Compared with other routes of administration, Plague Water Worship was perhaps the most potent way to correct cultural imbalances and allocate penance and punishment throughout the society. Typically, the condemned heretic had their skin forced or wedged open and held still with pincers or strips of cloth. By means of Hypothermic Inquisition, their inner liquids were then rapidly drained and interchanged with one of many variants of Plague Water, including acetic acid, choking glass, or formaldehyde. This transfusion of drought toxins could be adjusted to induce stupor, memory lapse, or temporary coma in the accused, allowing the inquisitors to access and extract personal disclosures, dehydration codes, and other conversion ingredients.
When repeated or prolonged Plague Water Worships were performed upon a specific victim, it was not uncommon for their body to grow dependent upon the torture, no longer able to regulate or reconcile the circulation of confession material on it’s own. In this case, it was necessary for the water of the victim to be beaten back into the skin, creating a soft containment for those concessions still to come.
Some built it up as a burning thing, but I knew it as a pierce through the window, there were too many small bites to let the heat show. I lost track. The bones inside kept moving.
Jillison had a red incision and a face with various backings. Chalk, gypsum, pigment, or any combination of these. They told him it was a pose for sleep, not for here.
The room was in linear form, the interior was cut out of dark paper. I was restless and nervous, uncovering and covering cloth, turning ingredients on and off, checking over and over to tell whether the charges had come back on. The walls offered advice on how to distinguish between a drowning (water in the lungs) and strangulation (broken neck cartilage). Jillison read them in front of me.
You start to hate yourself and you don't even know it. A crow storm at the corners of your mouth. A silhouette split open with an ice pick. It becomes every day.
There wasn't anywhere to crawl away, no even footing, no pulse to begin.
Head wounds matched perfectly with a piece of wet paper they kept in their pocket. When the body and the confession were the same, they treated the water like it was a common wound.
They told me to wait, so I did. They said it would hurt, and it did.
I was cold enough that I'd almost forget. And then I'd remember again. The anxiousness of all skins, sunk into one and then collapsed over me. Layers and layers of yellowed and worn out and hollowed and cold. Coffinlike and caught there.
I shut the door without a sharp angle or strong volume, I sat on a closed rectangle in the corner, under a window that never closed, I was a body under water or ice. White and gray and giving in.
I couldn't tell Jillison not to worry anymore, she had good reason and I was useless in hiding it. If it wasn't theft, it was outright manipulation, bulk shifts filled with hostility, a contagious headache. They never stopped watching us. It wasn't a worship. It was an emptiness, indistinguishable from the rest of it.
The room went from cold to bone level in less than an hour. I don't know how. I tried to sleep, six blankets on top of me, it wasn't enough. I tried to put the skin back on. In the dark, with only my open veins.
A cornered animal must create their own cage.
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