An Inhuman Condition

She woke me up. The loud synthetic beeps invading my dreams plucked me quickly from my sleep. I’m fogged, disillusioned and unable to adequately interpret or communicate. The voice is soft, jovial, alive with a playful tone. Mine is harsh, dusty and hibernating still. Slowly the speech changes, transforms from a subtle cipher into the unencrypted input my mind can manage. In line my conscious, cognitive, creative all perk up. I am capable of full duplex conversation and awake, finally.

The pile sits in ash: silent, waiting. The souls have run bone-dry and call out solely in extinguished death rattles. They mourn like a still bay after a pouring of rain. They lay there, through the sepia genocide, without regret. They are cast, one by one, into the dismally dry pit. Each victim resonates its death onto the burdened backs of the executioners. Even still, more are burned down and pitched into the void. Every breath is short, stifled and quiet as they pay their toll and take the last travel to Dante’s over-crowded waiting room. Each has a story to tell, an interesting individual life to sell: trying to make the dimes to buy its way from hell.