#drudgery

In Turin, Nietszche wept and threw his arms around a beaten mare. He kissed her matted neck, stepped into the dark, and spoke no more. Here, the horse survived the madness, inherited the silence, and pulled the cart into the final, shivering center of the world.

The music loops, a heavy, scraping cello, revolving like a broken wheel in the mud. It grinds the same four notes into the stone. It grinds the brain until the brain is dust. The wind does not blow; it chisels. It peels the skin from the valley, leaving the gravel bare and white like teeth.

A daughter fetches water from a hole that is drying up. Her fingers are the color of turnips. She dresses her father like an old doll, lifting his dead arm through the sleeve of a coarse shirt. They do it today. They did it yesterday. They will do it until the wood rots.

Inside the stone hut, the light is failing. They sit before two wooden bowls. The steam from the potatoes smells of dirt and heavy water. They peel them with their thumbs, burning the grey flesh under their nails. There is no salt. There is no conversation. Only the neighbor at the table, spitting venom: “They have debased everything. They have ruined everything. It is not a judgment. It is simply that they have acquired everything.” The old man barks him into silence. The words sink into the floorboards like grease.

In the stable, the mare has stopped eating. Her eyes are cataracts of milk and dust. She knows what the old man refuses to say: the road out of here leads nowhere, and the well is already dead. Even the gypsies who came howling at the well— flourishing their wild, stolen wind, shouting of America and free water— have been swallowed by the grey horizon. They took nothing. They left only the shadow of their cart.

The cello slows. The wheel ceases to turn. The shadow of Friedrich’s weeping hangs over the hay. Tomorrow there will be no potatoes. The fire will refuse the peat. The oil in the lamp will turn to black ice. They will sit in the dark, listening to the earth grow cold, waiting for the wind to finally finish its work. “What is this?” the daughter asks the dark. “We must eat,” the old man says to nothing. But there is nothing left to chew.

Little sneak at tomorrow's video...

"There's another girl watching the line in the next room, if she picks out too many pieces you'll get written up. For most of the workers here that means getting a stern talking to about getting deported or getting sent back to prison but the line supervisor is in on our arrangement; you slip up and he'll drag you into the freezers and whip you bloody. I've told him to go easy on you today because you're gonna fuck up one way or another, but from tomorrow on you'd better pick kibble like you were born for it."

"What, you thought you were getting whored out again? At ten AM on a Tuesday? Thought you were gonna have an easy life between shifts at the brothel, sweeping the floors and sucking our cocks and crying in your cage? You're here to earn money, skank, and we get a hundred dollars a shift letting these fine folks babysit you between customers."