SOUFYAAN TIMOL
Edge of night, dawn awaits, a scent of violence in the air, forcing its way past your too-long closed windows, threading through the rusted cogs of your stale mind. It makes no promises, no fanciful pledges, no deceptive, beguiling—no hollow words. It doesn’t stretch its liveried foot and claims a quick lick. No, none of that.
It asks. Quiet at first, a bare flicker at your vision’s rim, a momentary halt in your heart’s throb, so soft you are sure you missed it. Deceit and duplicity, fraud and glaring ineptitude, treachery to the point of flagrancy. Without doubt you saw it, felt it. The many years of plodding through the glut of rottenness numbed your eyes. Light yet breaks through the fissure in obscurity, breaks and flares up. It infuses the air now, and no matter how far, how wide—how low—you turn your gaze, it will grab your jaw of its scarred fingers and force you to meet its glare.
Quiet then.
Black of black. A crack in the veil. Incompetence so complete you can only stare speechless. Conceit to the hundredth power, idiocy that defies the very lines of idiocy.
Can you shut your eyes now? Can you kneel, again? Can you not hear the clamours on the winds? The chants of your old comrades, partisans of the dream. Those who walked during the darkest of times, and now call for you to walk, to discard your suits, to cast aside the steak. Their fervour sunders the bliss from ignorance; ignorance no longer lives down the depths we’ve fallen to. Their fervour the reason of sides, and sides here are taken by voice or silence.
A violence pervades the air tonight—the trembling of those above, you can almost feel it, a shiver down your back, surging drums in the distance—wreathes you in a grasp of iron. Come. Perhaps you have nothing to lose and the clenched fist you will brandish will bear the calluses of years, or of mere weeks. Or you have everything to lose, and fear permeates your thoughts and you know the risks and think of your children. And they? What do they say of this future?
This far, not-so-far future?
Its voice is the same.
Get up. Walk. Fight.
