The Consumer by Michael Gira

The Consumer by Michael Gira

Author:Michael Gira
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 1-880985-26-8
Published: 2020-05-22T16:00:00+00:00


(1993)

A SACRIFICE

The ground is a hard bone shell stretched flat over the desert like petrified hide. The surface is webbed with black hairline cracks leaking cool shadows up from a secret place beneath the earth into the clear white violence of the sun. They work shirtless, like two red ants toiling on a crust of salt, swinging their picks in wide careless arcs in a line that extends out from a fixed point in their stomachs, tethered by the tensed rope of their arms. The polished steel tips of their axes strain like missiles against their trajectory, shooting up from behind their bodies and sweeping over their heads in a parabolic curve that culminates stabbing into the desert with a brutal crunch, releasing a voluptuous suction sound like trapped vapors escaping. Every impact incites an involuntary grunt jerked up from their solar plexus as if they were two pagans drunk with lust, fucking dry holes in the hardened sand. They wouldn’t be surprised if the ground gushed blood with each steel intrusion.

A golden fur of jeweled wasps hovers close to the ground in an electrified field, spread out level across the flats, animated and rustling in the parching wind like sulfurized heather.

As they work, the sweat dries on their skin and leaves rings of salt around their torsos in chalked, rippled strata, tracing time on their flesh. They stop at paced intervals and drink water from an old rusted can that smells like gasoline. Often they squirt wine from a gourd held high above their open fish-mouths, washing down greasy chunks of black opium, then return to their labor refreshed, stupefied and methodical, serenaded by the humming dream-psalms of the wasps rising and falling in intensity in response to the wind.

They pierce the crust in a straight course, gradually dislodging thick jagged slabs of desert like pieces of a giant puzzle they lever out of the path of the ditch with crowbars and pile along its edge as they continue clawing the wasted floor, extending a dark strip like carpet unfurling pointlessly out into the blank white plain. As they work, the wasps congregate in the freshly turned dirt behind them in a solemn procession, sucking the last memories of moisture from the exposed earth. Off in the distance, just above the steaming horizon, a red blotch the size of a point on a sheet of paper flutters with the rising heat. They aim their ditch at this point.

This morning when they were dropped off by the truck, the stars were smeared across the black dome above them in wide swathes like titanium paint spread by the dripping hands of a delirious prisoner in a solitary, lightless cell. The dawn swelled at the edge of the globe, a distant incandescent catastrophe, silhouetting the foreman as he pointed arbitrarily off into the blackness, his eyes squeezed into tight slits and his finger extending out from his arm like a blind man using his body as a compass to locate the source of an echoing sound.



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