sits in a smokey backroom anxiously clutching the newspaper and intelligence reports. Suited men are lined up and the wall riddled. The machine was set in place, the mechanism primed and now we swim. Desperately, against the tide, hoping and scrambling to still be standing when all the potential energy has dissipated and the waters calm again, decades, years, weeks later when the sun finally rises again, over the smoldering ruins sheer in long-sought silence.