I opened my eyes. It was black. Everywhere. Not a flicker of light. My face felt swollen. Like it had taken a beating. But nothing of memory was coming to me.
All I could hear were the faintest murmurs of voices. Somewhere in the distance. They’d strapped me into a chair. My hands bolted. My feet bolted. Something clasped my head firmly into a device. It was upright. I could barely move it from side to side.
I waited. For what seemed an age. Had it been 10 minutes or 10 hours? I couldn’t tell. Still that opaque, bleak, black … Not a modicum of light from any space in the universe. Nothing.
I was thirsty. Very much so. Was I in hell? That’s how it felt. Words of horror painted the insides of my brain. Full of dread and fear. The smell was dank. Putrid. Disconcerting.
Then, a light switched on. Out of nowhere. A single bulb. Cobwebs covering it from head to toe. Noir. Purest of shadows. Footsteps approached. And out of the mist of the unknown, a man stood before me. An agent!
Floods of thought returned. Running. I had been going so fast. Hurtling as the speed of a racehorse. Then bam! 1 blow. 2 blows. And I was on the deck.
“Are you well of the mind?” He opened calmly, yet with a directness.
“Yea. I mean no. I mean yes. Yes, sir. I am!”
“Good!”
I could see him clearly now. He fetched a chair and sat it right in front of me. He was inches from my face. He breathed on me. Peppermint fresh. His teeth were as white as pearls. He smiled sweetly. Like he was about to make a nice gesture. But it wasn’t to be.
“Do you know why you are here?”
“No!”
“Think hard boy! I’m not here to mess about. There will be no second chance. I can assure you!”
I thought fast and, knowing how ruthless agents of the state were; I played ball. After all, they had me locked from head to toe with nowhere to go. No escape. It flooded back. Everything. I think it was always there. Present in my mind. Yet I had buried it to the depths of my subconscious.
“I am here through my faults. I have broken the law.”
“Exactly how?” He said with a wry grin.
“My duty. I have gone against my own moral cause and disgraced the state. I did not fulfil my obligations. I took pity on a detainee.”
“What did you do?”
“I let him off. I went easy on him. I gave him water and told him he would not have to consume the excrement, which I then tried to hide. In the drain.”
“We are getting somewhere, it seems. You have listened. You have made the correct decision. In omitting to your guilt.”
He took a file out of a suitcase to the left side of him. He flicked through some pages. Leaving me agonisingly to await his response. He flicked at his nose whilst gazing into my eyes with a piercing intensity. Fiercer than the devil himself. Then he began …
“First infraction: giving a detainee water without prior knowledge of the ministry. Second infraction: concealing waste material in a correctional waste facility. Third infraction: attempting to escape the law enforcement and refusing to stop on command.”
Out of thin air, he sucker punched me in the ribs. Then again, in my stomach. Then again, in the ribs. A velocity of strength. The fists of a giant. I had never felt such pain. I thought I would be sick. But still he continued until I was huffing and panting like I was going to pass out.
Suddenly, the door to whatever enclosure I was in swung open. Another light came on. This was bright white. Then, for the first time I could see everything.
Another agent walked over. Equally huge. He carried a metal plate on a tray with a top on it. I couldn’t see what was in it …
Oh my fucking God! Oh my fucking God! I didn’t need to. I wasn’t stupid. On either side were a knife and fork. And the smell. That putrid waft. Oh hell. Oh Jesus Christ!
They unhooked me from the chair in a quick moment. They placed the tray down on a table in the far corner and ordered me to walk towards it. The first agent brought a small stool over and told me to sit on it immediately.
“No ifs, no buts. If you don’t eat everything on this plate in the next 5 minutes, you will be on your way to the farm. Got it!” A very assured demand came from the second agent.
He wickedly pulled away the top portion, revealing a big plate of hot piping shit! It steamed around me like that of a cartoon pie. Sitting on the windowsill. Waiting for the dog to devour it. But this was no blueberry pastry. Nor was it Looneytoons. Oh, the irony of that thought. I was in a looney world alright.
“We have just taken this fresh shit from your ex-boyfriend’s asshole. Bunch of fags. You fed him your shit. Now you will eat his shit. We think that makes sense!”
