​

⸎

​

A laugh here in Merrymouseland, these days, is as foreign sounding as an instrument. (Consider the Theremin and its high-pitched, ghostly whine—the only instrument I know of that doesn’t actually require human contact with which to make music. Of this quirk I am insanely envious.) But a child’s laugh in this place is even more surreal. Like a sunken chime tinkling across some far-flung, twilit abyss, it thoroughly confuses the ear, cutting through the rasping wind of an otherwise banal midmorning.

​

When I find its source, I also find four freckled faces squatting over a squirming rat.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 [

​

​

​

​

​

Four ginger mops of hair with green grime-encrusted eyes, wearing drab olive uniforms missing several of their buttons.

​

Youngers.

​

⸎

​

I count two torn skirts and two tattered jackets with rounded collars. By the bright blue brands on their necks, I know right away from where they’ve come, as the initials ‘JG’ are synonymous with a life of diligent torment.

​

Josef Grimoire’s dullhouse is infamous for its insidious efficacy. Never has an inheritor

delighted so much in the playful persecution of his property. Twisted tales of what goes on behind the big brick walls vary from labyrinthine halls with hundreds of dead ends, Escheresque staircases, dizzying walls, barbwire pitfalls, and tessellated floors teased out with sharp visual illusions inviting escapees to tumble to their doom. In other words: mad scientist-type stuff.

​

Very few guards are required on the actual payroll, as the nightmarish architecture tends to take care of itself. (Perhaps some of these are grossly exaggerated but there’s no way to know for sure.

 

The only one I do suspect is 100% true, thanks to the manic ramblings of one of my fellow dethshepards back in the day—a trustee who was eventually sold back to the youth battalion after a series of “unsuccessful nocturnal procedures,” who claims to have been responsible for feeding the mewling new bloods for a short time—is that a quarter of its inhabitants are purchased at child birth, bred and raised specifically to harvest their organs. According to that same source, this lot never knew they were among this lot, as such anonymity would be kept under lock and key. Another quarter of the children, known as the Chosen, would receive superior treatment with a certain modicum of luxury even: actual food, soft beds, sometimes even books to read. No one, not even this ex-trustee, would know for sure what separated the “spare parts” from the chosen, and neither would they. I imagine this ambiguity worked wonders to keep them all living in collective fear, constantly wondering whether they were being treated so well because their eventual health was only important for future resale value or whether Grimoire, in his false benevolence, had deemed that they are deserving of a better-quality life for some unknown, unknowable reason.

​

As for the remaining half, they were the ones who would tend to mount escapes, as they suffered endlessly, dead-eyed and cowlike with brains full of sloshing neurotoxins at night, when their daily food vitamin would get spat out into a dog bowl through large pneumatic rubber tubes just before bedtime. During the day, some might inevitably rise, wander the halls only to get lost. They would never make it back to the dog bowl for their lone capsule of sustenance and by then perhaps they wouldn’t care.

​

I imagine them sometimes still, winding through the mazelike halls to Liszt’s Grand Galop Chromatique.       Out of breath.        Out of options.         Out of cares in the world.

​

⸎

​