The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
‘Dear Monster’ by Alejandro Bastidas.
Dear monster, do you ever sleep?
If so, how do you set your mind at ease? That’s me assuming you have a conscience, the same conscience you use every day when you decide that putting on the uniform and holding the baton are worth hurting those you claim to protect. Thirty-nine dead and counting. Hundreds missing, lost in that gray phantasmal place that no map has outlined so that nobody can go looking. The land has been haunted for decades, perhaps more. It’s hard to keep track of time here as the line dividing past and present is permanently blurred, forcing everyone who is trapped within to run from one wildfire into another, more brutal but still familiar because the arsonist always leaves a signature.
The generations that grew up hearing stories of the disappearances eventually had children of their own, children who also disappeared, and whose stories will be told to the young ones who are just becoming aware of the scars that mark the country like its mountains. Their names will be a warning of what happens when you speak softly or when you scream with all the might that your starved out lungs can gather. There are also two options of silence to choose from: the silence of accomplices and the silence of corpses. That is the sort of world you’ve helped build, and for what? For people who don’t even know your name and don’t care if you die for the law and kill for the law and torture for the law and abuse for the law. Those people twisted your name until not even you could recognize its characters. Part of me wants to think you weren’t always fluent in the language of violence. Maybe you were good back then and nobody feared you. But now I don’t know if you even deserve a “maybe” because this land does not allow “maybes” or “what ifs,” and you have certainly denied them to many people yourself when you executed but forgot to judge first. The dirt in your visor isn’t causing your blindness. No helmet can protect you from the damage that has already rotten your brain. There is no body armor for a conscience.
You have hunted many nights and many days, mostly unseen and in perfect secrecy, but the intangible eyes that witnessed your recent atrocities will tell the stories you’ve silenced for decades. There will be accountability. What has been seen will not be forgotten. I don’t understand why you acted as if a poster filled with angry brushstrokes threatened you. As if its words could somehow shoot forwards faster than the bullets inside the gun you held, and you were defenseless to stop them, so the only possible response in that frightening and horrific situation was to pull the trigger. You might not remember the faces of every person who ever stood up to you, but out of countless confrontations with strangers, you have recognized their ideas and the suffering that unites them.
When will it be enough to make you hesitate?