A Sample...
I found the boy sat on the metal chair without a bottom, his hands wrapped around its back, handcuffed. The room smelt awful. He was bare-chested, ribs jutting out like bicycle spokes. His cheeks were bruised. His lips shreds. His body was wet of sweat and other bodily fluids and he had been beaten so much that he could hardly open one of his eyes for swelling. There was the dish underneath the chair, the shimmering yellow liquid inside it, the faeces, the car batteries lined up and ready, the black and red wires. The Colonel stood above him holding onto the ends of the two electric wires.
There was no television set or propaganda on the walls like in the other rooms, only dried splashes of blood. Finger scrawlings. Names, dates, comments; Maxwell – 25.05.1982.
‘Have you ever seen what electricity does to a man David?’ the Colonel said.
I shivered. This is what it had come to. I was going to electrocute this little boy and he was going to deep-fry out here in the dense and distant bush. A historian or peacekeeper would later retrieve his crushed skeleton from an obscure mineshaft and the world would collect his and other skulls and stack them on top of each other like trophies behind glass cases in museums. Little school children would walk around the museum in awe learning about the terrible things humans did to each other in the name of war. None of them would ever know who this little boy was; I didn’t know what his story was and yet here I was dipping my felt tip pen into a pot of ink to embark on its epilogue.
What if all of this should pass and I went on to live a normal life and got married and had a son and he went to that museum and the boys skull was there, my portrait atop it, beneath a sign that read: THIS IS THE MAN WHO KILLED HIM.
‘The Opposition!’ the colonel shouted at the boy ‘When did you join the Opposition?’
The colonel brought the two wires he was holding to the boy’s body and the boy’s chest shot out into the air as if some unseen force was trying to rip him free from the seat. The boy’s eyes sprung open. He let out such a cry that a volt of compassion surged through my body and made me shake. The colonel kept on doing this until the force finally let go of the boy and walked away, leaving me to watch as loose stool dripped into the dish below.