glanced back. “Yeh, well, I’ll see you later at The Other Greek Place, OK? See you later.”
Moving quick, he pivoted at the end of the aisle and nodded to Aaron.
CHAPTER 10 Re: Pizza and Cartoons
The simple trust between Barbarians softened me.
You absorb how they tolerate domineering bullies and come to sympathize with the long silences of hostages tied side-by-side.
There are always shots fired at the prom, and still every time, everyone laments the shock.
Their noses pushed to glass, teary-eyed for sweets or footwear.
You learn to always stand prepared to hand over your watch to a petty official.
Meaninglessness, of course, begets meaninglessness.
Obviously it’s funky and puzzling to ponder all the corpses.
Bodies break so easy, dismantling into so many small tearing parts, it’s weird we don’t all get killed every day. But it’s equally funky and puzzling to ponder that we might live another day at all: with opposable thumbs to pinch, ears to buzz and muffle, eyes to keep closed, knees to lift tall over all the corpses rotting in the rain.
The Barbarian’s life is lousy crowded with pizza and cartoons.
All that pizza and cartoons may block out their books and dreams, but at least they don’t have to look at all the corpses.
Corpses piled tall along the train tracks that cut across the small downtowns; corpses melting into every curb, their stench on the breeze while you unwrap a sandwich.
I hate how a corpse’s weight falls when it’s propped up.
Its muscles locked in place, its final facial expression fixed.
And whatever that expression, it’s always coupled with confusion: content and confused, terrified and confused, surprised and confused.
Makes you realize how quickly the flip from dimly sentient blob to corpse really happens.
An eyeball bulging four times its normal size cracks the edges of the socket that’s always housed it; muscles slackened, the pupils float into relaxed asymmetry.
Face meat gets wormy.
That animating meat-force that’d been held within has spilled out all over its own lap.
Lips recede to reveal teeth, and skin hardens.
Beggar, respectable Barbarian, Good Man: it doesn’t matter.
All food to all the birds of the sky and beasts of the earth, and there will be no one to frighten them away.
Having had no say in its final posture, folded in ways that no dimly sentient blob could ever bend, gravel smashed into its skin, it felt rude to even glance at a corpse.
I know it’s shocking, Loyal Reader, but it’s true: I never even saw a real corpse before moving out among The Barbarians.
I was 30 years old!
I didn’t know about the singular and ultimate weight with which each one sprawls, face down, clinging to the pavement in its own unique way.
I didn’t know about the hard edges cut into where, previously, there’d always been skin continuity.
And how pieces shred.
Or the dumb meat of any single face stopped.
No photograph holds a single element motionless like that while the background continues to bustle about its business.
I didn’t know about how sunburn cooks blood into skin.
How little toes, after a lifetime ticklish and tender, get all at once stripped of reflexes, exposed to nibbling critters.
How neatly parts detach and get set aside: heads, hands.
Or depending on the weapon used, how mealy dermis can grind.
And other times, you could never guess how that dimly sentient blob became a corpse: business casual, with his button-down baby blue still tucked into pleated khakis, no evident sign of distress, leaned against a tree, eyes wide open and rolled back to show only the whites like eggs, mouth agape, tongue between teeth: he died making a silly face at a passing toddler?
I didn’t know about purple blood pooling in an ear, how it quiets you for good.
A hacked up, sturdy torso, as independent as a holiday ham, its skin peeled back at the joints to reveal fat and bone: that’s humiliating, but no more humiliating than the humble man who died intact losing the kind smile that had always squared his waistline.Both get hoisted the same into the small dump truck.
The lucky ones: it’s a whole life’s blessing to die face down.
To be charred, ankles and wrists tied, and left a stump on the curb; to be stripped and tied behind a motorcycle to be skinned alive against the rush of pavement; to be hit with pipes and feel each blow shatter bone and watch the witnesses stand around smiling; to be buried alive face down to suffocate, your legs kicking aboveground; to’ve gone thru medical school and all the hours; to’ve practiced and refined your eloquent sense of civics; to’ve been so pretty that everyone yielded to you; to’ve never even imagined that you could be stopped, in tune with the ancient forces propelling you, but to then be smeared hard against pavement, the path of your last dragging apparent to anyone that passes.
All these are natural causes.
All these are natural effects.
And I’d never seen a corpse before cuz I’d even closed the door and walked away from My Little Brother.
CHAPTER 11 Re: Oil
Ruckafella’s Standard Oil brought The Homelan into codependence with The Kingdom after WWII, and that ultimately enabled The Family’s lock on Power.
But as early as May ’11, The Supreme Court said: “Seven men and a corporate machine have conspired against their fellow citizens. For the safety of the Republic we now decree that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended by November 15th.”
This dissolution created 33 new companies, greatly increasing The Ruckafellas’ wealth.
Thirty-three.
As part of The Revenue Act of ’13, The Oil Depletion Allowance slashed taxes on any income derived from oil production by 5%.
And oil fortunes ballooned.
Regardless of actual costs, automatic deductions were given to compensate for waning assets in the ground.
And by ’26 this deduction had risen to 27.5%.
And The
