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Pandora's Casket

Neil Stuart Morton

Pandora’s Casket

  A story… and other scribblings

  Neil Stuart Morton

  Copyright 2014 Neil Stuart Morton

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  Copyright Neil Stuart Morton All rights reserved © 2014

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author

  This story is fiction and any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) or events is entirely coincidental

  Neil Stuart Morton may be contacted at [email protected]

  Cover art by the mighty www.a4ps.com

  All rights reserved © 2014

  Dedication

  For Jocky,

  A brilliant mate during brutal times

  ‘

  Pandora’s Casket

  Penance

  Devotion performed voluntarily in sorrow for a sin

  Rite of Passage

  To mark transition from one status to another... via ritual

  Elpis

  The personification and spirit of hope... the only thing left inside Pandora’s Box

  Pandora’s Casket

  Inside

  The interior of the booth is padded

  Industrial

  Purple and compressed with the odd orange fleck

  It deadens

  Soaks it all up

  I talk out loud… a lot

  Always have done… although this is in my head

  I think

  They tell me the voters like it… the talking out loud

  Inside it’s low-lit

  Like the warm glow of an ember

  Against outside through the window

  Just like staring at the sun

  The padding stops ricochets

  Bullets fragmenting and sheaving us in two

  Deemed to be unfair

  Viewers didn’t like it… voted with their digits

  The pirate channels started it

  At the top of the dial between the porn

  Semi-automatics

  And screaming bids to control the crosshairs

  Contestants all crammed inside one carton

  Just splatter fests to get you off

  If shooting fish in a barrel was your thing

  And before all the worms and bees were dead

  But this is the re-invention

  One shot a day and shooter’s prerogative

  Quick and clean

  Killed or kept

  What’s not to like

  I think of him… or her, as the Doctor

  Hiding out there with his panacea

  The answer to all our ills

  I limber up to do my thing

  To step into the light again

  Another prayer to the god of medicine

  To miss this shot of Vitamin B

  Bumblers

  All the bees are dead

  So gods bless Monsanto and their robotic polinizers

  Over island sized fields of industrialised wheat

  Just any port in a storm

  And for now… we must still ride with the devils we know

  The amber light comes on and counts me down

  I pull myself together

  And wait for the hatch at the back to open

  Then follow the curve of the tunnel out

  Don’t want to miss my break

  Overshoot my slot

  Did everyone get the pun

  Sponge Bob

  Back inside my pod

  The familiar soak of sponge

  And the white-out through the window

  Wonder if Dad’s watching

  Whether it’s day or night

  Do I make them proud

  Do they count the others down

  Who’s gone while I’ve been away

  ‘You’ll never know it’s happened… ’

  The last line of our briefing for our company of twelve

  The answer to one of life’s great conundrums

  ‘Will it hurt?’

  Perhaps a tad

  Or maybe not

  Perhaps even synapses struggle at 3,000 feet a second

  Because that’s shifting

  Even in old money

  Scran Van

  The feeding slide opens

  Always the slide at the other end

  I think they do it on purpose

  So you have to pass the window

  Sarcasm

  Come on down

  Viewers will like this

  Get extra votes for my cojones

  And if the Doctor isn’t otherwise engaged…

  Then none of this will matter anymore

  I bite down and stroll across

  Don’t hold your breath

  Oxygen debt

  Vacuum

  History

  ‘You’ll poison the worms man!’

  ‘You’ll poison the soil!’

  Placard waving pussies

  Hippies!

  Only good for gunning down

  So they did

  Sorted

  But they were right

  Boy were they right

  Booo!

  But seriously

  How the fuck do you kill all the worms

  How the fuck do you poison all the soil

  I’ll tell you Man! I’ll tell you

  Then tell me

  Hippie

  You drill through the aquifer to fracture the sub-strata

  But the chemicals leach back

  Really?

  Gallons of toxins into the arteries of your host

  Into the venal system of your one and only little blue ball

  Even parasites aren’t that fucking stupid

  Even parasites don’t consciously decide to kill their fucking...

  But cancer does

  Whatever

  We got frack-gas Baby!

  Means we kept on trucking

  For a while

  Bottle Top Tricks

  All anything ever was back then… before the shift

  All just black magicians’ tricks

  All just where you chose to look

  The mis-direction you bought into

  Knowingly… and willfully credulous

  In the hope the true reveals would never come

  And who needed worms and bumblers anyway

  When it all could taste soooo good

  High fructosed to the max

  Monsantoed to the Max!

