sign of the times. Is this what we’ve been reduced to? Commodity
warfare. Look for it wherever good souls are sold.”
“You used to like these guys,” Bobby the cameraman said after
the tape stopped.
“Damage control. If they really blew up the Biddenbrooks store,
I’m going to look like a fucking accomplice.”
The police told all the patrons to go home and took the principals
in for questioning. Only Colin had been left behind, hidden in a
supply room with the buxom older lady. Not much had happened
between them, really. After exposing her breasts, Colin suckled her
nipples and then drifted off into a cooing slumber. This was okay for
the woman, for she had never been touched so gently in her life. She
had hardly been touched at all in some years.
“Usually men fall asleep on me afterthey come. Not before,” she
told a snoring Colin. When she finally stood up to peer out the door
of the supply closet she saw only an empty white room.
“What happened to everyone?” she called into the vacant space.
She saw that life continued to flow outside the building, that the
doors were chained, that a yellow Police Line Do Not Cross tape was
affixed on the outside. “Hello,” she said, but there was no one there
to reply. As the coddling rush of the special coffee began to recede,
she saw herself standing there alone, massive aged paps reflected ad
infinitum in the mirrored walls of a modern temple in which she had
no currency.
“What the hell did they put in that coffee?” she addressed her
reflections. The turned around to the sound of thunder and saw the
vandals descend, skirting around the perimeter of the building.
Would-be poets spray-painted furious slogans across the large glass
windows as the woman ran behind the counter to cover her loose and
exposed flesh. From there she watched the room grow darker and
darker, cascades of spattered black vitriol slowly blocking out all light
and reason from the very place that was supposed to furnish it.
3. Limbo
“I don’t understand,” the vice president of capital resources
demanded, “How can Morris be lost?”
Leona sat at the head of the conference table and did her best to
look distraught. “We don’t know,” she said, “He went for a boat ride
ABYSSINIA
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