You ask: "Can you give me more represitia (sagacious, old leaked life)?"

But the man who is seating at the edge of a small, round table hardly acknowledges the question. He only inflicts a weak expression across the plasticity of his face. He coughs. He looks you in the eye briefly and then shakes his head.

You reach out your young hand, which is cupping lumps of collendarian (a blackened, wet currency.) He does not look at your hand but you can see by his aged, tired expression that he certainly knows what is in your hand, how much collendarian you have to give. He is shaking his head again and he is not looking at you. He is looking through you or maybe behind you.

You turn around because you think there is someone behind you. You think that he might be looking at someone who is behind you. But there is nothing behind you. There is the entrance. There are the sallow, fleshy doors. There is the long walkway of stones and wood and metal and a ceiling which is so high that it almost dissolves into black. And somehow, when you turn your head and swallow the whole picture behind you, that low whirring sound increases in volume. It is ubiquitous and it is jarringly loud now. Then there is a ripping sensation inside of you, the sensation of your entire viscera tearing into thinly sliced fragments. It is awful now.

You turn back around and you face the man. You try to form a twisted, pathetic look on your youthful face. You want to look as desperate as you truly feel. But he is still not looking at you. And even though you are sure that he heard your request the first time, you ask a second time. You say: "Please may I have more represitia? Please. I can give you whatever you like."

You are very serious when you say this. You are willing to give this man whatever he wants in exchange for represitia. You even think about all the foul things he has asked of you before. You remember a yellow day at a metropolitan festival. You remember moving slowly towards a crowd of people and using your sharp scream to stop them all, to make them turn and face you with tear-streamed expressions. Then you systematically robbed each person of all their musutilia (heated, new life.) You wore that sneering, convex face and you continued screaming until each one of them looked blue-black and drained. The musutilia felt wonderful cradled in your arms and gobs of it dropped to the earth when you sped away from those sad looking victims. You did not stop screaming until the festival was out of sight and the sun fell all the way down below the ground. And then you brought all of it to him. You wore your passive, thrall eyes. That may have been the first time you lost complete control.

And even after you ask the question a second time, he does not acknowledge you. He is extremely tired. He is tenuous and sickly looking with longer strands of light hair drifting in front of his averted eyes. He coughs. Now you are not sure if he even can look at you. You wonder if perhaps he has become too ill to raise his head, to look into you with straight and strong eyes. You know that he is febrile to the touch. You see his steamy skin and you take a step back. He coughs.

You think about taking the represitia from him. You think about pushing him from his chair and searching the entire building to find the represitia. You are sure that he has it all stored somewhere. He is hoarding it. He is keeping it all in some green, circular casing. You have seen it. He will wait for you to leave and then he will destroy it all. You know his true intentions. You know that he has no intention of giving you any new represitia. You know he will pour it all into the piping hot river and watch it flow out and away. Your hands are sweating now. Your stomach is throbbing.

You can only remember one occasion when the pain was this intense. The broad daylight poured onto your head and you were trapped in a large expansive knee-deep lake. You were trudging through the murky, viscous liquid and the pain inside of you might have been the only thing actuating you towards the house so far away. You carried much musutilia in your leathery, cold arms. You remember thinking about letting it all go, letting the musutilia fall into the lake and sink to the bottom. The image was solid in your head- the lake's bottom feeders sucking away at the slop after it had settled to the floor. But you did not let go. You carried the heap so far. You carried it all the way to the high-ceilinged house and you placed it down heavily onto that small, round table. The contours of your face had changed; they had whittled down smooth and plain. You looked nothing like your former self and he laughed when he saw you. He took in the musutilia and a look of satisfaction usurped his old, beaten face. He knew how far you had come. He knew how much you wanted all of the represitia. And he gave it all over to you.

But now he can not swallow any more musutilia. He is too tired and old to sustain any more of the stuff in his system. And you do not have any musultilia to speak of any way. You have given all yours away. You have stolen everyone else's. You only have this collendarian, which is definitely worthless to him. You feel ridiculous now that you have even tried to give any collendarian to him. If there was even the slightlest chance of him handing over the represitia before, there is no chance now. You have insulted him with your collendarian.

He coughs. His head hangs lower than before. You lean back and you can see his skin pouring to the ground. This man is not long for this world. He is so close to the end now and you cannot help yourself from posing the idea a final time. You say: "All I want from this world, all I ever wanted from this world was represitia. When I try to sleep I can only think of represitia and how it feels as it soaks into my body. It is my life. I know you understand. So let me tell you that all I truly need to feel happy is represitia. It is what compels me. Please. Please. I have nothing else left in this body. I have no more musutilia. You have taken it all. Please."

And then he lifts his head very gently and looking you straight in the eyes, wearing an expression of honest submission, he says: "Take it."