|
The War Against Ignorance
|
|
|
He is weathered and weary, yet a fire still burns inside, where no amount of infidel influence can reach and extinguish. He works here, though it is not his real job, and today he is leaving. The faces around him familiar to his eyes only; not his heart, not his spirit. His contract has finished here and a new one begun. A leather briefcase, a symbol of another's regime, not his. There is no sweat from his palm making the handle slick as there was on previous runs. He takes the lift to the top floor, leaves the hallway via the fire doors, and unlocks the door to the air-conditioning units with a key he has had made. He is blank and focused, his mind made clear through prayer, his body pure through fasting. This evening he will eat the food of the damned and drink the water of the dead. It comes packaged in blood and stamped with the gold and white symbols of their sins, constantly barraging the senses, hammered into the young before they can truly understand such evils. He will eat their fast-foods and drink their soft-drinks in public, he will let it leach the spirit from his body with every mouthful, and he will purify himself each night anew, lost in scripture, found in soul. He has enjoyed the flesh of their women, he has taken new lovers weekly, daily, whatever he can afford. He knows too well the temptations of the west, and he chants himself clean before he sleeps. He must know to reinforce his teachings, he must know to believe. The briefcase snaps open and he removes a sealed plastic bag, one of many, containing half a kilogram of white powder. He carefully opens the seal and pours equal amounts of the powder into each duct intake. 'Inshallah,' he says in an accent watered down through long years immersed in his surroundings. He makes his way back to the elevators and within minutes is back out on the street walking to his next destination, briefcase firm in hand.
|
Paul Haines was raised in the '70s, in the wrong part of Auckland, New Zealand. After completing a degree in the frozen, drunken depths of Otago he wound up working in computers and was eventually lured by sex and money to Australia in the'90s. Vowing to never call it home, he now lives in Melbourne with his wife and a loving mortgage. He's been published in NFG, Ideomancer, Aurealis, Orb, Agog!, and others. Paul is a member of the SuperNOVA writers group in Melbourne. He also survived the inaugural Clarion South writers workshop.