  Barry

  Survived another day… another round

  Played my part and gave a show

  That you can watch when you come home

  And consider at leisure my worth

  And where to place your vote

  They play Barry Manilow for this

  I Made It Through The Rain

  We aint so different

  You and I

  In the end it’s all the same

  In the end we all play games

  Swap Shop

  Started with boxes on some shitty game show

  In those slow years before the shift

  When life was tasty

  And good

  As if…

  For these are relative terms

  And who remembers anyway

  Or cares

  Apathy… or Nihilism

  I forget

  And prove my point

  Just in our nature to look back

  To some frozen past that never was

  Cast out and coloured by the cold

  But yeah

  Boxes

  Apparently

  The o
riginal inspiration for our game… of sorts

  Just a player and a box

  Filled with an unknown quantity of the bartering chip of the day

  Played off against a load of others

  Containing more (or maybe less) of that beautiful, notional moolah

  That now means fuck all since the shift

  Whittled down and swapped at random

  And at every turn an offer to cash out

  To take the shekels and run…

  Against playing for the big one

  Must have been riveting

  Sarcasm

  Pull up a chair

  And the twists that led us here

  Eventually

  If you’ll forgive my abridged account

  As I skip the vaccine and water wars

  And endeavour to keep my point

  Yeah… so this bollocks game that led to this

  You win some… you lose some… and yadda, yadda, yadda

  But ratings dropped

  Less sales of product between the guesses

  Soooooo

  Spice it up Baby!

  Increase reward

  Notch up the jeopardy

  Leave with all you’ve ever dreamed of

  Providing you had the balls

  Ooooh!

  The irony is everywhere

  Play that baby till the end

  Down until the Wire

  Two final boxes left to choose

  Providing you weren’t some Pussy who’d cashed out

  Or the jeopardy box had gone

  But I’m rambling

  You still there

  Still with me in my head

  Yes?

  Only teasing Baby

  You know I love you

  But yeah

  Soooo

  Yes!

  You are right

  You are correct-amundo my friend

  What was in the jeopardy box

  Cheese wire Baby!

  Cheese wire for a cheeeeeeesy show

  Either hand

  It mattered not

  All they wanted was a pinky

  Ooooh!

  Unlucky sobbing fat girl

  Guess Gramps won’t be going on that cruise…

  Or adding a seventh to her blues

  Guitar joke

  And before the pleading cow can fold

  The host is grinning like a loon

  And slipping on the cutting coat

  And the ratings went through the roof

  For a while

  And then began to fall… again

  Because now the viewers smelt the blood

  And as ever… wanted more

  And who needs both balls anyway

  And finally we’re here

  After the shift has brought us back

  To wherever here is

  And whatever we are now

  The premise of said game show utilised for something more

  For the last thing left worth winning

  And I know you love it Baby

  And you know I love you too

  Stop Buying Beans

  In the end… or should that now be the beginning…

  It was as simple as that

  In that metaphor of slogan we brought about the shift

  As figurative and as literal as that

  Stop Buying Beans

  And the prices will come down

  Stop Buying Beans

  And they can’t sell us SHIT no more

  The groundswell…

  Of some collective last-gasp grasp of realisation

  That there were more of us than them

  Just we’d never thought to count

  Been too busy watching game shows

  Until all the worms and bees were dead

  But the shift did come

  That much is true

  The shift did come… and brought us here

  Eventually

  Collectively

  The shift did come

  That much is true

  After the vaccine and water wars

  And with almost no air left to sell

  The shift did come

  And we stopped buying beans

  Realised that there was more of us than them

  And that even God was dead

  That even that was all just bullshit running up a hill from different sides

  And all there ever was on top

  Was just staring at the sun

  That we now couldn’t see for shit

  Because we’d set the hill on fire

  The only fucking hill we ever had

  Man I’m having a bad day

  Whatever today might be

  They say it happens

  When you’re a few days in and the adrenalin drops

  The pseudo Zen kicks in

  And you start talking bollocks…

  Or screaming like number three

  And of course the breaks take their toll

  And how could they not

  For these are terrible things we do

  Caskets

  Pandora is an unforgiving BITCH!

  Exacting penance until she smiles upon the chosen

  Behold our rim of effigies

  Who bend and break upon her wheel

  A sacrifice for all that went before… for what we did

  Until only one remains

  To be

  Ah!

  But I’m getting ahead of myself

  It’s still too early for reveals

  Jeremy

  The Panopticon

  Bentham’s ‘mill to grind rogues honest’

  Our pods arranged via Jeremy’s institutional design…

  Around the rim of a wheel

  Facing in

  Towards the tower… where the Doctor sits

  With his rifle

  The concept

  That Bentham’s lone guard might observe every cell

  Impossible

  But that every cell would believe itself observed

  The nature of our game

  We present daily at our windows

  Praying…

  That the Doctor’s crosshairs are fixed upon another

  The Doctor is Panoptes

  Greek giant of one hundred eyes

  Former poster boy of surveillance state

  In the Land of Buying Beans

  Before the vaccine and water wars

  And all the worms and bees were dead

  And before the shift that brought us back

  Quid Pro Quo

  It means, this for that

  The breaks take their toll

  And how could they not

  For these are terrible things we do

  Amber One Last Time

  Only two of us now

  As the final votes are counted

  And I don’t want to talk anymore

  Give this the reverence it deserves

  Instructed to stand

  And move once more towards the sun

  I wait for the amber glow

  As the other will be waiting

  Ever knowing that only one exit hatch will open

  To sprint the curved walk to the tower

  Into the hub of Bentham’s wheel

  To sight the crosshairs on the other

  And become the Doctor… one last time

  I think of Elpis as the music begins to play

  And if Dad…

  Zzzzzt