Opaque People

Wawh needed to impress this prospective employer. He was an Opaque person in a foreign land of Translucents. His body had reflective skin like a rainbow trout while the native Translucents had spots and sparkles suspended in their see-through body like a stained glass window with dirt on it. He sat across the Translucent “Head Stonk Manager’s” giant desk in a job interview to attain the prestigious title of “Stonk Hoarder.” Opaquer and Translucent alike could bend and stretch into many folds and lengths; they were in many ways the same. Wawh could then try to become a seer, a well-paid man who wrote delightful stories about stonks for all to enjoy.

Wawh’s homeland was on the edge of the sunlit world. Translucent people had reduced Wahw's place of origin to a destitute hellhole; they had blown it up with cannons to turn it into a void. He lost everything and only had the hempen clothes on his body. There was nothing there but torture from the newly established murderous government and starvation for the young Opaquer and his equally not-Translucent wife, Aqua, in their old country.

Stonk hoarders danced in the wind, collecting the ethereal blocks known as stonks that flew from the mountain. The stonks looked like ice cream sandwiches, a vanilla almond custard paste wedged between two blocks of asphalt. They existed partially in this world and in another time in another dimension that no one knew.

A statuette of a woman in a shimmering dress and another wooden statuette of a man with a tunic that appeared to be from Wawh’s homeland stood at each end of the broker’s desk. And an obscene picture, drawn with a crooked and uneven perspective, depicted a naked Opaque woman holding her breasts toward eight Translucent men hung behind the broker on the wall. 

“Take off all your clothes, so I can see if you are opaque throughout your entire body,” the Translucent stonk broker said to Wawh. “Then I’ll give you a job as a stonk hoarder.”

Wawh unbuckled his belt and dropped his pants. “You see, I am opaque all over.”

The stonk broker made a whistling sound to show he enjoyed the sight. “Sorry, sweet crevice,” the stonk broker said. “I want people who I can see through so I can trust them. Without trust, no one will believe a stonk broker. You people are rapists anyway.”

“But don’t you need someone who’s solid and can be relied on?” Wawh said.

“It’s enough you’re an intruder in my land and an interloper in the Translucent Domain. I think you people should be blasted from a cannon to the desert south!”

It was no use arguing with him. Wawh put his pants back on and buckled his belt. He lost his best chance at success and left the bright office. If only he was not so different. He could not say out loud how tyrannical things were and how Translucent people were ignorant to call Opaquers rapists. Wawh knew many of his kind from the old land and not one of them was a rapist.  

Wawh wanted to see his extended family, but the Translucent ones blew them up in the 2nd Territorial War for Domination. The Translucents he dealt with in this new land were the same brood and some of the same people that participated in the orgy of violence unleashed on Wawh’s people. To bring bigger insult, Translucents considered Opaquers barbarians while they themselves clearly were the primitive, animalistic ones. Translucents held the attitude their land was the center of all civilization and progress; the rest of the world was a swamp of rot and decay.

Wawh had the highest education in, as the Translucent described it, “heathen architecture” with its shiny edges and lined insignias. He missed his mother and father who sang complex songs that were totally forgotten to him. If only he recorded the beautiful music. 

 

Wawh and his wife Aqua went to the deli and picked up the shifting newspaper whose pages danced like the wind gusting on the leaves of a sunlit forest canopy. He turned to the last page and tilted it back and forth; the newspaper was a sheer-fabric rag that one could make out writing from twisting it up and down in the light.

Wawh’s belly had disappeared the day before and his wife, Aqua, had become a shroud of shimmering sequins draped over the frame of a tiny skeleton. Aqua was a beautiful Opaque woman with wavy hair, acute curves, and two large fists. Her skin glimmered and reflected light into a rainbow of colors.

“Are you thinking of stealing that?” the Translucent woman behind the counter said. “All of you people belong in a dark hole.” Shards of shrapnel floating inside the glaze of her head glittered.

“I just need to look at the wanted ads,” Wawh said. “For a microminute.”

“I should put a sign out, ‘no badgers and Opaquers’ outside.”

This woman was a textbook bigot and a flag waver of injustice.

The shopkeeper hobbled out from behind the counter on crutches. One of her legs was missing up to the kneecap. She presumably lost it in the war against his homeland. The Translucent-nation ghastly yellow-and-black bend-sinister flag wrapped around her thigh stub refracted light from the upside-down fire falling from the ceiling into a spittoon.

Wawh ignored her for a second and sifted through the paper more. There was an opportunity in a bebop refinery for a “paying position.”

 

So off to the refinery he went. It was a giant furnace surrounded by coppices on the edge of the shiny city. The Translucent man—every boss was Translucent —in a chrome wheelchair with spinning rims came to him as he opened the door that said “hiring office”. The office had a fire burning under the ceiling. It reeked of crazy glue.

“We need strong men to shovel the bebops into the funnel to pack the pipes so they don’t leak,” the man in the wheelchair said. Drool dripped from the corner of his mouth. “It pays one strip of grizzle an hour. We could use you.”

“I’ll be glad to do that,” Wawh said. He held back preemptive tears of joy.

“But first, I’ll have to check your paperwork.”

“But…” Wawh cried. “I don’t have any paperwork!”

“Sorry, we cannot hire the unrecorded here. We are a legit productive business.”

Wawh sniffled and a tear washed down his cheek. He could not argue with him about the injustice; he did not want to be demanding and rude.

Wawh took a deep breath as he exited the odorous room. He dreamt of monuments in his honor and a clay house overlooking the brook. Seeing obelisks in Time Square made him miss his home where his people had built a circle of Opaque statues over the hills to please the Great God. It was so beautiful until it was bombed by the Translucent cannon brigades. He was once proud to be an Opaquer, but now he was ashamed of it because of how his people lost every struggle. The fanciful God punished all his kind.

His body shook because of overwhelming hunger.

A group of Translucent men dressed in refined formal clothing, peacoats and stockings, stood on the corner smoking something with the plastic smell of angel dust. Their wealthy appearances suggested they had money. Wawh grabbed his Aqua by the hand and ran over to them.

“Please, can you spare something? We are starving.” Wawh raised his shirt to show his caved-in stomach. “Please!”

“We like Opaque people. In fact, we love them,” the man with the patch over his eye said.

“We think they are sexy,” the bigger man said, smirking or smiling. The veins on his neck had a tint of red to them.

The other three other men who were tiny said “Aye aye!”

“We would love to give you food, just let us get at that woman next to you, so we can enjoy her for a little while,” the man said with the vein. The vein moved as if it were talking, too. “Right under this cloud umbrella!” he said. He pulled one out from behind him and unfurled it, putting clouds over them to protect them from the rain that was forecasted to come.

“Can’t you give us these gifts because we need them?” Wawh said.

It seemed the only purpose he and his wife had come here was to be degraded. This rich land hoarded its riches like a miser and ransomed survival to its asylum seekers. Hunger trampled over morality and self respect. Wawh had learned about good and evil from his religion called “the Faith of the Most High God,” a religion similar to the Translucents’ “Great God Church.” He would be breaking many sacred laws the arch-elders had taught him to follow to have a meaningful life. Whenever Wawh stopped to think, he thought of dreadful things.

“Can’t we help you with something else?” Aqua said.

The veined man took out an oatmeal muffin from his back pocket and tucked it back in. “You’ll be needing these.” He pointed to the bench. “All your wife needs to do is just lay dow—”

“Ok!” Aqua said. “Anything so we can survive.”

“That’s all the persuasion you needed?” Wawh said.

“Do we have a choice?” Aqua said.

“He watches,” the man with the eyepatch said, pointing at Wawh.

Wawh groaned and had to agree.

The men took turns entering Wawh’s wife underneath the translucent cloud as she leaned on the bench. The speckled orgiasts slapped each other high fives and chanted “Translucent Team” after each turn. Wawh closed his eyes to block out the degradation of his innocent saint of a wife. One of the small Translucents who did not have large sexual organs went behind Wahw and directed his face toward his violated wife and said, “open those eyes. Now! Or you don't get paid!” In plain cloud-filtered light, Aqua got on her knees and pleasured all of them with her free hands and body. Glossy gossamer flesh filled every orifice of her body. And she moaned, her skin flushed, and she had the same comforted look of acceptance and love she displayed when Wawh asked her to marry her; it was as if he never knew her in their eight years of marriage.

The vein on the man expanded to the size of the fist as he smiled and filled Aqua's reproduction hole. His eyes rolled back into his head. A drip of sweat trickled down his forehead and onto Aqua’s back.

 

When the orgy ended, Wawh exhaled. Maybe he was better off starving in his war-torn home than having his wife passed around and worked about like barbells in a gym. What a terrible and unjust life this had become!

“That was fun, my dear.” The eyepatched one laid a kiss on Aqua’s lips. She grinned.

The veiny man said “oh, and here’s your payment.” He took out a muffin and braced his chin with a ziplock bag. He devoured the muffin and crumbs fell inside the bag. He gave the bag to Wawh.

Wawh was so hungry he put a crease in the bag and poured most of the sugary crumbs down his mouth. Aqua cocked her eye in scorn.

“What!” Aqua said. “What have you done? Now I’m going to die….”

“I left some for you.” Wawh presented the mostly-eaten bag with a line of crumbs on the bottom to Aqua.

She cried “this is not enough!”

“But-but!”

Aqua’s stomach caved in. Her body shrunk into a ball, and she disappeared.

“No!” Wawh cried.

It was his fault! Aqua was his destined mate. No woman had her beauty and warm personality. He ran to the forest to cry and sat down atop a tree stump. The tears flowing down ferns and grass around him formed a streamlet that washed down into the surging river inside the chasm. Wawh’s selfishness killed his love.

Time was precious when every second made an implosion from hunger nearer and nearer. He had to be strong. But he still needed a few moments to put himself in good shape for the search. Perhaps the trip to the forest burned too many calories. It was as if he had no control over his actions from the mind fog of hunger.

A Potato Sprite appeared next to him. He was a waist-height stout little person with potatoes for ears. He wore a fencing outfit covered in diced potatoes. He put his french-fry hand on Wawh’s shoulder. Sprites were a minority that lived mostly in the woods.

“Here, my friend,” the Sprite’s high-pitched voice said. “I’m here to help. Go to the Department of Social Services and ask them for emergency food stamps.”

With that the sprite flashed and disappeared. Wawh thought it took a month to get the paperwork filed, so he would not need it once he got a job.

 

Wawh walked because he could not afford the bus to Social Services. He came into the factory-like building. A Translucent man with reflective eyeglasses sat behind plexiglass.

“Reason for your visit?” the man said.

“I need food.”

“Wait and a worker will be with you.”

 

A long and hungry hour later, a man who looked like a clone of the secretary with the same tortoiseshell eyeglasses called him into an office. A bright overhead light poured yellow illumination on him.

“Ah, so I see you need food.” The man frowned. “Let me explore you. Standard procedure.” He withdrew a plastic glove from a big box on his desk and slipped his hand into it. It was one hopeless situation to the next. He had to be violated like Aqua to survive. This is what this sick world had throbbed for. But he could not be an angry Opaque person; angry Opaquers would never be tolerated or wanted for a job.

“Pull your pants down and bend over the chair.”

Wawh grit his teeth and obliged.

“You are a good Opaquer,” the man said.

The morally-bankrupt government official entered Wawh and made a fist and then spread his hands out flat inside his rear hole. Wawh’s insides expanded and echoed in pain. Could the man deny him his remittance if he did not find this examination acceptable? 

“I see you are alive and right for assistance,” the Translucent man withdrew his hand, and the cavity in Wawh’s body closed up. “I’ll get you set up immediately.”

 

Wawh went to the meat cutter, bought a few strips of grizzle with his EBT card, and devoured their chewy goodness right in the store. The food was only enough to help keep him from dying for a few days. His poor wife was gone, a victim of his greed and selfishness, and her loss made tears come to his eyes. He would preserve his people’s language and customs. The coughs and sneezes of the government official putting his hand and making a fist inside him cascaded through his mind a few times an hour.

He went to another job interview at a wheel grindership. The Translucent man wore overalls and a wrench in his front pocket and sat at a desk with oil stains diffused on it.

“What makes you want to work here?” the man said, his face breaking up the light from the ceiling.

“Food.”

“Good reason. What is your favorite color?”

“Viridian.”

The boss pursed his lips. “We usually hire people that like piquant, but I’m sure you’ll make a good door handle.”

“I would love to be that!” God’s rumored mercy smiled on him.

“You start immediately.”

Wawh paused and wished he could see Aqua’s oval eyes from the crease of her smile when he told her the news. A tear gathered in his eye, but he took a deep breath. He folded himself seventy times over and molded his dark body to the knob hole in the door. The Translucent boss forged a giant brass key to go into Wawh’s behind.