Faster on my Own: Chapter 43
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A hundred fingers on a hundred triggers to a hundred gun barrels jostling for the exact center of the forehead. General 1 tells General 2 to tell General 3 to tell General 47 to kill Steven, but by the time it makes it down the semi-circle it’s become a brush on the cheek and a gentle whisper, “goodbye, you foolish boy.”
General 1 asks what he said and with the filtered message in his mind, he jumps for joy. “We did it! The bastard’s dead!” But Steven can’t understand his hooting and hollering and only 99 guns against his head doesn’t feel any different.
Outside the office, a wave of knives rides the earth, each one imbued with blood-thirst for a dirty throat. 99 generals beg him to pull it back, but Steven can’t anymore than he can stop the rain from piercing through the skulls of everyone beneath it. All he can do is hold his hands in the air and feel their power in possibility.
General 31 asks if they should kill him. General 87 asks if they shouldn’t. General 17 wonders if General 1 is correct, while General 1 hoots and hollers and blows holes in the ceiling. All of their eyes in all of their skulls didn’t see as far as Steven and their grasping hands cannot have what he held and dropped into the wind that blows all across the world.
Three-quarters of a jaw chews in place. A patch on the desk where violence leaked out of its container shines in the light and Steven wonders if it’ll get a chance to spread. One gun presses harder and one finger twitches more and the 65th eye in the lineup has a special kind of venom in it because an explosion is still alive where the last quarter of that jaw used to go.
99 generals kiss the angry one on the cheek, on the forehead, everywhere but where the violence lives. They whisper “baby it’s okay” and the finger stops twitching and the tears start flowing and the gun barrel gets warm while Steven feels his brain not splattering against the wall behind him, not sending all his memories and fears careening out into the universe.
Generals 2 through 100 order him to stop the knives. General 1 will never stop dancing for the rest of his life. But the knives can only move faster, can only find more empty stomachs to eviscerate, how could Steven stop them when stopping isn’t something they do?
General 100’s stomach rumbles and the rest look at him and General 8 pulls some beef jerky out of his pocket and hands it down the line but each General takes a little bite and by the time it gets to General 100 he has nothing but hunger.
All the voices are alive. Put him in a shape. Put a shape in him. Put in him a shape. He has crimed, shape him. “Go on, shape me.” But they won’t, don’t, haven’t yet. They whisper different shapes up and down the line. Steven welcomes all of them. Cube wins, as it often does.
198 hands lift him in the air and march him to Cube. 990 fingers tickle his body and Steven giggles as the Generals carry him down the sidewalk. The outside of Cube is brick and inside is concrete and iron and inside all that iron is a cuboid and a semi-sphere. “Are these the best shapes you’ve got?” he yells, but the generals are all blowing kisses or still talking about shapes and General 56 puts his hands directly over Steven’s on the bars and brings his face close.
“Provisional.”
“Provisional,” Steven repeats, teeth gritted.
“Provisional.”
“Provisional.”
“Provisional.”
“Provisional.”
The generals leave Steven to rest on his cuboid or use his semi-sphere in obscurity. They don’t know him anymore and Steven doesn’t know his knives anymore and that makes him feel lonely, to lose his connection to a million promises of a billion murders. He hopes they’re doing well and they’re too busy to miss him.