Pendington, Jude
JOURNAL ENTRY 05
Antisocial Personality
Disorder

For the second time in as many weeks, I'm standing beside Belial on a stage draped in blue fabric that Belial insists looks "political." A gaggle of idiot journalists fills the lot outside the T.O.G. Center, each of them brandishing oversized, phallic-looking microphones or tape recorders. Flash bulbs leaving green smudges on my eyes when I try to close them. The smell swallowing up the area is nearly unbearable.

"We are impaling dogma!" Belial bellows, pumping his knotted, scaly fist in the air. On his head is a large, glamorous looking headdress fashioned from feathers, jewels, and tiny bones. I swat at a fly buzzing in front of my face.

"In order to seize the power that lies dormant within each of us, we must first sever the bonds that restrict us. We have been so content to police ourselves that we have made a prison for ourselves. No more!"

He pauses for a moment, sniffs the air. "Christ, that smells." He mumbles off microphone so that only I notice. "Look around and what do you see?" He calls out to the crowd. "Is this death? Or is this rebirth? By limiting our control over our own bodies, nay, our own destinies, we have limited our control of our future!"

A reporter retrieves a small handkerchief from his coat pocket and covers his mouth and nose. Another stops watching Belial and turns to stare at one of the dozens of tall spears lining the outer courtyard of the center. Skewered on each of the spears' gleaming barbs are the remains of a recently aborted human fetus. The reporter makes a face under his handkerchief. As he stares at one spear in particular, a piece of the remains impaled on it drops to the concrete below, where it meets with an awful splat. The reporter gags.

"Sickening?" Belial muses. "Hardly! What is sickening is the leash of these ethical taboos. Are we finally prepared to cast it aside? Or shall we be dragged by it all our days?" He covers the microphone with his hand and twists his neck toward me. "Whose idea was this? It smells terrible."

"It was your idea, sir. It had to be done."

"Mine? Guess my nose couldn't predict this. Where did we get all these scraps?"

"From... women, sir."

"I know that, idiot. We had this many knocked up in the center?"

"No sir. We collected material from local facilities as well. We had more spears than... scraps."

"Oh yeah, well God forbid." He returns to the microphone and yells, "No more chains!" almost like an afterthought. The reporters cheer though most are covering their noses. A small cluster of bones falls from Belial's headdress and tumbles down his snout before he snatches it between two fingers.

"Gross," he mutters.