It is time.....
Chapter 1
The ceiling always looked the same; pale, sombre and cracked, but the eyes that fixed upon it today; were different. They shifted and narrowed, driven by a new insight and inner motivation. The brown eyes belonged to Seikha, and now they had become that of an eagle. Revenge? No, just regretful resolute remorse and anger. Regret that she didn’t act sooner, regret that she always knew in her heart the truth but was schooled as a child to question and quell the passion with her mind, resolved but angry about her condition and her fate. She would change soon, but her body was weak; rendered impotent by the internal inquisition that never adjurned. Not guilty was her plee but the case was still open and the prosecution was still busy refining its evidence while the jury were out to lunch. This, Seikha knew; had to cease.
She was tired from the long hours restlessly sleeping, tired of the waking dreams and ultimately tired of the constant bombardment that she felt besieged her on all sides. She just wanted to be loved and to love - but there isn’t time for that now. Slowly, listlessly; Seikha dragged her crippled body from the couch she had taken as her bed for the last seven years and meekly stretched, yawned then, after a short pause; slumped back into a heap. Her illness quickly seizing the better of her once again, and once again; she was paralysed from the neck down. This was the daily torture she had been suffering for years but she insisted to herself it would one day be different.
It is time, now is the moment to act, she thought. Seikha knew in her heart that no other time was like this. She had seen it all. Towers 'struck by lightening', wars pitched across medieval dogmas, climates changing and the inward clambering of the people had reached such a fearful pitch that the clambering now feverishly spilled outwardly. The manifestation of this was now visible. Domicile apartments sky rocketed in their prices and the real estate hyenas laughed out loud for it was feeding time.
The ceiling always looked the same; pale, sombre and cracked, but the eyes that fixed upon it today; were different. They shifted and narrowed, driven by a new insight and inner motivation. The brown eyes belonged to Seikha, and now they had become that of an eagle. Revenge? No, just regretful resolute remorse and anger. Regret that she didn’t act sooner, regret that she always knew in her heart the truth but was schooled as a child to question and quell the passion with her mind, resolved but angry about her condition and her fate. She would change soon, but her body was weak; rendered impotent by the internal inquisition that never adjurned. Not guilty was her plee but the case was still open and the prosecution was still busy refining its evidence while the jury were out to lunch. This, Seikha knew; had to cease.
She was tired from the long hours restlessly sleeping, tired of the waking dreams and ultimately tired of the constant bombardment that she felt besieged her on all sides. She just wanted to be loved and to love - but there isn’t time for that now. Slowly, listlessly; Seikha dragged her crippled body from the couch she had taken as her bed for the last seven years and meekly stretched, yawned then, after a short pause; slumped back into a heap. Her illness quickly seizing the better of her once again, and once again; she was paralysed from the neck down. This was the daily torture she had been suffering for years but she insisted to herself it would one day be different.
It is time, now is the moment to act, she thought. Seikha knew in her heart that no other time was like this. She had seen it all. Towers 'struck by lightening', wars pitched across medieval dogmas, climates changing and the inward clambering of the people had reached such a fearful pitch that the clambering now feverishly spilled outwardly. The manifestation of this was now visible. Domicile apartments sky rocketed in their prices and the real estate hyenas laughed out loud for it was feeding time.
Seikha herself felt it personally, as she was condemned and confined to a rented hovel. She always had an eye for style though and managed to blast her brains upon the square cubicle. Lavish but garish self-expressions of her feelings but always mindful of her landlord, who she inwardly regarded as her prison warden come paternal replacement. She hated the way in which, upon his random visitations; he would glance around the space; her home, his hobby, with looks that she could best describe as dismissive and officious. If, for instance; she had spread herself out to far; like leaving her menstrual soiled underwear on the bathroom floor, he would curiously notice them, make a mental note but still keep an icy business manner about him. He was well educated, meticulous and direct in his indirectness but was prone to exploiting those he thought were less so, often quoting axioms like – “there’s no such thing as a free meal” and “you don’t give a sucker and even break”. These sorts of comments didn’t bother Seikha to much as her meal ticket was taken care of by the State, while her childs' father had been psychologically seperated at the childs' birth by the 'Pre-disposition' Act - a clause in the Law that pre-emptied a males' primal instints for domination and ultimately; violence when denied freedom. This, the State knew; was the only way to 'protect' and engineer its populace for its own purposes.
It was this state of affairs that troubled Seikha the most. She always cherished the notion of being a free spirit with the man she once loved but was now; more dependent than she could stomach. She received regular payments for her child and her landlord was paid monthly, directly to his bank account. It was an addiction, a socially manufactured and accepted habit, one which served the State more than the individual. The State back-burned and put on ice Human Resource like a stores-man regulates his stock. With regular stops and checks to ensure the never ending train of supply and demand never halted for fear of “The Grind”. The Grind was the academic tag given to the last two thousand years of human history in which many global cultures had risen, frothed, smashed and clashed to then fall away like the crashing of waves.
The departmentalisation of history - large swathes of human achievement, glory, misery, comedy and tragedy neatly stitched up into one huge collective patchwork memory – was one of the most significant and defining moments of recent times. It heralded an age where Time was never to exist again. Time being blamed and demonised as a co-conspirator of “The Grind”, along with Death.
Seikha knew she was going to die one day and that it was just a matter of time. She had been overlooked when the culture vultures had flown over. She never received the “Atonement Pill” which cascaded through the social ranks and into the dance arenas.
Nowhere was free let alone cheap in this part of the world, not even clean drinkable water, instead; it was being bottled and shipped to the other side of the globe, complete with a nostalgic slogan of health, beauty and simplicity. Nothing was that simple any more, not even the chemical structure of the acidified water, traditionally called rain, which fell constantly down from the monochrome leaden sky.
She suspected that the pigeons had sussed something out, for their plumage echoed the greys of the sky. Like the pigeons, she too just wanted to blend in, melt, and be absorbed, not by the grey sky but by a golden sun, on a golden beach by an aquamarine sea.
posted by tensionseeka at 7:12 PM
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