Colonialism

I stood outside the makeshift detention center in the lab, an ancient tank we used to use for penguin colonies when they first arrived, but now housed a writhing man clawing at his chest. He was only wearing a pair of jeans, stained with blood and God knows what else, and kept flinging himself against the Plexiglas. The sight of the smeared blood on the tank was making me nauseous, and my stomach turned at the thought of what would happen when his long fingernails eventually reached his face. 

“We’ve got tranqs for the walruses in the health center,” I told the security guard. “Go get one, tell them I sent you. Tranqs and a defib, Frank.”

After a quick argument (“He’s choking on his tongue, Frank! He bit it off!”), Frank ran out and returned with a scrawny, ashy looking man wearing a Cyclone shirt, and the EMTs following behind.

Frank, Cyclone shirt, and I watched the ambulance leave, standing in the parking lot and letting the adrenaline warm us up in the frosty twenty degree air. When that wore off, Frank walked off to eat something, leaving me and Cyclone. 

“Guess my roommate’s not coming back,” Cyclone finally said. 

I looked him up and down and thought of my mother’s reaction to news of a man violently tripping at the New York Aquarium and attacking a sea otter; how her smothering was just as overpowering as her tiny house in Bayside, her influence as constricting as the penguin tank. 

“Where do you live?” I asked, reading his name tag aloud, “Nels?”

It was time to leave the colony. It was time to revolt.

“Look. I spent 9 long years in prison for stabbing a man who wanted to evict my mother because she wouldn’t fuck him.” –Abdul Hamid in Ishamel Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo