ATONEMENT

Music plays. There is a calm atonal reverb. It is a sad carnival tune that would play at a clown’s funeral. It adds a false sense of pleasantness to the current environ, metal walls with a floor of brown and red, a pleasant hell. The fuck noise resumes, overwhelming the music, and I proceed with my duty once my break finishes. I march from room to room in the industrial area peeking through the window on each door. Making note of the process within each room: arranged bodies chained to welded metal in improvised shackles where meat intersects in the most grotesque ways; the heavily pregnant female beheld in a metallic spindle with catheters and IV fluids plugged into them along with their rapists’ fists almost elbow deep in the anal cavity to hollow them out making room for the arrival of more products to market. The females have a comatose look about them and one can hypothesize if it was drug-induced or brought on by shock. I mark a plaque by each door the number of births to come, life expectancy, race, gender, etc. There have been such innovations to speed up the birthing process, 6 months is fine if there is a need for spare parts or the base materials necessary for more creation. Nothing is left to waste. For if there is a still-birth or deformity they are recycled -albeit for medical research or simple cannibalism to feed the less fortunate. I don’t even know the price for a feast of a healthy newborn but imagine it to be ever more costly. I notice the time and realize we have visitors, children visiting their place of conception. I finish my task and head to the main office for the tour. We encourage children to recognize the means for creation, the logic is that they will understand the nature of this world and will come to be better workers. I usher in the children and act as their guide. They laugh and snicker with some in awe at their surroundings. Some begin to weep but not out of empathy but thankfulness for being allowed to live – looking to their black boxes, being reminded of a time long since passed where there would be no creation. A few were cracking jokes and using apps to superimpose the faces of serial killers upon themselves, a short and smiling Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer watch as a birth machine is finally at their end -receiving the sweet mercy of a quick death via a hammer blow to the skull. A child tugs on my sleeve asking me how to become an executioner.