Crack the Spine - Issue 155

And so the dream keepers spoke and spoke and spoke through the night everywhere.

One evening, there were policeman stationed in front of the shelters. The people jostled through. The next evening, the policeman had nightsticks and there were black eyes, fractured clavicles, ribs cracked like wishbones. The ordinary women of the crowd wept and begged and a few fainted. The sleep keepers, dressed in white nightgowns, walked the streets singing and crying out their reassurance.

The nation was sleepless.

The young men were restless. At lunch, they stewed and plotted in their work crews.

The next night, they found the shelter doors cemented over and the treachery was unbearable. The crowds followed their nocturnal guardians in a swarm, swelling the streets with tired, shuffling bodies. The police beat them at their edges, but it was no use. The night angels—those mothers, heads covered in flowered scarves, those wispy old women, those barefoot girls—smelted by the intensity of the fear they habitually absorbed, they didn’t flinch.

The general was a clever man—how do you think he won the war? He sent an auditor to fetch the municipal records. The honorable register of bewitching voices. Under cover of daylight, he instructed the police to snatch them one by one.

The first improvised bomb thundered at midnight.