sheltered

Take your positions: that is their slogan. No one has any idea what it means, of course. They all just keep looking vacantly and vacuously out of the thin windows. Devices make them forget about the approaching cold. The impending tipping scales of winter. Some just want to keep repeating the same words over and over and over and over again. Some just want that weak sense of irony; some, quite simply, just fall-down drunk on it. The rampancy of such intoxication is not lost on me, she had told him once. He laughed at this, but not because the message was untrue. We need to do something about the gaunt light, she had also told him once. He remembered that now because he had responded in almost the exact same way to this statement: with a laugh. But, again, her words were not false. He laughed because her ability to portray the truth unequivocally was so jarring. Anxiety in the announcements, these loudspeakered phrases push things forward. Corners always have to be turned. A few more instances perhaps, a few more carefully mandated scenarios. Forceful additions from our own doings. These are the kinds of things he thinks about when he sees her curl away from him on their burlap bedroll, resting on a pallet made from the bones of no less than six trillion tiny birds, split and spilt by storms.

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