The Axe Oil Story

While travelling across the pink and glittering river in a ferry that usually got me late, I arrived surprisingly on time to the fortress of the ‘Eurean Wall’. For everyone wondering what the Eurean Wall is – it is a menacingly ominous structure that stands 500 meters into the sea, as a bastion of purity and healing against a forever blue-grey sky. What it fails to let one know is the fact that in the process of creating the elixir that soothes man of fears, aches and grotesque images from the past, it drives the lives of many of its workers into misery, mine included.

So as I entered these cursed gates, a crow with a red ribbon around its neck called out to me from behind. It wailed in pain as a result of archery in the neighborhood, but I had no choice except to get to my workplace. I just dropped a small jute bag with a small bottle in it, beside the crow hoping it would apply itself. Despite the dreary image that superseded the languorous walls on the outside, the insides of this fortress resembled the future from the future unseen – luxurious, royal and cushioned. The torture was of the mind. They used the principle of feeding the goat well before slaughtering it. My mind, like most minds, often tended to slander the Employers. And in this castle of a work place libel of any kind was simply unacceptable. They took out long processions against those who even stirred any mind activity against the establishment.

Subsequently, I switched on my digital Skytop( Floating laptop)which got me acquainted with the sales and accounts that spiraled upwards as every day passed. The monopoly of the Axe Oil company was a strong motivating force for all employees whether they liked it or not. All of us employees were given glass casings of this Axe Oil that rested comfortably on our tables as a reminder of our curtailed and shackled lives.

Suddenly, shrieking like a sharp whistle, a small cleaner-boy was being dragged out and was followed by a trail of blood that dripped from his foot. It seemed as though the force at the top of the hierarchy had struck down the free mind. I looked at the calendar and realized it was that day of the week when the sacrifice of the unscrupulous was given to the Crocodile Arena. Here, crocodiles didn’t eat you or bite you. In fact they were blind. But the sheer size and number of the well-fed crocodiles trampled you in a frenzied stampede thereby crushing you previously upheld untrammelled spirit. This was the nature of the ill-treatment.

The mailbox on my screen flashed in bold “Get with it!” in reference to the consignments that were pending and snapped me out of the delirium. The Eurean Wall was known to manufacture the greatest and finest by-product of Eucalyptus oil which they branded the ‘Axe Oil’. This meant that the work load was harder to accomplish than scaling the highest peaks. I decided to get with it when right outside my window, that occupied the frontal portion of my desk, crowds started to gather. It was the death call for that poor boy that got dragged out. I panicked and my chair slipped almost dropping my head on the table to the side. Just managing balance I peered from above the glass window to see the words in the Crocodile Arena light up in blue and red. It read “TO THE UNSCRUPULOUS, MERCY WILL NOT BE SHOWN.”

I then saw the entire process of the boy being crumpled and pulverized organ by organ which forced a sweat drop from my forehead to my chest. There was nothing anyone could do at this point but gulp. Everyone in my cabin just gingerly whispered, “I knew he was cursing boss for asking him to polish the oil’s bottle by an extra millimeter. Stupid guy’s thoughts would’ve been caught on the radar”. As soon as the boy saw his last breaths everyone immediately opened their respective bottles on their tables and whiffed away - as though the oil would heal their minds and spirits and contain their exuberant hearts whilst they still worked there. And everything else resumed as it was, with a pleasant smile! Just then across my window, the red-ribbon crow fluttered away into the horizon.