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they were gathered in groups of three: mother, father, child. mother, father, child. if a new batch had more than three to it then the smallest ones would be sent to the "refuse" pile, thus fulfilling the "rule". if incoming subjects were a third piece short then the admitting officer would assign one of the rejected from the refuse pile to an incoming couplet, once again fulfilling the "rule".

dream of love. the unbreakable kind. the kind you wish could never be returned, because you want so bad to believe that yours is the strongest kind, that nobody else can feel about someone the way you feel about someone. you want that for yourself. to give of yourself. to receive upon yourself. dream of that love. the kind that never came. because you did feel that way, so much, so strong, so long. but he never came. love to stand on two feet. love to knock you out cold. prize fighters never knew such strength as your love. your love never knew such pain. dream of love. the kind that spreads. every drop of water is your love. every wisp of hair. every clasped hand. every blinking eye. every wanton smile. your love is your love.

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Giorgio Contreras Romero cut him self from hip to hip, along the waist, and back around the lower part of his neck, just below the bone. He sat in a hut at the edge of the bluff and waited for forty-two days. During that time he bled into a ceramic bowl for twenty-three days and twenty-three nights and on the twenty-forth day his wife came to him.
“Where have you been, my darling?” she asked, a relieved tremble carrying her words.
“It’s been twenty-four days, twenty-four days that I’ve been here in this hut, sitting and bleeding. Where have you been?” he responded, looking only at the marble slab resting before him. The palms of his hands were coarse and pale, flaking away like dry paint. His wife stood in the doorway of the wood hut, eyes sunken, and said, “My darling, I’ve been to here and there looking for you.”
There was a pause. Slowly, Romero stood up from his spot. He bent low to lift the marble slab from the ground, leaving only dead skin in its place. His wife watched anxiously as Romero shifted his the wafer that was his body and began to carefully walk toward her.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he spoke, shaking as he stood in front of her, “but this is what I have seen.”
“Darling?” was the last thing the wife of Giorgio Contreras Romero spoke before being crushed under the weight of the marble slab. Satisfied with his work, Romero returned to his spot on the floor and once more took up his ceramic bowl.
Eleven days would pass before anything would happen once again in the tiny hut at the edge of the bluff. Romero lay motionless underneath the wooden beams as they shifted from brown to cold steel, mutating into something not quite whole, converting five thousand years worth of memory into a single moment. What once was dirt and stone was now cement and metal, industrious and uniform. Romero curled in the remains of his shelter. The bluff begat paved road, the wood hut spawned something of a garage, and people sat all about this new and peculiar place.

I need a new start. I’ve never been more certain of anything in my entire life.
This is something of a predicament.
No one says, “Predicament”.
Pass me another one of those.
Yeah, well that may be true, but honestly, what do you think will really happen?
This is the way those things work.
You wait and see, man.
I’ve heard it all before, okay? We’ve all heard it before.
People say that. People say a lot of things.
What? Open your mouth when you talk.
Shhh. Do you see that?
I’m telling you to shut the Hell up right now.
I’ve practiced this before. Trust me. It’s okay.
No, he’s not coming. He just called and told me.
You’re seeing this, right?
There should be some more over there.
Yeah, I think I’ve seen this all before.