Drabbles III
Bureaucracy
We missed celebrating our leader’s birthday, so now we need to establish a committee to build an excuse. The layers of administration around our leader will not be easy to navigate. There are toadies and family and those certain favored financial supporters to pass through. At each level, no matter what excuse we fashion, it will get less elaborate. At the end of our mission, it will be just easier to blame someone or a collective. After all, our leader doesn't want to know why; he just wants to punish. Out of whose defilement might we draw the most profit?
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Collar Turned Up
Quibble worries about his safety if the government turns fascist. Quibble has said things unpopular, made comments possibly against the administration. He has not been as cautious as a man should when hefting a government with a point to make. Yet, none of his outlandish comments or beliefs carry enough weight to be noticed by the enforcers in the capital. Quibble? A nobody, lackluster citizen, payer of taxes. What notice of him would those at the Capitol take? Then he knows it is not the fascists in the capital he has to fear, just the ones living down the street.
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We Did This to Ourselves
Jersey’s job is looking for pregnancies. He takes identification cards and cross-references them with health records to ensure their condition is registered. Half the women he stops are not pregnant, but better to have a dozen false positives than let one secretly pregnant pass. He enjoys the position, the built-in fear that comes with it. Women he has known his whole life, slept with as girls, see him differently now, polish their conversations even when he is not in uniform. Council thinks he is doing well. It isn’t, after all, the pregnancy that matters. It is the requirement to obey.
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