Member-only story
The Return
A Lovecraftian Tale of Indifferent Action.
As a population we’d come to expect protection, such that we could live our lives with a degree of freedom, a feeling of security, with a little confidence (that we didn’t often step back often enough to consider, if at all) that things would more or less remain the same tomorrow as they did today.
Protection from each other, supplied by to us by each other.
Arranged by the officials we elected to represent us, and carried out by the police, and ultimately the well equipped army with its bright young faces and shiny powerful weapons.
We fully expected that as long as we paid our taxes and stayed on the right side of what was presumed of us in our ordered society that we would indeed be afforded that protection should the need arise.
That’s why it was safe to walk the streets, live in our homes unmolested, and we could skip past articles portraying wars in far off places that surely couldn’t affect us as they were being taken care of by someone else.
Shelters from the storm, barriers from the sea, prison walls to separate the good from the bad, we strived to build, and we strived to protect.
The ridiculousness of our fragile society, that collective illusion of fellow human beings actually being able to protect each other, all of…
