A Temple Massage by Deb R. Lewis
An assassin—so the intelligence goes—has inscribed
a bullet, though it numbers his days, with your name, his sanctimonious
sovereign, an oily blot defying the empirical sun; he has loaded
in the chamber this bullet meant solely for you. He has crept
undetected into your troubled bedchamber, faintly murmuring the
words of the founding fathers; he has gazed down upon your oblivious
face and confirmed the memory of your podium pounding, head-pecking
palaver. Yes, in this private moment before your death as the
shapers of the nation exhale dream sighs within a few miles of
this guarded slumber—all the alarms have been penetrated,
and the bodyguards stand with their oblivious backs to your door—unknown
to them the assassin senses your heart's tenuous beat in the heft
of his gun. If he fears someone will hear, he screws on the silencer;
sticking an arm out, he takes a steelier aim than any other. But
the bureaucracy is huge; its motives are infinite. If there were
a simple, uncorrupted government, how he would fire, and soon
you would hear fantastic stumping for responsible dreams and a
bright new pluralism. But instead, how futile is his mission;
still he is only ending the machinations of your bloody fingers;
never will he fish them from the murky well of government; and
if he managed to end your life, nothing would have been accomplished;
he would have to mow down your shifty Veep; and if he managed
to do that, nothing would have been accomplished; he would have
to stride up the steps of the capitol and gun down the Speaker
of the House, then after scotching the President pro tempore in
the Senate, then again, bump off the Secretaries of the State
and of the Treasury, and then liquidate the Secretaries in the
remaining cabinet; and once again knock off the Joint Chiefs of
Staff; bribe the Supreme Court to recuse themselves in the nation's
favor instead of yours; take the state capitols for human collateral,
and so on down to obliterating the lowliest thousands of vindictive
book-banning school board infiltrates; and if at long last he
should blast through the veneer of false promises—but that
can never, never happen—the barter of influence, the corruption
of power still stand to his right and to his left, towering as
high as barrels of pork waste in a Pentagon warehouse. He rubs
his head in grief; nobody could fight his way through here, certainly
not one with a caliber of decency. But the gentle and angry citizens
sit at their televisions and dream of that bullet as you drift
us all into an age of night.
Deb R. Lewis
Deb R. Lewis's fiction has appeared in many places, including:
Bad Attitude, VelvetMafia.com,
Blithe House Quarterly,
Gertrude, Sleepwalk, The2ndHand.com,
and multiple issues of the award-winning Hair Trigger.
In 2005, she was a finalist in the Many Mountains Moving Flash
Fiction Contest (the finalist story, "Waiting at One End
of Time," will appear in a forthcoming issue of Zahir:
Unforgettable Tales in 2007) and the Faulkner-Wisdom Novella
Competition. She writes, lives, and teaches in Chicago and expects
to be dragged off to a federal holding tank any day now. Until
then, see www.DebRLewis.com
for more information and an obnoxiously bad photo. She can be
reached via email at: bigold@prodigy.net
