The Cerulean  Pill

by Sterling Davis

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    It is a miracle, this skin I walk in. But this skin is not my own. My greatest fear is of black birds; they bring death. Every time they alight from thin air, I wonder, "who's going to die."

    I used to have visions. Of slaughterhouses, namely. And of headless, soulless rams. Our government had declared the whole wide world sick. They said: the most dangerous word was live. 

    The air around the commune I live is as noxious as carbon monoxide. "Time is importunate. And intransigent," proclaimed the campanile in the town square. No mortal man is safe; it is sickness that we all saunter to. 

    Schoolteacher said the brave man is the most sick. Courage is weakness. That passion is dangerous. He smiled when he said this, in his dark cloak. He told us to hate those who are strong. Why be strong? When there was soil to till. He explained that if man became too strong that would spell disaster for the picking of roots. So, each morning, everyone takes their blue, oblong Cerulean Pill. All violent thoughts, all aggressiveness, all spontaneity is swallowed up into docility. "And there will be peace," he said, "When all men are weak." I thought my ribs would crack.

    The Censors, in their filthy robes, guard the manikin of humanity with their crab-claws. Resistance is insurmountable; their oozy light rays annihilate all dissent. It is themselves, they guide, in their sootiness. They superintend all society from their Cathedral of Truth. They have subverted all values. To think differently is to sin.

    I want to sin. I want to think freely. I want to be precisely what I am. The noonlight is like dawnlight. My soul refused to be crushed. I was the one, the true. The most forbidden word: hero.

    One day, at solar midnight, a sudden epiphany entered my skull as if by x-ray. "The most dangerous man on Earth is the indifferent one. Indifference is a nihilism," an alien voice warbled to me, as I sat among the drenched laburnums. "To hate what is good, what is strong. What is rare. Is evil." My soul shook. To love your enemy? When the snake slitters by is there love in snakes?

    Once there was a legend or mythologem. Around our hushed fires, the old ones proclaimed THE LAW. They told us of searing.

    "Not long ago," they said. "There were aberrations." They spoke of ruins. Outside our commune, there once were rows of impressive buildings.

    "What happened?" I asked in sunglint.

     These miserable creatures," they exclaimed. "They thought for themselves!"

    
Sterling Davis is the Executive Editor of Poetries in English Magazine. This story is an excerpt from his debut novel-in-progress, I Hail the Superhuman.