"Abscission of Eschewal”
If I am still, I can hear the voices.
Chimes of advices, softly spoken, coronate in neon in my peripherals. Messages, abscissas from the x-axis of words and sounds, just parallel, float their fog of transmission to me.
“Touch that wall,” a voice’s suggestion nudges as I crookedly gain my balance by clutching the flat surface of this white wall, one fourth of the surfaces confining the contents of a tight enclosure. Just under the ventilation shaft, the wall is vibrating. The voices are louder near vibrations.
The enclosure, with every surface bleach white, is a bathroom, a corner taken at the edge of the convenience store off the four lane highway by the high school.
Its sink compacts spotless metal into its design, and the crafting lines visibly run parallel upon in its surface, reflecting generously to the bags under my eyes. The soap dispenser’s cubic structure cut into a visitor's vision like the blade of a pencil sharpener, showing every pixel and every angle of my face inside it.
Feint grooves dig into the wall in the shape of a triangle and a pair of scissors. Opposite that wall, a door with no handle stands; in the place of the handle rests only a circular lock. Behind the door, I hear a sigh, a winded slurp, the kind joggers give after high speed exertion on a morning run.
I hear the air rush, hitting the nostrils.
I hear a whimper.
I push the door open, slowly, and the hinge pops in intervals as it wedges open.
In front of me, a stool sets with a touch screen phone running on top of it, and a limp woman curls in a ball upon the floor, facing the bathroom. Her eyelids are missing.
A video plays of her on the touch screen phone on the stool. In a Skype window, she, a brunette girl with duct tape wrapped around her mouth, flickers in the thick black mire of what appeared to be another lavatory with a single fluorescent light with faulty wiring blinking a white glow upon her matted, unwashed hair. A black frame and darkness outlines her figure, filling the rest of the room. Her eyelids are missing in the video, just as her eyelids are missing in person, but she grasps to consciousness in the video, and she turns her eyes frequently with nervous twitches, wheezing and whimpering in the Skype window on the phone.
“Incoming call, 785-135-1581,” a white screen with green buttons interrupts.
I touch “Accept” and pick up the phone.
When my ear touches to the phone, I hear heavy breathing.
“No breeding, Jonas.” a male voice whispers.
“How do you know me?” I ask.
“Mating. They want to keep you from it,” the man continues.
“I won’t let that happen,” I assert.
“This was in protest, the first. Eyes open, so they can see,” the man says on the phone.
The male voice I heard on the phone, The Heavy Breather, inhales and exhales.
“Are there anymore?” I ask.
“I didn’t need anymore. Find out about her. See for yourself.”
I check her wallet.
I see credit cards, visas, and a 5x7 with her standing behind a podium in a lodge in a small town with a banner behind it, and a picture of a man racing on foot, crossing a finishing line with an arm outstretched in front of another racer to prevent him from finishing.
On the banner, a slogan reads, “Keep unborn and unflowered: cleanse the youth.”
Seated before her in the lodge are several lawyers, doctors, and town leaders conversing, smiling, and greeting.
“Look what they’ve done, colluding together, excluding us. Leaving us alone. Partying while we suffer. Those in The Colluded of the Equinox kiss their wives and girlfriends and children in public they hoard and tell it all to us, flaunting their miscreant deeds. They hide in shadows and do every wrong thing, but they only rarely do wrong in public, and they are never together at the same time. They keep hidden company. They rejoice in their evils, oppression. We live not more than a few miles from them, wherever we live at anytime. We live with them. One sin from an unlucky man is worse than a thousand sins from a lucky man. Is that it? Is an unlucky Christian worse than a lucky atheist? They spew their mantra: 'It’s so much worse than you think.' They tell you you’re not what you think, that everything you know is wrong. 'Submit,' they say. You know what I did? I did what I wanted. This woman on the ground before you is what I wanted.”
“All this to stop from reproduction? This society…” I ask.
“I hate it, also. Be it willing or unwilling conspiracy, it is still conspiracy, high crimes, ” The Heavy Breather responds.
“Crimes before whom?” I question.
“I don’t know,” The Heavy Breather admits.
“I know some. First, they stare. Peeping in your windows, following. Then, records, whole security camera videos, receipts in stores, gone…written in ink that disappears. Records of existence...gone.Wherever you were, you were never there. That’s what they want for you, to delete every backed up conversation, memory, and recollection, so they can instill new things. I shopped in stores, and the devices were amnesiacs,” he recounts.
The woman on the floor moans and stirs, but she settles again feebly.
"They can't get rid of all that at once," I interject.
“No, but they keep scraping the little details of life away, proof of life, covering them up. They have cleaners, cleaning up our little spills of progress and success. Witnesses, like the devices they own, are amnesiacs." The Heavy Breather asserts.
"Even if the electronics are wiped clean, they must have seen us at stores or parking lots, somewhere. They can think for themselves and put it together, right?" I ask.
“Those that remember us have no incentive to continue those memories. The Colluded of the Equinox brainwash. Married people are telling the ***** not to get married. They force celibate priests, figures in white hoods.
The Colluded of the Equinox force people like quivering lures, closing doors until the only ones left are of seclusion and chastity. They are in all religions, hierarchies, in every ruling body, replacing reproduction with work, with ‘purpose,’“ he continues.
The body on the floor twitches as I hear the Heavy Breather grunt on the phone.
“These are their protocols. These are the Colluded’s motives. The Colluded condemns displays of affection, physical acts of love, reproduction. The Colluded controls the population. The Colluded tells the women to focus on each other and obey advertisements’ models of how they should behave and look…conformed and emotionless. The Colluded are survivalists, locking the reproductive organs of selected citizens to save money and keep control. The Colluded use the magnetism of credit cards to lock your urethra…the tingle you feel when you sit down on your credit cards in your wallet…it lowers your ***** count,” he growls.
“The answer came to me. 'Write your message on her insides,' said the sentence that was scrawled within my closed eyes in neon. It should read: ‘She threw us a stone instead of bread, the way corrupt people do.' You can go, now. I have work to do,” he suggests.
I heard a motor crank on the phone.
“Should I expect the authorities here?” he asks as the sound rumbles in the background.
“Carry on. I didn’t see anything,” I reply.
I grab the cell phone from the stool, press the 'End' button, put it in my pocket, and walk out of the bathroom, pushing the woman on the floor with my foot on my way out far enough from the door to close and seal it in front of her, nodding to the convenience store clerk as I push the glass door open and walk out into the street, cranking up my car and leaving to the open road.
