53: Scalpel

They walked away briefly again and, coming back, found it still shut. Is it really only just beginning? With barely a millimetre of me sliced? But now: ice, hands, eyelids … that smell, that mustiness, their plan still an imagined vibrating tone drawing to me. But I’m not convinced - it causes beeps. Closing my closed eyes further, I pictured the chocolate I grated three days ago. The scalpel pressed down again, “Yes they would normally consider taking cards … I know. It’s on a screen, they place it there to not exist.” We were playing a quick game of ‘What makes up my solid?” in the playground, Patricia holding in her hands a clump of something close to simmering. “Hurry, hurry, it’s scorching my palms!” We all sat on the wall with our homemade reed pipes and began gradually blowing, while Patricia raised the substance over her head and shuffled 360 degrees. A minute in, it became clear, Marsha’s pipe had a hairline crack as it whistled awkwardly between two disparate notes neither of which were appropriate, and whatever was in Patricia’s hand, though no longer building up an uncomfortable heat in her tissue, had started to drip into her hair, running into her ears. The bell had started to ring, and there was some agitated twitching in our ranks but we held firm in the face of the mystery plopping over Patricia’s shoulders. The door opened onto something solid, the trolley that brought me in? “The bastards poppy’s back in place! See mijo!” I called out from the dispenser table, having downed my annual pint of ‘Lest we forget’ IPA and scanned the qr code to meet the authorities basic requirement for compulsory silent reflection into a received past. A spotty faced teenager cleaned each paper flower for reselling. It was a desperate cry on my part, more to the powers that choke the real lessons to draw from industrialised carnage than to Michael and Michelle at the bar, but they nodded as though the intended target. “We’ll see you next year!” Scissoring out carefully constructed approximations had created limitless options for material elements drawn from my reverie, the lights had picked out an Onion Johnnie. Then probes, several injections, a winch, a barbershop quartet vocalising synthesiser modulations that asked, “Do you have children, or coins to pay for gold light to be reflected in and then from your eyes?” Six rows of twenty people set at Munkegaard desks each with a glowing electric blue orb set in paper thin china bowl in front. Their nostrils are flared sucking in an odour more old fashioned train set than the pure pulsating suchness they are about to consume. “Could you pass this test?” I asked her afterwards. “I’m not sure,” she answered, “but it isn’t really necessary for me to do so.”