Eschatology: Fiction of the Week by Nathan Fisher
News Editor

I go into the shop.
Before this, I look at the shop window: the enticing display of female mannequins posed as goddesses in latest fashion with bags and bags of flour piled at their feet. I want this, sexually, the female mannequins and their flour and, behind this, what it all represents, so.
I go into the shop and the shop owner announces, “Hello, I am the store owner and: Sale! Today! Only!”
I walk past him to the back of the shop, through a strange, wrought-iron door, into the back room, to the back wall of the shop. Behind this wall: the parking lot, the loading dock, the brief row of pine trees meant to evoke the bucolic in commerce. On the wall: tools and bits of metal, strewn about on mounted shelves: a drill here, drill bits there, a level, a rake, a broom, etc. Just before the wall: several neat stacks of bags of flour, piled six high, at least.
The shop owner, concerned, follows me into the back room, lagging several steps. “Excuse me, sir.”
I raise my hand, non-threateningly but with a certain forceful charm that I had not previously supposed to possess. So he disappears, dreamlike. Just like that.
Many salable items in this room but, alas, there are no prices here. I sit down, on top of the flour, and already I feel my legs begin to decay. I am certainly not hungry. Thirsty, perhaps.
Alone now, a single phrase continues to bubble to the forefront of my consciousness, so genuine that I can hear it spoken to me with another’s voice: a female voice: a female mannequin’s voice. “The law is neither a device for futurism nor regression,” she speaks.
As soon as it is completed the phrase begins again and the female voice, I imagine, intones the strange expression musically, like a chant, with the emphasis sliding toward the end of the sentence, ending in a high note.
I feel a draft, though all the doors are shut and there are no windows. I become frightened, extremely self-aware. The voice does not stop and, indeed, grows louder, more urgent with each iteration.