’Nope. Just wiping dust off our sentential logic. To spend time pleasantly.’
’Well, I never…’
’ The use of “should” does not turn the predicate obligatory true. Besides, I know you did not fuck her. It was she who laid you up, my friend.’
* * *
…eeeeeeeeeeee…
…pain… pain… pain… pain…
too boundless to feel anything else… its surging tide since long went over the brim of all capacity to hold it… exceeded… inundated… sank any ability to sustain… restrain or fight it… too mighty a tide… too shallow containers…
it’s bigger than the ocean… it’s wider than the universe this here pain… crushing… nauseating… unbearable… guts ripping…
so too merciless… it stops at a sliver of a notch from killing you… not to be… I wanna not to be and not be filled with this pain… to die of pain would be a blessing… sadistic double-dealer pain keeps that bliss away…
impossible to evade… escape the of pain… no strength for cries… for moans… for squeals… for whimper… for nothing but this squashed and crippled ‘eeeeeeeee’ unable to reach anywhere beyond this side of pain…
no way to squirm or writhe like an earthworm cut in two… like any maimed animal struggling to adjust their ruined body to… to find some kind of alleviation in whatever quirky and unnatural contortions so as to shun their pain at least a split grain of it… to dodge… to feel it less for half a second…
no room for hope… it will be pain and only pain… pain… pain… till the very end… o were it nearer… but nearer it can’t be… there’s no time… it’s meaning gets annihilated where each moment is an eternity of pain…
no room to move… this immobility deprived of death… pressed in between unyielding walls of pain… a helpless powerless subhuman overcome by Pain… your cruel Master…
impossible to move a limb when having none at all… all your possessions stripped away… replaced by just this feel of pain…
you’re nothing but a captive… a slave… a crushed plaything of your excruciating Master…you are immersed… engulfed and squashed by the immeasurable pressure in the unfathomable abyss of pain…
eeeee… how it pains… eeeeeee…
* * *
There was no chewing gum in the blue wrapper which V picked up from the table in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin before Sally brought meal for him and 2ic taken away already.
Only back home V got it what namely his companion was texting about by flailing his eye-lashes the moment before he was arrested. Even conveyed in an unknown code, the message clearly indicated the dropped stick of chewing gum. Which wasn’t there. The wrinkled wrapper contained a little flat lamina of memory card.
V checked it with File Manager in his Debian system to find just 2 files in that 2TB card. A .txt file that 2ic, presumably, referred to as “ transcript” and a folder which, technically, is also a file containing further files. This one was filled with an endless mess of audios in Vorbis format.
A couple of them clicked at random played back thru the black speakers one and the same impersonal flat drawl of artificial reader, unnaturally distanced and sexless voice-over. V didn’t bother to tweak the pitch or tempo in robotic diction, or choose a dialect from the long list of options, he just left it as is. Moreover, the statements—the stuff was too haphazard for a story—were hardly keen on disclosing who they belonged to: a male? a woman? a snotty kid?
