How to Avoid Acting Monstrous

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Photo by Debasish Lenka on Unsplash

The sound first; the sound of crushed metal tearing, crushed dreams, crushed gravel as they run the lot expecting bullets and crushed spines — transactional expectations — but instead of marytrhood they find the factory wall, which tears under powersaws and tuna can efforts to find fresh meat. Who’s Monstrous now?

Power’s not good medicine for the angry: something burning veins constricted, cathartic thought burned away, burned to adrenal constrictions of binary action:

To hurt or not hurt?

I expect Management to be the next to wake me but instead find myself with a pitchfork in the chest, the abrasive-resistant cloth punctures beneath the force of the tines. I feel it abstractly, like a lightning bolt across the sky. The pain is there and then gone.

‘This isn’t Management. It’s a farmer, face ravaged with shadow block ravines, pitchfork held in gnarled knuckles, gripped tight and bloodless.

I have no protocol for this.