TALKING IN CIRCLES

Was that 182 or had he missed one?

A sigh.

One…Two…Three…Four…

Alton Whitlock had been in here for…well, he wasn’t exactly sure any more. But what he did know was that it is actually impossible to count the amount of bricks on the back wall directly opposite the cell he found himself in now. But he was unsure why that was. It could be because he kept forgetting where he’d gotten to. It could be that the bricks were far away enough that the lines between them weren’t distinct enough.

Alton thought it was because he’d spent so long counting that he’d forgotten how numbers work. He’d gotten to that point where you repeat a word to yourself over and over again and the more times you say it the more you question if it’s even a real word.

Each number sounded like it’s own foreign language to him now.

Processing this situation was very difficult for Alton, who had spent so much of his life trying to make the world a better place, but now there was no world to be better. All that existed now was those walls, that door, and the brick wall with at least 182 bricks contained within it. He’d spent so long with his own voice, talking himself up.

“You’ll be out of here in no time Alton,” he’d tell himself.

But every time he heard the words fall out of his mouth he knew why people thought all politicians were liars. He’d lost track of whether he meant what he was telling himself or he’d become so good at telling people what they wanted to hear that he could even fool himself now. But he knew he had to convince himself everything would be fine, because the moment he stopped thinking everything was fine his mind slid back to the conversation he’d heard between The Warden and The Butcher.

Someone would die, before this ordeal was over.

What kind of world would it be then?

All the time he’d been thinking this through he’d carried on counting the bricks, but having failed again he moved away from the door and sat in the corner of the room, looking at this, his new constituency, consisting of a dead spider and the dead fly it was looking forward to eating.

Could he live in a world where some had had to die for him to live? He of course had read and heard all of the stories from the great wars from the veterans he’d met. He knew people had died so that he could live before now, but this was different. This was so direct. And this was him talking himself around the fact that it could be him who died in all of this.

And then, as he looked at the spider and the fly with a look of disgust even thinking about it, he stood up and moved to the door, where he stared at the wall in the distance.

Was that 182 or had he missed one?

A sigh.

One…Two…Three…Four…

How long had he been here, again?

Cut.