SHORT FICTION
“Alas” (A Queer Cautionary Tale)
A story about what happens next if we fail to act
The cell, if you wanted to call it that, was not that bad. Peter had certainly expected worse. Walls freshly painted a tasteful cool white. Comfortable single mattress on hospital bed, variety of disused hook-ups — inputs and outputs — electrical, ethereal, tubular — ports for the connecting of devices, gauges, the slow egress of gasses, and whatnot — all laid in rows of carelessly skewed stainless steel plates lined up the wall either side of the bed. Part of the hospital set-up, though all rooms in the Jimmy Jay Buckhorn Pavilion had since been requisitioned by the Legitimately Elected Government “for processing of convicted perverts.”
Peter had nothing to do here but watch the Legitimate Truth Channel, if he desired to turn on the TV, which he decidedly did not. These days it was nothing but show trials and gun commercials. All his books had been taken from him, even before his incarceration. Not only had they ordered them burned, they’d made Peter do the burning himself. An oil drum had been set up outside his apartment building and they’d made him toss his own books into the flames, by his own hand, one by one, in front of neighbors and passersby, as the Legitimate National Police stood and laughed. In went his Oscar Wilde…
