conworlds.info

[Nugan]

A single page from another short story I was working on. This political campaign is consuming my life, so who knows when I'll ever get back to it.

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Emmy Haustrom died for me, but he was dissected to entertain the crowd. The slip knot was still on his neck when the man from city hall cut him open. He had a pair of shears, longer than his tall hat, and he used them to break Emmy’s ribcage. He took out Emmy’s heart and his lungs and his intestines, and he weighed them on a steel scale. A man with no sweat on his shirt and a megaphone in his hand announced the weights to the crowd. That wasn’t the end of it. They were giving Emmy’s skeleton to an anatomy professor at the university, so everything had to go. They had to strip him down and hollow him out. Goodbye guts and skin and fingernails. There was a tub of weak acid to take off the clingy, demanding morsels of Emmy that would not leave his bones behind. The man from city hall wore Emmy’s coat home. The man with the megaphone already had a clean shirt, but he took Emmy’s anyway. He folded it and carried it home tuck inside his dry armpit. The executioner got Emmy’s socks. I don’t know what he did with them. What do you do with a dead man’s socks? But I know what they did with Emmy. They boxed him up, bagging the little loose bits so nothing would be wasted, and sent him to away to university with the anatomy professor. There he would open Emmy’s skull, take out his brain, and fill the empty space with ball bearings. He expected Emmy’s head to hold less—or more—balls than normal people. This would show that he had been born wrong. Too much extra room, or too little.

I didn’t see what the professor did to Emmy. I read about it in the paper. Emmy was always him the paper. Except they didn’t always call him Emmy Haustrom. The name was too long. It was almost half a column, just by itself. So they only used it when they wanted to remind you that he was foreign. Otherwise, he was Emmy Haus. Emmy Haus was a union organizer. That’s what he called it, anyway, in the interviews in the back pages. Agitator is the word that the paper used up front and in the headlines. He was a union agitator. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me. Those words are opposites, aren’t they? Whatever Emmy Haus was doing, organizing or agitating, he was doing it at the ________ match factory. He had the workers outside the factory, in the streets, yelling and pointing and marching in front of streetcars and doing just about anything but paid work. Once I read that he dragged a man down the street on horseback. The man wasn’t on the horse though. He was behind the horse, with a rope around his neck. If you read the back pages, you found out that the man didn’t die, and he was a scab besides. I don’t know why that meant he deserved to get pulled over half a block of cobblestone whatever had fallen off the undersides of a few hundred boots, but this was a big deal to Emmy and the workers. They were always quoted in the back pages, talking about scabs and gun thugs. It was one of these gun thugs that they hanged Emmy for killing. Emmy didn’t kill him though. The paper got that wrong. I know for sure.

I know I talk about the paper too much. Maybe I sound obsessed. But I have to know this stuff. It feeds me. You can’t sell them if you haven’t read them, not well, anyway. I’ve seen kids try. It’s terrible. You don’t sell half as many copies as you would if you had read them, and you look like an idiot. That’s all laziness does. It makes you look like an idiot, and then you starve. Yes, some of them can’t read, but there was a time I couldn’t either. But I can read now. So there are no excuses. Some of them learn just enough to read the headlines, but that’s no good. You think you’re going to make sales repeating the same six words, over and over? What if someone comes over, ready to buy, and asks you a question? Even if it’s just a simple one, even if it’s just about the humidity or the fog, what are you going to say? Like I said, laziness just makes you look like an idiot. But even if you don’t sell much, it’s a respectable job. It’s not like the other options. It’s not like being a whore. It’s nothing like being a whore.
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