Victim Of Circumstance
The screams grow louder with each passing second. I hear them just around the corner, “Please don’t hurt me!” Is what a soft voice screams, then she’s gurgling. The sound of drowning rings out like a chainsaw and grows ever louder, I can hear her breathing hard, or trying to at least but only her blood comes back in, the harder she breathes the louder the gurgling gets, “the body’s want for life is what’s killing it” came into my head and I chuckle at it. “It’s her own fault for her death! Stop trying to breathe and maybe you’ll be able to live once again!”. But oh, the apathetic, inhuman thoughts get a kick laughing at those dying around the corner, but have they forgotten that I could be next? Of those dirty machines, I could be next! Fools! I am a fool! “What am I to do!? They are too strong to wrestle and fight, too durable to chip away slowly with a gun, too fast on their wheels for me to try to run, and too smart to try to hide! I’m outclassed by things that I helped to build! My own creation! Doomed to kill me and feel no worse than if they stepped on a cookie! This is my grave! To spill my blood on these white and delicate walls!” I grab my hair, sit on the ground, and lay my elbows on my knees. The screams never stopped, they grow louder “Run!” a man says “Shoot those things!” another screams. I raise my head and lean it against the wall, “Useless” I whispered with a tone of total defeat and pain, tears from now, “I have done this." My eyes peer across me and see a poster that is torn on the left side of it and uneven, the right side hanging above the left. On it had a cartoonish-looking robot, with a T.V. for a chest, a single rod, and a wheel, for a leg, with a large smile across it and a hand waving at the person viewing the poster. It had a large caption reading, "Helpers of the Future! For the old! For the New! Always Ready to Serve You!" “Helpers.” I whisper, “Helpers. Helpers. Helpers!” Each new word sounding more demented and lost than the one previous, the sadness, and stress, were now turning to rage with a target unknown so now it shoots blindly at what it saw as the problem. “I should’ve been the one to help us. I should’ve been better! But no, THIS useless piece of shit couldn’t do ANYTHING! Not even prepare a FUCKING OFF SWITCH! Useless motherfucker!” MY eyes are torn open, never wanting to blink, my mouth clenched shut, breathing in shallowly and rapidly with foam starting to form as air rushes in through my teeth. I grab my hair once more and say “Useless mother FUCKER!” Total rage engulfed my sanity, with it burning brighter with each new breath and a twitching muscle on the right side above my eye starts to make its condition known. . . They suffer, I suffer, we all suffer at the hands of a being greater than all of us combined. “Useless fuck!” The rage screamed at me, but I didn’t respond, cowering with my head between my arms while they rested on my knees.
“Helplessness, victims of circumstance. But always failing is a funny thing, 2 paths always emerge from it. Hopelessness but then, there’s anger. Total hate at the world, and at yourself. To the point you don’t care what happens, a total, complete apathy. Men like that are the scariest of all! Who do you think make up the assassins killing world leaders? The desperate man! He would do nothing but watch as the world burns! And he’ll be smiling doing it!” Then the people cheer for the words while the man who spoke them silently stands on the stage, leaning on his podium which has a banner on it but is blurry and difficult to read the words on it. And soon everything begins to blur, and everyone stops cheering and stands strictly, arms to the side and the man does the same. The blur grows and I am doomed to be consumed by it, with nothing being able to save me from its confusion-inducing ways, but fear strikes me finally and I stubble around the crowd with my eyes peeled wide, back hunched over, mouth gaped open, and mind racing. I force myself through the stiff bodies of the people, stumbling towards the stage, more specifically, the man on it. Nothing more than a “feeling”, is forcing me to him. A feeling that I could not describe more than it being a last-ditch effort at grasping something with power, something that shines with hope, and desperation. The people’s bodies grow stiffer and stiffer as I continue to make progress to the stage, with each new body passed, the more their feet become heavier, arms more rusty at the joint, and their clothes became those filled with epoxy and polyester, yet the force I spoke upon before, forced me to continue as all emotions of desperation do. . Finally reaching safety. I glanced around with my head exaggerating its movements as if my neck was slowly losing its strength, and soon after I realized the weakness the rest of my body followed suit. My shoulders began to ache, legs began to buckle under the weight of its upper half, back fell apart and I hunch forward using the stage for support with a hand that feels as if it was being cut by it. “I must persist! I mustn’t fall now! Not after this struggle! Not after what I saw between the laboratory’s walls! I can’t fall! I mustn’t…” My hand starts to feel warm on its palm side, and my feet feel as if steel rebars are piercing into them. I simply grind my teeth against themselves and scream through my closed mouth in order to cope with the newly formed pain. Now the force wants me to go to the man, no longer loitering around the stage and I can do nothing but obey its demands. I place my left hand onto the stage and prepare my legs so that I can jump and land my body on the floor of the stage. . “Don’t lose! Don’t Lose! Not Now! PLEASE!” Is what it continually screams at my soul, feeling it with an unwarranted determination lighting it on fire, causing blood to rush through my veins ever so quickly and hotly, perhaps making my face blush as it did with my hands. But none of that matters at that moment, my body laid still, recovering from what it went through, but my soul demanded it work, and so it placed a knee, placed a hand, and pushed itself up one jagged and painful moment at a time, and ever so slowly, and once I stood on my feet I continued to walk towards the man who is no more than 10 feet away on my left, so I walked and walked, doing so with a stance of a poor man, a starved man, a dying man, back hunched over, an arm drooping down, hand near my knee, eyes tired and bags forming underneath, and mouth breathing stiffly, saliva starting to drip out, and sweat complementing the look. “March on!” The soul demanded, and the body followed suit, pain in each jagged, unbalanced step. But this journey went off without a hitch, but the world went black once I touched the man’s shoulder, and it did so so quickly I’m not even sure if I did make contact with that man. But now I stood nowhere, in a world devoid of all, even the feeling of desperation was gone, so I was stuck with the thoughts of a lonely man, a desperate man, a man whose anger knew of no target other than its spawner and it spoke, “Fucking useless. How do you even screw something like this? Truly, tell me! How do you fuck up talking to another dude! For Christ’s sake, he was just standing there!”
“How was that suffering, my fault? I did nothing but continue the torturest path, that I assume YOU laid out for me! I had no control of what the world was! I had nothing given to me! I had nothing! Yet you expect me! TO BE SOMETHING YOU HAVEN’T TOLD ME!”
“USELESS!”
