Page 50 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Knowledge and understanding are not remedy, we came to understand, as we stood

and remain with Cassandra watching the on-going carnage; against our will, we become

whores to it.

Accepting that people I know have been tortured does not assure me I could survive it,

or better, die of it when applied. And science, the great god of a depraved species, will

soon offer a procedure or a pill, made of our own DNA, our own genetic material, to wipe

out bitter memories. Related methods, newly tested on veterans suffering PTSD, can

wipe out the memory of slaughter – what they did, what was done to them, their

responsibility or lack of it – so that even wars may be erased from our memory, and

consciousness will shrivel like an old balloon, and then the brain will wither, nothing in it

but a false positive of Eden. The soldier forgets that he tortured while his torture victim

writhes wherever she has been dumped to resume her rat life. Or maybe we can

arrange for her to forget, as well. Not one of those murdered by government order will be

brought back from the dead. Nor those vaporized by bomb blasts rivaling the sun.

An old memory:

I told a friend: “I can’t bear it.”

“Who asked you?” she answered.

I thought this was our comedy routine.

She died early, wailing at the injustice of it, without knowing she was being given the

grace of escaping what was left of the twentieth century and the brutal beginning of the

twenty-first on Planet Earth.