A Convenient Lie

Their eyes like a thousand heroin needles littering the dark, abandoned streets, reflecting the sad mutations of mankind. Mindless drifters covered in strange substances, perhaps oil, perhaps polluted water. They’ll never know. They’ll be dead within an hour, choking on poison. Intoxicated by the power they hold in their baby fists, the men in the circle raise their dirty glasses and make their toast.
Here’s to the future.
Ah, the unknowing yet sardonic wit of politicians.
Here’s to the human race.
That adorable presumption that everything will turn out fine, that they can go to sleep and wake up in a utopia. Their cups touch each other’s gently, a soft noise that sounds loud nonetheless in the empty alleyway. The watchers peer down at them from high balconies. Some are not watchers. Some are dead.
Here’s to the apocalypse.
Unwilling hearts go bad, their incessant beeps forming a flat line of corruption. Dead machines are more alive than them. One man is still alive in this wasteland, and he is sitting perched on the roof of an apartment building. The pigs in a circle see him up there and wave with their fat fingers, their tainted souls, their hollow eyes. The man hears their hopeful toasts and smiles grimly to himself. They have it so easy, those government men, sitting in puddles of their own filth and leaving someone else to clean it up for them. Even now they’re leaving, dropping their glasses on the ground. They’re oblivi-ous to any impending danger that could occur.
Here’s to living a sheltered life.
The man knows that in a few hours it will all be over; his life, ended just like all the rest. No one is a snowflake anymore. And his mouth, upturned like a grinning hack-saw, opens slightly as he makes a whispered toast to himself.
Here’s to mortality.

And, as he lies dying, he sees it all again.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS