💾 Archived View for wampa.xyz › old-poetry › kidnapped.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 11:54:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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kidnapped * “Where are they taking us?” asked Vince as we jostled around in our seats in the back of the army vehicle. He sat diagonal from me on my left, and I was on the passenger side. A few others were with us. I shrugged in response to Vince’s question, and glanced at the two other men in the back with us as they returned my glance with fervor through scrutinizing eyes. After about ten minutes of desert driving, we approached a mountain range, with a strip of desert running through, curving around to the right. After leaving the mountains behind, a luscious green golf course surprised us on our left. A man and a woman, both wearing polo shirts and reeking of high class, were engaged in putting on the first hole’s green. The man was the first to smile at us the whole journey, with the woman following soon after. Reading their body language, their smiles appeared to be genuine, but why they would smile none of us knew or would ever know, since we would never see these two again.

We walked through the desert a bit under our own guidance (apparently none of the men who brought us here cared where we wandered), and approached a one-story building that was shaped like an ‘L". The roof consisted of standard red shingles, and the walls were stuccoed and beige, and both were well worn by the sand’s well-intentioned constant caressing. The inside looked like a sort of thrift or antique store, with old tube televisions, rustic wooden chairs, generic art by unknown artists, and so on. We stumbled upon a woman silently sitting and reading a magazine in the short part of the building, and inquired as to why she was here, and also as to why we were here. She lowered her reading material slightly and then looked up, first with her eyes and then with the rest of her head. “I am here because I need to be. You are here because you need to be.” She spoke sternly. I possibly even detected a hint of annoyance, as if she had been asked those particular questions far too frequently…

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