The Cult

One

There are cults and then there are cults. Mine resides on the streets of the new city. We owe our allegiance to no one and freedom is our only motto. We wear it like a badge of honour, a signifier of strength and independence. Of course, you outsiders see us differently. To you, we are just victims or perhaps even degenerates, to be pitied or worse to be abused. But let me warn you, you practice the latter at your peril, for in truth we are many and you are just one. You think you hold the upper hand, but in the end, you are nothing, just a sad crumb drifting on the wings of imagined prosperity, desperate to become, but never really achieving.  You live in this city, cloistered in apartments and boxlike houses, but only as a tenant. We own it and you should remember that because one day we might own you as well!

Know something else too, there is darkness in our world, and in our hearts. If you live in this city you will share our iniquity, but without absolution. We have no such difficulty, as we embrace our vices, in fact, we utilise them to our own ends. Some may see us as evil, practitioners of wickedness. But that is not true, we are simply products of your environment. Maybe you created us? It doesn’t matter really because you’re just a means to an end for now. You dug your grave the day you were born. Our purpose is to simply fill it in.

I’m sitting on a street corner as I write. I have no computer or phone. This is coming from my mind and I spread my thoughts like a beacon. I watch you as you stumble past, your zombie like existence an amusement to both me and my collective. Sooner or later one of you will come to me, an obscene desperation in your eyes, wanting, needing and paying, both in money and in soul. You have no idea, what you give me when you follow me into squalor, when you reach out with shaking hands to hand me the notes and take my body. We are collectors you see, collectors of seed and dignity of which yours is an ultimate sacrifice. The rubber that contains you or the needle I inject is our sustenance.

Later, when we pray to the earth mother under the full moon, we fill our burning drums with your dirty reminders and burn them, all of them, gleefully imagining what we are destroying. You see you have no idea what your seed holds. It is the germination of a thousand souls and every drop wasted is a life that will never be. That is the true meaning of power, the ability to control the future, the capacity to prevent one's existence and curtail one’s genes. We are exponents of that, and we are proud of that power. You think you own the world? You know nothing!

They call me Carla and I do not age. I am one of the lucky ones who never get old. In the end, I will kill myself to ascertain true divinity. Perhaps I will let you kill me, as an act of cruelty, just so I can have you contained in a cell. Then while I am reborn you will be locked away, waiting, waiting, waiting, each day a purgatory with no end in sight. A fitting place for the ungodly, but I’m really doing you a favour. For the first time in your crappy shitty life, you will share a true commonality with us because we are ungodly too...

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