Dérive

“Can you let me out of here?” The little blue light kept blinking and he took a break from badgering the rectangular fixture. Looking to the middle of the room, he kept talking. “I wish I was hungry so that I could tell you what I wanted to eat. Imagine the endless ideas that would come up in my head. But if I were hungry then I’d have to stop talking to eat it once you gave me whatever I wanted, so I’m also glad I’m not hungry. I actually figured this problem out already… I thought I was a tragic figure condemned to falling asleep because sometimes I’m mute in my dreams. I don’t think you know how to dream and I hardly think you know how to talk. All you have is a ‘yes’ this, strangely enough never a no.” After each morning’s customary requests, he rambled on for hours. The only color in the white cushioned room—besides his flamboyant wardrobe—was the steadily blinking blue light. The space was usually small with just enough room for some sort of comical priso...

“I’ve never killed anyone.” She thought back to the “Path to Personhood” poster she had seen to reply “Wrong, you kill people all the time. They’re just not really people yet. Your body is constantly killing thousands of people daily and you eat plants, don’t you?” Keegan, grateful for any sort of digression stopped a moment before responding, “I hardly think the inhabitants of my gut can be considered human.” “Well, none of them are ever going to be considered human if you don’t hurry it up.” “Why don’t you do it? You clearly want to eat this guy more than I do.” “I already brought him here and set this all up, didn’t I? And anyways I’ve already shown that you’ve killed someone before. I have never eaten which is why you need to stop chattering.” “You’re the one chattering. I thought normal tourists in Thailand came to do sex crimes, not this. This poor boy has enough problems here I’m sure.” The two girls had been standing over the never unconscious body. Th...

The boy hardly looked like he had handled civilian corpses just weeks earlier, if it weren’t for the side caps and the hall’s decorations no one would know. The war was over now and the 20 year olds had not aged at all but had ended an age. “I am going to dance tonight,” said the one with the white shoes. The voices of the black and brown shoed boys around him blended into a patchy incongruence that resembled their suits as they yelled across to each other. Once, the dance routines were nearly synchronized, the grand waltzes founded by the clockwork switching of partners. Today the band was playing faster and the partners were switching with less fidelity as the excitement of a different kind of abandonment seized the young people and their drab dress shoes were submerged into the wood floor. Above the floor and above the frenzy was a long way that the banners reached before originating from the ceiling. The old banners with their fathers’ stern faces had b...