A Place on the Wall by E.A. Mayer

TUNK is sitting on the ragged stump of a pine tree split by lightning when he hears Griff and his buddies drive down the narrow fire road in two cars; they jounce over chuckholes, slap spruce limbs. Griff and a man dressed in tree-bark camouflage get out of a blue Jeepish thing. Five other men tumble out of a low-slung foreign car like circus clowns.
...READ MORE

Sitting here…caught up in the world wind of gustily made decisions and all these little bruises…wondering whether I should be completely unreasonable or just moderately unavailable for comment at said time.

How could I continue to dupe those around me? These fellows of esteem – and of course Marlow, sitting peacefully as the blaring light from The Chapman (1) lit his quietly miserable outline. We were alone, so it seemed, no souls in sight nor sound could see the grief-swept anguish to which my features alluded.

“Good afternoon Mr. Oldman, I brought you your lunch.”

With the passing of the years, and thanks to attentive observation of his clients, Doctor Salvador Uriburu had discovered that the majority of the population of Calataid lacked the European origin of which it boasted. In its eyes, in its hands, persisted the African slaves who repaired the walls in the nineteenth century, and surely the older slaves who built the wells in the times of Garama.

The lights in the hallway flickered in a cryptic rhythm, reflecting off the puddles on the floor as well as the drips that fed them. Every flicker sent a shudder through my being, every drip, a twitch. My brain was experiencing some kind of electric impulse-tic reaction to external stimuli. I was unable to take any shortcuts through the winding canyons of my thoughts; long winded explanations filled my mind, being faced with these sensations. I now know it was merely intense fear, manifested through instinctual physical reflexes.