Appeasement
Shaun looks down at the burbling maw, and the burbling maw looks back up at him.
It’s hard to tell what a volcano might be thinking or feeling, and Shaun has never been the most empathetic person. He could never tell what his ex-wife was thinking or feeling, either. But in this instance he thinks he could hazard a guess.
The volcano looks hungry. It looks impatient.
“This is insane,” he says. “You can’t do this. It can’t be legal.”
There’s a man behind him with a clipboard and high-vis jacket, worn over a strange grass skirt. He’s smiling as he leafs through his paperwork. “Well, there’s no need to get all political, Mister Matthews.”
Accross the mouth of Mount Pushemin is a rickety bridge of wood and rope. The bridge is new, but it’s been made to appear old, because that looks better for the cameras. Now he has been brought here and pushed out onto the bridge by people with machetes. There’s a burgeoning new industry here which has created hundreds of jobs. Arts students and dramaturgs and video game designers were all heavily encouraged to retrain as Volcano Sacrifice Technicians. Now all they have to do to make a living is wear problematic Tiki Warrior costumes and ocassionally push people onto artificial rope bridges. It’s probably more fulfilling than their old work, to be fair.
Shaun swallows. The smoke is making his throat itch, and his eyes water. His cheap plastic brogues are starting to melt, from the heat. Sticking to the slats of the bridge.
“But it’s not right,” he says. “There have to be laws against this.”
The man in the high-vis jacket sighs, behind him. “There was a referendum, wasn’t there?” he says. “The people have spoken. You can’t start complaining just because you don’t like the results.”
“I’m not complaining about the results, I’m complaining because you’re about to throw me into a fucking volcano!”
“Well there’s no need to use vulgar language, Mister Matthews. There’s a huge popular mandate for throwing estate agents into volcanos. We’ve thrown in all of the cabinet ministers and hedge fund managers already.”
“Wasn’t that enough? Can’t we stop, now?”
“Nah,” says the man in the high-vis jacket. “Sorry, mate. Gotta keep doing this until we’ve the appeased the ancient volcano gods. Have you read the papers, recently? I don’t think we’ve appeased them yet. Do you?”
“But there must be somebody else!”
“When surveyed, the majority of respondants ranked estate agents among the top five professional groupings that they’d enjoy seeing fed to a volcano god. So there you are. Can’t argue with raw data like that, can you?”
“Let me off this bridge you heartless bastard!”
“Oh, isn’t that just typical? I show you the hard evidence, and you start resorting to ad hominem attacks. Well that says a lot more about you than it does about me, Mister Matthews. Honestly, some people just aren’t worth debating with. Go on, lads.”
Two of the art students bring down their machetes and chop through the frayed ropes with a single stroke. The bridge goes slack beneath him, and he plunges down, towards the weird red viscosity of the lava. It doesn’t feel very appeased.