Hi All – I chose a version of the animal prompt, I suppose. This one is the story of the imperious robin detectives that stalk our lawn, then it sort of falls down a wormhole into a meditation on the Surveillance States and the complicity of metaphor…anyway, enjoy!
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We will investigate each blade of grass or make it citizen to Our will. Each fellow robin a cousined detective. Our charge imperious and punishment in excess for each discrete individual worm in offense of any number of indexed and articulated and coded and justly formulated laws. For protection We extend draconian umber shadows over each meager burrow. Our control total. No need for panic or think. Assurance doctrine designed Our panoptic heads to surveil with cocked-eyes and has lined them in technologies of coalsmudged microplumage that pulls in light and sucks in any sign of dissident gleam peeking out from the enclosed safety of heathen earthen abodes. We siphon up each pitiful peasant, willful and wriggling from the individuality of their homes, if decency codes permit and issue warrant (they will). Never to be undifferentiated while connected as one glossy category under Our one gaze. We Are A Complete Circuitry. A fulfilled dream.
Is not metaphor a miniature scene of a bridge? Imagine each cobbled stone on their own and yet bordered and connected hovering softly over silent and clear-running water. Its clarity is plunging into unbeing, so to see it, let us say it is made instead from the luster of toothpaste, the sparkly kind a child may layer in a shoebox diorama and exclaim, “look, a river!” This, too, has a brisk running and is endlessly deep. How cold it must be. How deadly freezing this close to Nothing. Each trickle past the anklebone feels familiar, but unique. Each step (if one dare take it) is never the same river; never the same serif “I” of shinbone dipped. Why are we now down here wet under the bridge again? We know the story about what happens in (and to) undersides and you may not be able to scale yourself out of this abyss We penned you in. Never forget: you are prey and under Our inspection. A ladder will instruct you on climbing up and out through the echo of its construction.
Alas, now the bridge has burned in itself in the mean time of your ascent and the stream below it polluted. You choose how it went: the fact of the event does not matter as much as the evident. While gathering poppies on the bank of decision as evidence against your indictment, you neglected to notice Cause trotting off with Effect. They had, dancing, just looted the dead who not yet haunt the half-moon suspension of sky between flow and keystone. It smolders. Still are there crossings. Did you think you were the sole pilgrim? The subject of Our investigation. God’s eye has been on We robins.