prompt: forever, title: lifting waits in misc. flash fiction

Casinos have no clocks upon their walls, casinos have no windows at all, ugly carpets forever force us to look up at pretty blinking lights demanding we press our luck. It isn’t accidental, libraries worth of books on the ways buildings are constructed toward controlling without us consciously knowing. Walk through a grocery and note how long it takes you to get to the daily staples of life, the milk, the eggs, the cheese, how many football fields of high-profit calories you need first meet your gaze. Obvious manipulation is obvious, of course, easily ignored. Controls built into our very architecture, however, glazed over as simply-are and always-were, passed as incidental through repetition, the true weapons of suggestion and suppression.

Eyes up at the pretties, don’t look down, not at your feet, let alone your watch. You are here, you’ve always been here, you’ll be here forever. Spend like your life depends on it. Consume as natural as breathing until the lungs finally collapse from the weight of infectious consumption. Ignore time. Pretend time ignores you, even though it will collect its due nonetheless, until then we allow you the illusion of halted entropy, as long as you spend it on timeless spending. Buy those brownie bites. Press that goddamned luck.

Since the later Sixties, American college dormitories have been designed along the same lines as high-security prisons, in the hopes of suppressing the kinds of communications and connections that allow for the development of confinement riots or political demonstration, in equal measure. Doors cannot face other doors directly across, either staggered from each other or opening out to an opposing wall instead. Controllable and easily observed gathering spaces at the centers of the buildings. A thousand mechanisms built toward isolation or, when isolation isn’t feasible, tight management of movements. God forbid, we meaningfully communicate toward consensus. Devil worse forbid, we meaningfully coordinate toward change.

Because we’re born and die so quickly, we perceive the worlds around us as unintentional and eternal, always was, always will be, formed by natural accidents without a subliminal meaning. Entities intended to last longer than lives, however, know how to leverage the living hell out of our mayfly blindness. Falsified unintentionals wired into walls, piped through basements, laced into the very mortar binding together the bricks of civilization’s firmament. We’re distracted easily by anything allowing us to pretend we’re isolated, from each other, from time, from space and meaning. By anything that tells us we just are and can just be, so stay inside the cave thought eternal, spend some time, spend some cash, spend as if your life depends on it. Or instead you can look out a window to a real that’s been concealed. You can look at those clocks still ticking steadily away. You don’t have to just look up.

Last updated September 12, 2020