"Propaganda"

I wrote this story based on the first fifty or so images on Google after searching for "Propaganda." Enjoy!

The man in the white hat is pointing his long finger in my face; the man with the mustache keeps his back turned the whole time. Accusations automatically become truth when they're said with enough conviction. A third man in a mask is begging, pleading: is he on my side? I look to her, to her wrists cuffed together like mine, to her brown eyes for reassurance. The finger continues to point as if unattached to any body.

I am aware of the reality, of the gravity of this situation. Mockery is boring but only one of our sides can be right. My enemy loses power when he expresses doubt. But that finger continues to hold steady as if it emanated molecules of doubt that attach to any being at which it aims. Are good and evil relative terms? No. But how did I end up here, with her, in a state of compliance, in a state of surrender?

“Shut up,” the man attached to the finger says. I never said anything out loud. Yet here I am, willing to, eager even, to believe everything he says. And her and I aren't the only ones. The alarms were sounding; we panicked; we fell in line. We surrendered identity. We submitted possessions. We abandoned thought and listened without discourse. We barely ate.

But were we afraid?

I'll be glad tomorrow when this land burns, even with her and me in it. One of us may even have a chance of escape.

“You shut your mouth,” the finger barks.

A man in a mask screams in the corner: is this our chance? Or is the man in the mask setting a trap for us? This will all seem so obvious to future generations. These pigs are no different than the ones they think we support. If the enemies of our enemies are our friends, why define these terms at all?

And then: the bomb.

The room goes white. All I can see is that finger, steady, as if the external world could not affect such a stubborn accusation. A flurry of thoughts scatters through my mind and in a snap judgment I decide who it is I can actually trust around here. The man in the white hat, the man with the mustache, the masked man in the corner, her: Could these all be four sides to the same coin?

I know what is expected of me. I finally grasp the absurdity of the situation. Their talk of good and bad, us and them, it's all meaningless. Mockery is not boring; satire is the one true virtue. All these words, these gestures, they're all meaningless in the face of satirical violence. A voice on a loudspeaker calls for nurses, but clearly no one in this room has been hurt. The finger shifts its position away from me and points in another direction. Relieved, I dream of a land outside this room. Home? No. This is home. The woman with the brown eyes picks up her gun and walks through the door. She lets them decide the next fourteen years of her life. If I could put all this nonsense into one single word, I would.

Distracted by her freedom (or her version of it), comforted by the disappearance of the finger, I fail to notice two hands leaping for my throat. My vision goes red, I try to punch; my mind wanders to thoughts of what could have been. What her and I could have done. What flags we could have raised. If I too could have been free.

But our hope was lost when we surrendered identity. Were we ever even born with the possibility of thinking for ourselves?

Because too late I realize, the two hands around my neck are my own, and they're tied with a string, this whole time, attached to the trigger of a...