Scene 9

 

Blat! Goldy where are you? What have they done to you now?
And when he woke up a slave in the salt mines he had to invent other realities. As the brutal separation was too great.

 

He struck the walls of Potosi over and over again. He plotted away. His escape his mutiny his raising of an army and marching out to whatever city she was now held in. Burn down the entire empire city by city if he had room to do so. In darkness ten thousand captives struck the walls of the abyss, shattered away and tunneling. In some of their lands they had been warriors and kings. Others were simple men. Emptied lands that no longer existed.

 

 

The captives were of many tribes and many tongues. Most of not all were not white, for this was not the work of white men, mining salt and tunneling, but race was actually a distraction. He learned that in political theory class at University, when he was a young man. What year was this? What country, whose epoch was this?

Crack.

The pitiful sledgehammer strikes into bleak nothingness, ten thousand tunneling souls, and their families held in the neighboring townships in case they mutiny or do not make quota. They send us deep into the mines each day and await us to cart our dead out at dusk. Cart out our dead and the salt they use for batteries.

 

 

They ripped us from our lives as people, killed in us everything we knew about our cultures. Our religions. They reduced us to their zombies, their walking dead, something more broken than a slave. A hostage.

 

But there was hope, Avinadav would come back! Solomon would sing to us again, we would rebuild the temple, this was all prophesy, this was all real!

CRACK! My big yet flimsily hammer chips the wall.

            All my bloody day dreams were a speck! Yes, they were nothing and I was powerless to do anything but break rock.

My mind went deep into time, I was so many places at once, I was again with her. So many times before, and again god willing again in the sweet hereafter, in the worlds to come. What year was this? CRACK. What country am I slaving in?

 

My world is one of torment, I have lost everything. Every single thing. I have been made less than a number. I don’t even know what year it is. I would put out my own eyes, I would refuse the gift of air, but, but, but; I will bide my time, I will escape, I will find, but her real name is now lost to me, or was there even an inner most name, something for the even more cute.

I will get out of this wretched salt mine! I will kill my captors! I will raise and army, and march on the gentry who put me out like this, separated me from my true love. Will I?

In this life or the next. If you believe in such things.