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the Blind Eye
cc&d (v265) (the September/October 2016 issue, v265)




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the Blind Eye

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The Spoon

Charles Hayes

    Hanging from a pulley chain, I hear the squeaking wheels of The Spoon in the corridor outside my concrete cell. Stretched to my toes, like a bagged buck ready to gut, I see the intermittent splashes of color from the whirling lights of the control board. They come and go across the glass of my steel door’s peep square. Watching the colors flash, I try to go away into their rhythm. Mind travel is all I have left. But my trip away suddenly vanishes when the hum of the electric motor, and its mishmash of internal noises, enters my senses. And I know that, again, I am going nowhere.
    Adding their own sounds to this cacophony of ungodly choruses, my guts begin to grumble low down, like an underground loosed liquid beginning its journey upward. Quickly growing louder, they erupt, sending a stream of feces down my legs and onto the concrete floor. The resulting stench completes the staging for The Spoon, the principal of my terror. And just in time. The colorful reflections of the peep square glass are fixed and the wheels are silent. The hum and beeps of the motor are at my door.

    I must talk and answer no matter what. Talk and keep talking like it is all from memory. Like it is true. Never must I stall, act like I don’t know an answer. To not know an answer will put The Spoon in me. Arms with foreign tattoos will haul the chain, tie my feet, and guide the spoon. Ringed fingers will move over the board, turn on the switches.
    I watch the prep testing of The Spoon. The short bursts of the gritty brown pudding like substance from the dosing arm yield to gravity quickly and mix with the excrement on the floor. Little splatting noises occur with each of these unions and the foul vapors increase.
    “All good Gods, please take me to my boyhood and the place where, as kids, we watched pirated monster movies about Igor and his kind. Help me to be there, laughing and pointing with my friends, until I can give the foreign tattooed ones what they want. And not feel what they do to me.”

    The blast of cold water from the hose, like a whiff of strong ammonia, calls me back and tells me that it is over for now. Cold metal no longer presses my naked skin and the dosing arm has been removed from inside me. Unable to touch the floor and with a rag in my mouth to keep me from a filibuster of terror, I watch my keepers, having gotten all the answers that they can get, hose down the floor. They push the spillage and excrement down a central drain. Strangely, I flash back to the chore I had as a boy, hosing down the concrete slab of my father’s cattle barn. The Spoon is gone, being driven back to its garage. Back, squeaking down the corridor until the next time. I hope my answers are better then.



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