POLITICIANS OF THE DEPRAVED

Motion sickness is necessitated by the flow of hair that is the under balance of clouds. Too many voices call out in the rain to be constituted as a replenishing of dead saints. Who stands at the apex of the day wearing the clothing of the dead, who in their despair depart on woeful wooden boats to seek the silent rose petals of the silent? So silent is their breath that they may be mistaken for the dead. So loud are their tremors of doubt that their ears are pined to the floor. Here in the stale mists of ammonia a woman whose hair is lit on fire by frail exasperated monks takes repose in the heat of the day by examining her own forehead with forceps made of glass. She opens a small cavity in the flesh revealing a colony of spiders that eat at her brain causing a frontal lobotomy that leaves her transfixed in a state of agitation. It is in this state of agitation that she speaks in mumbled tones and caustic automatic phrases. “The somnambulant fish, the veiled interruption of shadows follows me to the edge of the well.” She grins at the walls with no response. She pulls at her eyelids, lifting them to release a flock of birds. “Too many”, She responses with a despondent glance. “Far too many to hold on my tongue.” She turns toward the door as if to leave, but her skirt is caught by the light, preventing her from any kind of movement.


Outside on the pavement a crowd gathers to elicit the crowning of the weather. Storms gather around their feet in small eddies. These pools of climatic conditions whirl about like crows. The disturbance discolors all the chaotic visitations of meteorological transmutations. The crowd shouts wordless obscenities that are frozen to their palates like thin wafers of dead skin. Policemen gather around them and peer into blocks of distortion glass that reflects the seasons of their latent brutality. It is under the guise of this reflection that they began to dislocate the tiny nerve endings of their cranial cortex.


The woman stares out her window at the crowd gathered below. A deep sorrow overtakes her and throws her into a deeper melancholia than she had ever experienced. She began to cry, but the tears were hard droplets of glass that fell to the floor shattering leaving tiny shards of pointed glass that gathered at her bare feet. As she paced back and forth by the window the glass cut into her flesh leaving behind a trail of blood. Her nervous condition prevented her from feeling the small cuts left by the glass and only agitated her sense of despair. “If I cry out”, she thought, “they will discover that I exist and they will come for me and if they come for me they might uncover my chaste and lonely solitude.” She placed her hands against the panes of glass wishing she could push away the intrusion. “If my solitary self-imposed imprisonment is discovered then they may seek to liberate me from my exile and seek to force me to reenter the world of their prying eyes. My shame would be extracted by a flock of birds and dropped like seeds into soil that is moribund and evil, the result would be the growth of weeds that would engulf the earth with the despair that is my own.”


The crowd began to grow; filling the street with upturned faces, salient whispers, shouts and cries. Their faces revealed a certain degree of futilely and anxiety that exposed the temperament of mob madness. They began to stomp their feet in a cadence that suggested the heated insanity that was about to lose control. The air was thick with fear and the heat of fury; all sanity was lost as they rocked back and forth, from one foot to the other. The sky began to crack, opening up a gap in the clouds that resembled a wound. The crowd cried out as the wound began to bleed and the blood flowed down into the streets. At the height of the frenzy something dreadful began to take place, thousands of dead birds fell from the sky, finches, larks, doves and ravens, birds of every description and size. The panic that ensued fell across the crowd like a tsunami of menace and malice.


The woman in the window collapsed to her knee’s weeping, her body convulsing with fever chills that swept over her, possessing her every fiber. “I am discovered, I am doomed, the whole world is as if it were my flesh, cancerous and filthy. I have been daunted by the very life that has cursed me from birth. I should have passed into death from the womb, still born and lifeless like dust.” She dug her fingernails into her palms, drawing blood. She licked her hands, the acidic salt taste consuming her in delirium and loathing. “If I must, I’ll remove my face and implant it with another. I’ll rip my soul from this dried shell of a body and fling it to the stars where it may be consumed by a black hole or left to wander as an aimless comet without a tail.”

She rose to her feet and peered out the window at the crowd assembled outside. The crowd had amassed into a sea of alarm. They moved about as if blinded, aimless and without meaning. Their cries reached a vociferous pitch of ear splitting decibels that the very air began to tremble. From a low rumbling ophicleide call that opens oceans of monolithic dinosaur jawbones to the shrill high pitched soprano reverberations of mucus beetles, the nervous twitch of the air created a habitual catatonic excitation. Maldolorian ossification of the senses took every ounce of strength the woman possessed. It was by shear will alone that she stood before the window with her forehead resting on the pane, her fingers splayed on the glass like spiders, her eyes filled with the fog of a distant sorrow. “Has there ever been a time,” she cried out “that I have not been the focus for such suffering.” Her head taped the window glass. Tap, tap, tap, and tap in a rhythmic pulse, tap, tap, and tap. “If there were a God, would he have condemned me to this wretched soulless imitation of life? If so than his is a miserable humor. The joke of it all lacks all amusement and taste.” Tap. Tap, tap and tap her head bounced off the window glass. The glass began to shutter as her head reverberated off the thin pane.


The glass gave way with an explosion, raining shards of razor sharp glass onto the crowd below. The glass fell; cutting through flesh, tendon and bone. Their cries were cut off as the cries escaped their mouths, falling to the ground like a cold whimper. The woman above waved her arms in the air as the crowd fell to their knees. She howled out in the blood stained night, “EVIL, reverse the letters and it is live. To live is to be drowned in the excesses of evil.” She looked down on the carnage below and shouted, “All of you, the dead who think you live, you are the face of evil, the mirror of a darkness and the skin of the earth. Your souls are eaten by demons that resemble yourselves. Do you recognize them? Do they greet you in the morning when you shave or brush your teeth? This bastard universe that spawned the vile stench of murders, rapist and child molesters, you are all politicians of the depraved.”


written by Ribitch