Hellcats Lair

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Katzenjammer

Ariana

Monologues

The Brink

GINGER

Dawn’s getting started and it looks like any other dawn. The sun’s not up yet so the colors aren’t right. And from where we stand, I can see a hare darting through the scrubs. The world is crisp and waiting to begin.

The stranger stands across from me, shifting her feet, fixated on the hare. And then she says, "You’re out on the brink."

I think, it’s just a small diner. She looks at me, and I realize I said it out loud. And then I see how totally stupid that sounds. I pull hard on my cigarette. What did the stranger mean?

And then it comes to me all in a blast, washing over me, flooding my soul with lights and ideas.

It’s the desert. Everything’s the desert. And the diner is here like it’s the edge of the world and reality falls away from it in every direction in submission to the overwhelming maw that is the desert. It’s the brink of civilization. This is where man comes to meet his maker and play God himself. He smashes atoms together to see what they do in this nothing desert. The same sort of nothing where the original blast created the world. They reenact the beginning again and again in those vast wastes. And people are drawn here to be reduced to nothing, to be taken down to their basic elements, and be recreated.

All of this flashes over me in a single moment. And I say it as simply and quickly as I can to not lose one mote of this vibrant flash. And the stranger, she shakes her head and she says, "I meant, there’s nothing around."

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