Dealing with it
Today: Luke O’Neil, author of the newsletter Welcome to Hell World, and the story collections A Creature Wanting Form and We Had It Coming.
Issue No. 504
The situation with the bull
Luke O’Neill
The situation with the bull
Fiction by Luke O’Neil
One thing is worth considering
The machinery was indeed odious. I’ll tell you that for free. A distinct foulness to it. Still each morning we lined up in the center of town and filed one by one through its turnstile. Then out the other end at close of business. A ledgerman on hand accounting for our comings and goings. Tipping our cap to him as per custom. Feeling significantly diminished in the long and short of it all I should mention. Most days I felt sick at heart in a way that is difficult to describe. An ingredient in a recipe. It was a Wednesday I believe when a rare delay came and loitering in expectation I met a familiar bailiff regarding me with what I mistook as a sort of human pity. What happens in the interim I asked. On the inside so to speak. It’s a production he said. A production of what? A certain process he said. Conspiratorially. Smoke was belching from an exhaust near where a group of mechanics had gathered. Squabbling and poking around under the hood of the infernal thing. I caught a brief glimpse of its insides and turned to the man queued behind to ask if he had noticed as well but I could already sense it in his widening eyes. The gears and the wheels and the levers. Beckoning. Don’t mind that the bailiff said palming his stanchion. Stiffening up now as others nearby fell out of line to get a closer look. We can’t have any of you getting caught up in there he said. I thought of a prisoner handing a bouquet of flowers through the bars of his cell to his neighbor and then so on down the line. Not romantic but dutiful.
Keep us breathing fire!
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