I hurriedly, and with the shakes of an alcoholic who had not had his morning beverage, picked up the knife and fork. There were 3 giant logs. The smell alone enough to knock me out. And now I had to eat it and fast. I took a big chunk onto my fork. And with a quiver from the deep, placed it in my mouth. I gagged quickly. Yet, there was no space of time for that. I chewed. It was terrible. The bitterness was like nothing I had ever tasted. I quickly continued chewing, and with one full gulp, swallowed the first piece. But that was just one chunk of one log. There were still two more to go. Please save me God. I repeated it in my mind. But to no prevail.
They both circled me as I went. Daunting figures of black above me. I felt nauseous. From the meal I was eating and their perpetual motions around me. I went into a haze. A thickly coated layer of horror encapsulated me. I was at the mercy of the Stasi of the state. The clock was ticking in my mind. Was there 4 minutes left or 3. I didn’t know. Eventually, with all my might, I got half of the plate finished. My stomach wretched. It bellowed and boiled with cramp. Shit cramps. The worst of the worst …
Ohhh, how now, at this very given moment, the deathly notion of ‘what goes around comes around’ hit me! Hahaha, the world laughed at me from above.
The slayer had become the slain. The ego had become the humbled. And I was now officially an eater of shit. The shit of my ex-shag. The utmost humiliation spread through me. Abject so. Karma had got me … it had smitten its wicked wrath upon me. But would this be all of I had to do? Oh no! Of course not; this was the ‘STATE’. This was their way of telling me I was finished. An entry meal to the future of a life as a human toilet. Nooooo!!!
I gazed down at what remained before me. Nutty logs of shit of not only my ex-shag, but those who had shat in him. Time and time again. Different men. I was devouring the recycled shit from a plentiful of anuses. It couldn’t get any worse. Tick Tock, Tick Tock …
Eventually, with all my might, I cleared the plate. I looked up at the two snarling beasts of authority in front of me.
“Didn’t you ever used to mop up the juices with some bread to clean the plate?”
He was right. It looked like the remnants of gravy.
“Clean the plate!” raged the second agent.
“You have 30 seconds remaining or it will be the farm.”
And with that, a final push. Like a kid lavishly licking up the last of an ice-cream sundae from a goblet glass, I picked the plate up. I took it to my face and feverishly licked everywhere I could. Dragging my soiled tongue on every inch of that cold metal. I didn’t stop. I counted the numbers in my head. 1 elephant. 2 elephant. 3 elephant. Had I done it?
I placed it down on the table and miraculously it was like nothing had ever been on it. I had completely eaten the shit. All of it gone. Into my stomach. The lowest of the low. A fallen and humiliated person who had got his comeuppance after all he had done to others the same. The glee. The joy. The devilment. It had all evaporated. But what was next?!?!?!
Before I knew what was happening. And with no time at all to think about my stomach of shit, they both hoisted me between them over their shoulders. I was like a feather.
They bundled me into the back of a wagon. The doors shut and again came nothing but black.
We rode for what seemed hours. I paced up and down. Holding my belly. Wondering where I would go. Was it light of day, or death of night? Did it matter? Not really. This was hell on earth. I was now the villain. In the eyes of the State!
The wagon stopped. The door swung open, and they lifted me out once more. But then terror. Terror from the deepest depths of a hell fire earth one could ever knew befell to me.
It was the Shit Shacks! The place of delight and disgust I had known in such easier breaths. They had now become an image of the rapture! This was no fairytale. This was no happy ending. There was nowhere to turn or hide.
They put me on my feet. Ordered to make haste. The second agent pointed with his finger and selected the sixth one in the row. The door was already open. Ready for my new life. The end of the tunnel which bore no light of solitude. Only wicked serpents and ghouls lived here. No fairy godmother with a magic wand was to going to save me. Not now. Even god himself had betrayed me.
“Damn you god. You non existent fraud!”
I shouted at the top of my lungs. A sudden punch to my kidney. Then one to my face. Then to my stomach. I shut my mouth …
They threw me like a sack of potatoes into the Shit Shack. I fell into the pits of the floor. The nauseating smell of shit coming from the other shacks.
Then the door closed. And bolted behind me. It was dark. Nothing the eye could see. I had collapsed in a panic. An unimaginable horror. I was in my very own Shit Shack!
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