boys in boxes
The men are dying.
We’re the boys who see them. In tabloids, on news bulletins. Faces pocked with purple lesions, bodies ravaged by weight loss. Their abandoned eyes, their hollowed-out stares, hold us.
We’re told it’s a plague of our own making. Our fathers – both Holy and holier-than-thou – say it’s unnatural, say their boxes are wired wrong. We sit to these comments daily; as everyday as pouring the last remains of dust from a cereal box.
This flash was originally published in Reflex Fiction, and re-printed in Fractured Lit.