Off Limits

You’re with me now. We’re walking into some place brutal. Hard. Ice-cold. One of the places known simply as Off Limits.

“Are we meant to be here, Mama?” you ask.

“No. No one is meant to be here. Ever. But it’s okay.”

You flinch when a sound reaches us in the hollow air of the tunnel. A sound of something monstrous. Something not meant to be. A roar and a shriek and a lament. I flinch too, but I’m your momma and I can’t show my fear.

“Mama, what was that?”

“It was something we have to get past.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Neither do I, dear heart. But we have to. Be brave.”

I already miss the pugilistic night of the surface world, gusts like dancing feet, tense quick jabs of rain and sleet; despite the lightning combos to our body, the sudden startling scimitar of the hook, this place is so much worse.

I want so badly to say this, but I only think it: You are a warm jewel, a pulsing light. Your copious life makes mine a blip. You are a white hare glistening in an arctic winter. You stand still, quivering, brimful of the moment yet unmindful of the rest. You are a bird, mellifluous as a single sunrise in spring. You are full-throated, raw, momentous, awake to all your possibilities. You are an artist on stage and I the audience, each a battery charging the other. How do I tell you what you mean to me? How do I not scare you away? How do I pretend it’s okay?

“Mama, is that a man?”

I start and squint yet cannot see what she sees, though I sense some immensity moving peripherally, like a shadow disengaging from its host, like a dark uncoupled ghost.

“I don’t know, my sweet.”

Our crime was knowing, is all. About the way things work. Protocols set in motion by our breach. We are so small. Which might yet be our hope. Hope. The most vicious of four-letter words. 

I feel her hand squeeze mine harder, and a flurry of mechanical sounds echo ahead and behind, steampunk corvids and clanking maestros preparing for some dark discordant machine song.

The voice when it comes is close yet far, flat yet loud. Intimate and appalling, snaking through the marrow of my bones. 

“Your first mistake was to leave. Your second and worse mistake was to take her with you. Your third, and by far your worst, was to tell of what you know.” A voice that sounds like something flayed, a whisper-shriek like steel quills raked over mortal wounds, an unviable thing aborted by another universe yet thrust into this.

My fear near throttles me, but I manage to say, “Let us past.” My voice with subatomic spin passing through nothing, a neutrino sigh in the spume beneath everything. 

He is pestilence. The deadly sludge in a reactor. Something oily and massive clogging a sewer. I can smell his awful smile. He doesn’t even need to speak. The impasse between us spans eons.

My girl’s hand squeezes tighter, and I can feel the tremors of her terror. This gives me the strength I need.

“You have the power to destroy us; that is obvious. Still, you will allow us passage. You will show ‘mercy’”—hoping he doesn’t hear the quotes around that word—“because if you don’t, the circuits woven into my veins will transmit topside what unfolds here, and everyone will know you as the monster of our nightmares you claim not to be. So prove it. Let us go.”

If silence can be personified, his is a great bubble of malevolence, an inbreath of all that is loathsome, a quietly calculating horror, the moment prior to carnage, far from sane yet bright as the suppurating heart of an infection. Time uncouples from space. We are unmoored, adrift in a warp of unnameable matter. 

After the alpha of then and the omega of when, he speaks.

“Pass.” 

Good call, but you will never make things right, I think, as we head for the unknown, hands still clasped, my tiny fawn’s galloping heart echoing in the pulse of our wrists.

Breaking News

They were going to make this public, live on cable news and all the networks. Facebook and YouTube. 

All pretense had been abandoned, and men in dark religious garb thronged the periphery.

A small black-haired woman with olive skin, barely covered by a white cotton slip and thin as a wishbone, was led in shackles to the stage.

Since there was no one else left to tell this story, she took them up on their token offer of final words. Two minutes were all she had left in the world. She leaned like a nightclub singer into the mic, her manacled hands behind the swanlike curve of her back, a doomed ballerina. 

“If I hadn’t stood with my placard at the last protest, you wouldn’t have been able to tell I was any different from you. And in many ways I’m not.” Her voice shook like the tiny aftershocks of some long-abated cataclysm, but she continued. “I eat and breathe and love my family and my friends. Loved, that is…” Again, she hesitated, a look of abject sorrow passing across her delicate face, so forlorn it silenced the auditorium more than her words.

“Fuck your feelings!” yelled someone in the crowd, after the brief hush.

She breathed in deeply and straightened her posture, a frail young woman wishing she was a warrior, and she continued through the shouted insults: snowflake, cunt, wetback, dyke, libtard…

“But they are gone now, as you no doubt know. Everyone I loved. And I know you don’t love me, and even revel in my pain. And that, my tormentors, is where the true difference lies. You were playing to win, as if there were scorecards and touchdowns, baskets, runs, and goals. You grew to hate us when we defended successfully or attacked with passion and skill. Even when we played fair. Especially when we played fair. That seemed to enrage you all the more; perhaps you mistook our joy for piety. But here’s something: we weren’t playing a game. We were doing it to improve the world, to make it better for our friends, for our children, for our neighbors, and for those who had been given fewer chances than others. And also for you, had you but noticed. They’ve played you. This heartless sociopathic coward who was born on third base and even then had to constantly cheat”—among the officials, the elderly white senators and representatives gathered by the stage, there was a brief flurry of activity at this, but she refused to be distracted—“has somehow turned your heads, and you’re now all that’s left. It will be a joyless, determinate world you’re left with, the last of its love leaching away to mingle and be tainted with the toxins now allowed—encouraged, even—by the last futile industries. We wanted to stop all that, make things better. Share the astonishing beauty with our children and theirs, forward into a dream of a future we might have fashioned from our sisterhood, our brotherhood, our commonality, our better angels. You saw it as a game, and you won. But what did you win? Really, what did you win?”

“Enough!” came a voice. A youngish man, prematurely bald, eyes baleful and hooded as something best left in a reeking cave, stepped forward and smirked at her without humor. “Your time is up, in every sense. Your kind is gone from the world now. It is done.” 

At some subtle signal, the clergymen advanced, faces hidden, gleaming swords and deadly knives raised.

The trembling woman closed her eyes, thought of wheeling star fields over summer-night beaches, of a single moment with her little sister—something about a dispute, an offer of ice-cream cake, and a sudden forgiving smile.

“Glory be to power. Power is great!” rang from vast speakers on all sides, and the bloody execution began.