Tres Idiotas

This one is a metaphor for something. I think I made it too obvious personally, but I hope you disagree.

Tres Idiotas. 

February 29-March 6th,2024.

Edited: Mar 6th 2024-Mar 10th 2024

I woke into a scarce and cobbled room with shattered manacles laying around me in dust. Dark and heavy water dripped with purpose from one terrible corner to another and all about me raised the smell of oubliette. I had only a small fat candle from origins unknown and no means to light it. To my right, far away in a dank and curving alcove of the wall sat an older man hunched over a small pile of mostly bare bones, to my other side a much younger man still a few decades older than myself huddled around a lighted candle of his own. To my back, where I turned expecting a view of shuffling foot traffic or barred visage of sniggling twisting stars I found only a solid wall. Though, someone, perhaps one of my silent naked companions had painted in rotted greens and molding blues and slimy but brilliant yellows from origin unknown a fresco depicting a beautiful prosperous city rising above some sort of muck below.

I spoke first, “Hello?”

           The younger man looked up from his flame and smiled warmly and for a moment I could not feel the frigid stone against my bare flesh. 

          “Hello,” he added. 

The older man scoffed in place of words and went to tossing flakes of bone and rocks at the fresco.

I stood and shivered in the lack of any breeze at all. The air was stagnant, never shifting in temperatur or level of slight haziness. There was a blanket in the center of the room offset towards some sort of door a bank or fabulously wealthy person might use to house stacks upon stacks of gold. It was nearly perfectly smooth, twenty feet tall and composed of blackened steel matching in style with the dark, dark room. I picked up the rotted cloth, and used it to wrap myself up. The old man gagged and sputtered angrily at me from across the swampy floor and amused himself with his rocks once more. I turned my back to him and approached the other fellow who sat calmly back upon his hands in a leisurely air and with a pleasant smile about his face. 

I repeated: “Hello.”
And he again did the same.

“Where am I? Are we?” I continued.

“Ah!” he announced, swinging one finger up to point at a (perhaps sunny perhaps tarry black and starred) sky neither of us could see in declaration. “You are now within Archico!”

“Archico?”

He nodded.

“Where is Archico?”

“‘Where?’ Right here. Within our mighty walls. Where else? From which isle of inept school mistresses do you hail that you cannot place Archio on a map?” He scoffed and looked me up and down. 

I turned my eyes up and tried to search the front cupboard of my brain with them.  I found no satisfactory answer as to my origin.

“I suppose I am from here,” I said. I sat upon the floor before this affable male, still covered and by my terrible robe. “This is the last place I was…seemingly…the first as well, I believe.”

“Then you are the stupidest citizen of Archico I have met yet.”

A larger piece of bone snapped off against the painting and chipped loose many flakes of yellow dust so that some stone was laid bare to oxygen again. The thrower snorted and chuckled. He adjusted his posture confidently; laying his self pride next to him so as to gaze upon as he reclined leisurely. I searched for eye contact, any form of recognition at all, from this man, but he merely scowled each time his gaze met mine.

“As is your right, in our blessed land. You will find no true citizen who would dare to stop you or deprive you of such freedoms.” 

I surveyed closely the citizens of this land. They were afflicted both by a handful of strange ailments apiece. Oddly colored rashes, tiny pieces of the body missing, tickling coughs and clicking bones nearly visible through the skin. And nor could neither one truly be claimed as perfectly sane. How could one who lived inside a world such as this? I looked away from my roommates, instead towards my own reflection shimmering in a tiny pond of brackish, blackened water. My eyes were hollow pools themselves bordered by ashen sands. 

From behind the massive gate there echoed a dull ringing. Like that of something long and heavy dropping and dragging along. It knocked again and the citizens (sans myself) stood at attention. They clutched clawed hands at their hearts, then looked up and whispered invisible prayers with barely twitching lips. Finally, they took form together like soldiers waiting before the portcullis. The great thing began to moan and creak first gently, then uproariously at its foundations, and its two attending knights eyed me with great distress. Their glares made me feel that perhaps their hearts would explode. They would give in to the stress behind their pulsing eyes like some tiny furry mammal, and pop. Hoping to end their suffering and squirming I joined them in line to much success. They and I calmed and cooled and turned attention to the door now much more inert. 

A smaller slot in the door flipped open near the bottom. All the rumbling, all the deep and rhythmic pulses and screeches had only opened this small door? Had only achieved in lifting a piece of metal about the size of a loaf of bread? I must have looked quite puzzled because the older man snapped his shaking fingers at me and hissed. The one I held slightly fonder gave me an instructional and apologetic smile, but both were quickly drawn back in by the captivating oily void. Suddenly, three bowls of food were slipped out the hole before it was shut again. 

The three of us approached to investigate, I more tentative than the others. And as we did so the mechanical slab began its complainings again. It creaked and screamed like an army of soldiers all perishing at once. One more flap opened, this one a few meters or so above the ground (on our side of the barrier at least). The citizens and I at a brief delay stepped closer several times, tapping and shuffling across that desolate, cold floor, until at last we stood not a few noses away flexing our necks so as to look up into the new hole. I felt a cool and sadly stale wind bluster over the dull, scratched horizon and shudder across my face. A long note of peace took hold amongst me and my brothers as we stood there enjoying the breeze. Then suddenly three bouts of spit shot down upon all our faces. I fell back in surprise. 

“Ah!” smiled and cheered the older man, suddenly bolstered, in tandem with the gate crashing shut again. He swung his arms out and raised them up as if to feel at some gas around him. “It has come to rain again!” He smiled even wider. 

The other said nothing. He was instead focused intently upon swallowing all the liquid on his forehead. He tossed and strained the muscles under his neck and face, making sure to not lose even a single droplet of moisture to Archico’s great reserves between the tight cobblestones. I turned to look away and gag and hold retchings in at the sight. How determined he was to drain and strain and swallow it all. Not like an animal, but just like a man. Clearly he knew just what he did. He had skill, applied knowledge and theory, a well of experience from which to dip. He knew his task well, and did not mind the contorted, reddened face of malice it brought him. Nor the pulsing muscles rippling beneath his skin. I turned back still holding closed my stomach. The older man danced in pantomime rain.

“Sir‽ Why do you drink so?” I asked.

He wiped his mouth of the last tinges of spittle but not his grin.

“Might as well take all they give you,” he replied shockingly plainly. He patted his knees joyfully and danced them side to side. The older man kept dancing.

“Might you?”

“In time, you’ll come to learn,” he said, still smiling. 

I turned away again, disgusted (or terrified) by words now. I clasped my ears shut and my eyes as well and when I finally opened them it seemed much time had passed. The painting was a little more chipped now. Just a little. So little that, perhaps, nothing had changed really. Perhaps I was wrong and never had seen any pigments crumble away at all. It was easily believable that the piece was so old, so baked and caked into the wall, that nothing tossed or scraped against its surface would change the immutable window of the past. That the small bare spots had faded long ago, had always been bare. Even if I took to throwing stones and detritus there and then I could succeed in bringing no difference about. So, there we all sat dressed for the womb looking around for lack of any thing else to do.