A Functionary Finds Himself in a Doomed, Sun Lacerated Vat
Gravity did most of the work as he descended the stairwell. The entrance to the 4th floor caught his vista momentarily - this sight, like everything else in the office, was of equal impertinence to not only his life, but all lives, history in toto, and, most importantly, the ways of flesh.
The lights in this place could induce suicide in better men; this domain, however, was reserved for those who, in a more honest age, consumed grain with effaced envy. Even when strong, the weak love inconspicuousness.
Reaching the second floor, he flung the door open - the force applied being a diminutive expression of his attenuated and cloistered masculinity. Diverting left, then left again, he reached the bathroom and ensconced himself in the closest cubicle.
Thoughts became clearer; petty feelings: sharper. He had been slighted. Ego: ¡nada!
"Revenge. Yes, yes. Bastard. Piece of shit. Motherfucker. A snake in the grass…they thought it was me…ME…’ever the blackadder’ — to which a guffaw constituted my refund. Who? What? When? Where? I'll have him hanged."
If we may be so liberal as to describe the foregoing as 'thoughts', an appraisal worthy of zealous scepticism, they were in keeping with his character: incoherent, lacking direction, impulsive, desperate, feminine, an affront to both platonic and Christian conceptions of an ordered soul, and so on, and so on.
Exasperation followed envenomed ire. He stood, sans panting, in exhaustion. Facing him was a beige wall. Studying it's crevices distracted him. Tick tock. Tick tock. Time was running out. He was glad. Death, synonymous with oblivion since the age of 13, ensured the equality he secretly coveted — at odds with his explicit politics; he was a “patria potestas enjoyer”, or so he claimed on Telegam.
The wall set an appropriate tone for what was about to come; its hue was that of a desolate and arid Savannah, complimenting an inner-ambience of intestinal dread experienced by one subject to existential anguish or irritable bowel syndrome. He felt like a gazelle adorned with a Francis Bacon death-mask, bereft of gas in the tank, caught betwixt a Lion pride with their crosshairs set on his jugular and a cackle of spotted hyenas eyeing up his pancreas — as an aside, he now informs me, Hyenas, votaries of Johann J. Bachofen, are matriarchal. He avers:
“If one accedes to the precept of universal maximisation of pleasure as the good, Hyena’s consumptive customs are indubitably an affront; unlike the Jaguar, Tiger, or common house cat, — the latter’s domesticity hasn’t in the least attenuated this apex predator’s effectiveness as a hunter — Hyenas devour their prey alive. Whereas this remains an exception for the foregoing, for the latter it is the norm, and is only eschewed in the case of small game. Viewed via a classical sociologist’s prism, the unnecessary savagery of this practice is unsurprising when consideration is conferred to the the matriarchal order of the hyena cackle — a direct effect of sexual dimorphism in favour of female Hyenas. Aristotle, or was it Rousseau(?), spoke of intense violence being a marker of matriarchal civilisations.”
That’s enough out of him — “The killer awoke before dawn, He put his boots on”
The cadaver had been exposed for some hours. Innards strewn, inside and outside the cubicle. Quite the mess. Quite the clean up - the roast his wife had scheduled for 6pm seemed less and less likely to be consummated in the act of consumption. He shed a tear for the chicken that died for nothing (the satisfaction of his taste-buds was taken to be a worthy telos); the stuffing destined to reach the other half’s tonsils elicited a tear in his right eye.
Nails: no sign of defensive wounds, but there was a dissonance between the nail-bed and nail-plate, which reached its apogee on the nigh-disconnected fore-finger on both hands - one of which was detached from the remainder of the corpse.
Scrawled across what was once a tawney wall, now meridian stained, appeared to be symbols of Iroquois origin. Said savage semiotics superimposed upon a half-written homodicy - less a treatise, than a schema for a world state; the just end to a tapestry of injustice.
“The victim’s scrawls?”, he jotted. The scalp, which had been peeling to a degree imperceptible, now fell to earth with a gravitas that betrayed arcane pedigree. Its majesty confirmed by crowning the otherwise bald detective. Red blood formed a tear-shape, pausing equidistantly between his cheekbone and lower eye lid.
“His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favourite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”