I’m not sure how I ended up in prison. There was a loud bang and then everyone in the gravel pit was arrested and taken into a cave to be counted. They made us trade clothes and do push ups until we passed out. None of them touched us except to cuff us. After that we were prodded with long batons. The girl a few ranks up from me started coughing. And then the girl behind her. And then the fellow in front of them started coughing uncontrollably. Like a daisy chain it found it’s way down to meet me. I almost wanted to cough, in expectation, but nothing came to me, and the person behind me continued the trend and the person behind him and so on. They led them all out, uncuffed them and let them free into the forest like foxes with torches tied to their tails. I was kept behind. No one told me what any of this was about. I felt perfectly healthy and unconvicted. I began racking my brain for some reason as to why I should be singled out, detained, or mistreated. The short guard barked at me in a language I had never heard. It was perhaps similar to an inland African tongue of some sort but the fellow looked like Napoleon Bonaparte or even Mussolini perhaps in his stately and unidentifiable uniform, short and stern with a pale and plaintive complexion. This was the first any of them had spoken. They all began yelling at me all at once as if demanding something. Then I was unconscious.
The next morning I found two figs and a raw turnip by the door of my cell. There was also a cup of lukewarm oolong tea that I believe was drugged but I was too thirsty to care at all. I had an unreal migraine. My head felt like an amethyst rock hiding its crystal interior from the dull light pouring in from the barred window sill. I lifted myself up on the bed and stared out. I was somewhere arid and rocky and that’s all I could tell. There was a hill of rocky sediment in front of me and nothing else to be seen.
The guard outside the door was asleep or dead. I went over and found that the cell was unlocked. I walked out, uneasy, and into a naturally lit hall. Down the hall and through the sharp sunlight I shuffled nausiously until I came to another larger door, ajar, and entered into a court yard. There were the remnants of a meal on one table - fig and turnip soup, goat milk, and neon yellow smoked fish. Crows were screwing with the left-overs. On the other table I could see discarded beakers and bunsen burners that looked disappointed if that makes any sense. There were several unused syringes in a tupperware bowl and in the fire pit in the middle of the court I could see a poking melee of used needles half melted and charred by yesterday evening’s fire. I cannot be sure what burnt blood smells like but I have reason to believe that these strange captors had been trying to mask it with the juniper branches they had fueled the fire with. The door to the courtyard led outside. I found myself at the foot of a soft and simple mountain. I could not tell you what continent I was on. I decided I would circle the prison and try to put together some conjecture. My headache was only intensified by the heat and light. I walked along the straight rugged adobe wall. I noticed that there were ticks along the wall, like marked off days, or perhaps a calendar of some strange or ancient design.
I came around the corner and found a shallow and expansive dimple in the ground, perhaps a quarter mile in circumference. It was full of burning refuse and nearing the edges where the heat was less intense I could see the definitive bones of countless human skeletons. I puked and, dizzy, tumbled up against the vertigo wall.
When I woke up again, still feeling faint, still suffering the amethyst migraine, I did my best to reorient myself. Now that I knew what the smell was, I was so profoundly unsettled that it was everything I could do not to pass out once more. I struggled along the wall to the next corner. I wanted to put as much distance between me and the reeking pyre as possible.
Around the corner was a slim gravel road that led around a curve of forest and down the hill. There was a guard who seen me and, wailing in terror, turned and fled down the hill. I looked at my left arm for the first time since I had woke up in the prison. It was brutalized, jaundice, full of tiny pricks and bruises. All the same, I could see my arm healing quite evidently, like watching bamboo grow. I took after the fleeing guard as if by instinct. Answers Answers Answers, i pleaded with myself. Coming around the second curve I could see the whole platoon of pale horse-humans unfolding like a multitude of clouds, coming out of the bespeckled outwork of caves and strange magnificent trees. I blinked fast and hard. They were all but naked, losing their hair and muscle mass before my very eyes, like watching a dying ember cool off, they were withering into old age. The empty nausea of my stomach began to rival my tremourous migraine. Their terror upon seeing me was so intense that I felt reproached as if by God himself for the monster I must have become, much to my ignorance, much to my chagrin.
I felt the first bullet enter my collarbone. I felt my skin close around the wound and my bone piece itself back together. My migraine intensified. I felt the next bullet enter my stomach and another glance my tibia. There were two more bullets entering my left femur. Each time my migraine boomed harder and my body continued to regroup, leaving substantial bruises in place of bullet wounds. I realized that was weeping and feeling fainter and fainter. My mouth and teeth started to ache like I’d eaten a raw steak. My headache gave way to a sort of music, as if in the furthest of distances I could heard angelic voices and a deep resounding drum that would come up out of my heart to meet me.



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