Article: 288699 of talk.bizarre From: gomi@best.com (Gomi no Sensei) Newsgroups: talk.bizarre Subject: Assaulting Tegucigalpa Date: 1 Dec 1996 23:06:13 -0800 Organization: Best Internet Communications Lines: 33 Message-ID: <57tv55$8vn@shellx.best.com> Keywords: fts At dawn, as we all ran screaming down the tinder-dry slopes of the hills that surround Tegucigalpa like the bones outside a predator's cave, brandishing our flaming limbs so that sparks flew everywhere (as if we were the ignition of a new sun to challenge the one rising, a flaming defiance to the ancient blazing ember that had defined our waking lives), turning the sere vegetation into a roaring firesnake whose illumination joined our own to shout our challenge to the dawn in yellow dancing light, the very ground seemed to shrink away from us, to tremble under our feet, a little in awed respect for what we had achieved, a little in horror at the need that had driven us to it, and the city itself and tried even to uproot itself, to run from us (from us, before whom the wind that fed the fires in our wake hung its head, ashamed!), it sought escape from a vengeance it had bought years before with an unholy burning we had first suffered, then endured, then tamed; a fire we did not put outside a crucible but within one, the better to transform it into the purifying raiment, the naked strength, the righteous agony in which we were now clothed as the hills around Tegucigalpa burned from our footsteps, raining a glowering yellow light on that cluster of stone temples and structures of less identifiable purpose, the wooden walkways connecting them already ablaze as we danced our implacable rage out on the stones and bodies and embers of the city's body and soul, its buildings and inhabitants, reducing buildings to rubble, people to corpses, all to char and ash and an ineradicable stench that hung low over the valley, waiting for the wind we outran to arrive and scatter the ashes into the waiting crevices of the hillsides. gomi -- 'spend a day and a half dead and the lettuce runs amok.' -babs woods