Innocents

Today, I work amongst innocent people who scrape their nails along the walls they climb to find a peace with their lot in life.  They squirrel away petty grievances like small acorns and burry them deep within their souls.  The predator waits patiently for the innocents to take the acorn out from deep within their souls and then pounces on them to claim what sustained them. 

The scratching of their nails along the walls of fortune, dug deep into the pockets of their debtors, while they lose their grip and tumble to the misery of their tedious and lifeless job.  Reach up and sink a claw to start the hard climb, while the predator keeps a watchful eye on the strength of your desire. Always climbing, forever clawing, lying prostrate to the wall they bleed in drops of tormented ambition, always looking up for the other side.  Their sideways feet slip cascades of promise that try and try and try to find a place where they can hold, but they never can because they never will – not while the deck is stacked against them.

A tiny spec of blood slithers into a small crack in the floor, by the desk, near the door.  Through the crack the blood cools and suffices the dust inside it, and a moment of nature interrupts the crack and the dust and the blood to sprout a web that starts low on the floor and sneaks across the carpeted cubicles to begin its climb over everything that clings to life.

They scratch and claw and dig and scrape at the big wall until their fingernails vibrate a cold song that can be heard by all the innocent people who watch them try to climb the wall.  Their heads turn slowly, quietly, inexorably until they gaze upon the friend that sits at the desk and works in the cube and plies at the job they wish would turn into something more relevant than the meaningless trudge of intransigent mission statements, visions and values that cow tow to the irrelevance of taxes.

The pecuniary interests that plague the innocents, and sully their soul through messages that say everything about nothing, paste them to the wall and force them to push and dig and claw and yell and gnash and scream and walk the web to the spider.

The formation of the web, which sprung from the rivulets of blood that leaked from the innocent who chose the wall, ran up the legs of the chairs, scaled the desk, clambered across the computer screen, scrambled over the phone that sat unawares on the desk, ascended up the walls of the cube where the innocent worked, before leaping across the isle to spread amongst the other cubicle that were occupied by the innocent people who chose not to climb the wall. 

They sat in their seats in front of the computers they used to carry out the orders that met the mission and had a vision and were of value.  The web that was started in the dust of a crack that was very slight, but had the time to be in the right place, now enclosed several cubes that were occupied by the innocent people of the same job.  The web started to jump and scamper and climb and scurry over everything in the office where the innocent people worked, and it was cold.  The web changed color the bigger it got.  It was blue were it was big and wide and bright red where it was thin, and everything in between was blood red; and most everything was in between.

Under the web a claw rose from the fingertip of an innocent worker who clawed and scratched and dug and hacked and climbed and climbed and climbed to reach the very top of the wall.  He looked up and pressed his head against the web that now engulfed him.  He looked for success, and was told it was there - had hacked his way to the very top where it was possible.  Then the web enfolded him and brought him back down to earth where the innocent people who work at the job that pay for the vain, to live in their castle, with anyone they claim, to escort out at any time the innocent workers who clean off their brine.