Excerpt: The Avfel Haus

"No more!" the boy screamed. "I can't do this anymore! Please, I didn't even know about the new law! You have to let me go!" The volume of the horrible boy band from the late nineteen nineties increased, and the young boy's ears started to bleed. "Please! I beg you! Stop it! What do you want?" the young boy shrieked through a thick stream of drool. "Anything! I'll do anything!"

The young boy was not any older than fourteen. His head used to be graced with a crown of feathery golden hair; now it was bald and sweaty, with the dust and grime of the old decrepit cell making little trails down his brow with every drip of perspiration. His eyes, once sparked with fire blue, were glassy and faded, framed by swollen dark circles.

The boy was named Kristoff, and he was tied by his frail, pale arms and legs to a straight, high backed wooden chair. He wore nothing but the soiled, once white briefs he wore upon his arrest. The dirty stone room he was imprisoned in was only forty degrees fahrenheitski, and the walls were flat and featureless. The only irregularity in the entire room was behind Kristoff's line of sight. They were three speakers, one in the upper right corner of the wall behind him, one in the upper left, and one dead in the middle.

Kristoff had endured nearly eleven full days of torture of the most unimaginable kind. After two days of his torture, his muscles had begun to sieze regularly. After four days, his brain had begun to swell. On the fifth day of Kristoff's suffering, his sinuses began to rupture and his veins slowly started constricting. Today, day eleven of the torture, all the muscles on Kristoff's body below his shoulders had atrophied, his skin began blistering and festering, and his brain had swollen to the point of partial paralysis. His heart had been pounding so hard for the past eleven days that it had grown to three times its natural size and was beginning to lose steam.

A voice with a strong German accent came onto the speakers above the boy band. "Sir, your reeducation ends after two weeks. That's fourteen days, and you're only on day eleven. You'll have to shut up or we'll put on Greeley again."

The horrid music Kristoff was listening to at this point in time was The Backdoor Boys. The Backdoor Boys was merciful compared to Greeley. Even eight year old schoolgirls who liked that shitty sort of bubblegum pop admitted freely that Greeley stinks, whereas they still thought The Backdoor Boys were forgivable.

Almost all of the neurological and muscular damage Kristoff suffered in the past eleven days was due to Greeley. On day seven he finally fell halfway unconscious despite all the cocaine he was being powdered with, and the supervising Punishment Emperors simply thought he was succumbing to compliance. Phase one of the reeducation had been presumed complete and as a reward for his obedience and submission, the Emperors put on the slightly less horrible band.

Instead of bleeding out of every orifice imaginable, Kristoff only bled out the ears and sometimes his nose when listening to the Backdoor Boys.

But now, with three days of reeducation still remaining, Kristoff began to believe that Greeley was a preferable option. Obviously this was not because he thought Greeley was better than the Backdoor Boys, but because he knew that if he endured even an hour more of Greeley, he would be mercifully dead due to an exploded brain and a stopped heart.

Kristoff began screaming. He screamed, he shrieked, he drooled and spat. He snorted and hawked up loogies left and right. He cursed every politician whose name he could remember at that moment. He bit his lips until they bled, and when he ran out of mucus to expel from his mouth, he used his own blood.

The Punishment Emperors turned to each other, nodded, and put Greeley on at notch eleven volume.

After half an hour, Kristoff felt his heart slowing down, slower than he had felt it in any of the past ten days. His headache increased exponentially, then suddenly ceased. His skin bubbled, his limbs convulsed. He knew that his plan had succeeded. He let go of his desire for control over his body and let the awful music ravage him.

And when his body collapsed, ragged against the ropes confining him to the chair, Kristoff used his last breath to chuckle through his broken and bleeding lips. With his last ounce of strength, he closed his eyes and waited for the sweet oblivion that even the horrible Greeley could not intrude upon.