blood_bucket

Agarma

He was besotten by the bucket of piss, shit and blood that the guard brought in. It was as pungent as he should’ve expected; it was as full as he should’ve expected; and it was being emptied when and where he should’ve expected. Yet, in spite of his supposed expectations, he was nonetheless frozen, as the weight of reality broke the lower-dimensional hole he had had for it in his mind.

Necessity. Where there is necessity, there is no morality. You can’t fault an angel for falling when they can’t control gravity, and the ground is pulled from beneath them.

Did he not choose the food he ate? Did he not prefer reds to blues, and leathers to wools? He made choices, he made morality.

It stank. His sister’s bucket of excrement stank. She was squatting and bleeding into a bucket in a seldom-used cell, probably menstruating. He wasn’t so parsimonious with Claire, but he didn’t have so much to lose then.

Does it not speak to a lack of imagination that he’s letting himself suffer from her aches, though? Is he so lacking in unallocated resources that this how things have to be? But no, anything allocated could be un, Samantha herself would assert that. Claire would, too, despite herself, scratch that, as a result of herself. ‘Why’, she’d ask, ‘should anything be necessary?’

“Sir?”

He had been staring at the bucket too long, unblinking. Claire bled, too, and she ate, and breathed, and her skin would yield if pressed, her eyes would water, she’d shit and piss, and yet, despite being so chained to her body…

She pulled him away.

Samantha would suffer at Northpoint, even if she didn’t know it. And she’d suffer in Felkner, and Penbarrow, Blisbane, Penwarden and Fowler.

He truly was an ass.