The Oppressionist
Matt Robinson
He—The Oppressionist, The Grinning Wolf, His Majesty, Lord Sir—had a resplendent, oaken desk to sit behind, but the one time its legs did not curtsy to his presence and sitting in front of it was deemed redundant, he had it issued a ticket to stand among the sparse remaining upright.
One of them was a small girl. She’d left her mandatory Official Majesty’s Appreciation beret at home on the exact day The Oppressionist’s sleek, black limousine cut through her neighborhood like a shark perusing a gulf. Her hair, burnished and unwound, discommoded His Majesty the Murderer, so he had her taken, lifted so swiftly her left foot had no time to cling to the makeshift shoe in which she had been happily skipping.
The hexad of numbers followed. Slender in frame with an illusory base, one resembled the next. They warred as long as they could, knew what befell them. In a display of scintillating contingency, the numerals lined up neatly like soldiers in a palindromic row.
The last in line ahead of the desk was a margin. A tract of pastel blue empyrean fused with malachite flusters of tree limbs. The gunman noticed this as he entered the arena. His order to execute the boundary between land and space came as a surprise, but to see it, to lower the barrel and square it in his crosshairs, to pull the trigger and watch it fall, in an aggrandizement of loathing and paranoia, to know he had done away with His Majesty’s loftiest enemy, while The Oppressionist reposed, wary that somewhere, at some point, his assassin would be born and his clock would need to be adjusted accordingly, well, what comfort could materialize in that instant when the gunman realized the assassin had been born inside of him?
MATTHEW J. ROBINSON Occupies Seattle.
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