Elective Decisions

The Wall was alive, its texture mottled and warm; and as she felt the soft firmness of muscle stretching infinitely in either direction, her desire was eclipsed by the terror that made her body tremble.  A battle raged between these emotions as her hand slowly sank into The Wall’s fleshy indefiniteness.

 

Involuntarily, her eyes searched up and down the eternal partition.  Bodies, male and female, stuck from The Wall.  Some had merely forelimbs entrenched in the living mire, as she did; others were barely recognizable silhouettes stretched taut against the barrier’s ghastly crimson skin; vague outlines of people once independent.  Some had tried to escape, after they’d been drawn bodily into The Wall’s flesh. 

 

Now their faces stretched horrifically frozen from The Wall’s insides as their minds were slowly taken from them into the collective barricade.  Some had tried to leap The Wall, whose height from a distance seemed surmountable, but in reality was thrice that of a man.  They too were captured, many of them writhing in agony as The Wall drew them in.

  

“Stop!”  Cried a voice from behind her.

Eyes drunk with terror, she stared back, found her voice quavering: “I can’t, mom—”

 “But you have to!”

  “I don’t want to touch this thing, dontcha’ get it?”

 “Then what are you doing?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Her mother began to sob, “but I do, child.  I was there.  I’ve felt it.  It pulled me, too; but I ran!  I ran and I escaped and matured—”

 “Then why can’t you save me?”

  “I—I can’t be taken again, Child.”

  She whimpered.  “M-mommy…”

 

Her father appeared from over a hillside, stood breathlessly next to her mother.  He yelled: “Is it too—no…it is.”  A hand went to his forehead, he looked imploringly to his wife, then his daughter, then: “I’m coming for you sweetheart, keep fighting,” and he was sprinting for The Wall.

  

Her mother screamed: “Walter, don’t!”

  

But he wouldn’t be stopped.  The girl was already in up to her elbow, eyes swiftly losing their humanity, the look of a bovine dullard creeping behind the pupils.

  

Walter struggled with her for hours, sweating and bellowing; but the harder he pulled, the faster her arm sank into The Wall.  Her eyes soon lost their light completely as a leg and then part of her torso was sucked into the flesh.  Her free arm began to beat at her father, trying to force him away from her.

 

Walter’s wife joined them, and both parents pulled and strained, trying to save their only daughter from the hypnotic Wall.  In the process, Walter touched the glowing flesh, and as his stricken eyes looked on his wife, he gave up the fight.

 

***

 

Years later the family emerged on the other side. They were mindless, soulless, careless…essentially dead, like everyone else whom The Wall had immersed into itself.

 

And still the glowing partition of socialism beckoned across America, ever luring its victims toward Utopia, and crying for more.