The Cybernetic Cyclops and the Psychic Palate of his Concubine

Gloria was a Musketeer and she worked for one of the strongest bosses in the Old North District. She waited, tonight, for her watch. Every night for the last 15 days was the same. She poured some oil in a small silver dish and waited by dim candlelight. The minutes passed slowly in the empty halls of her father and all of the ancestors before him.
A slide reel concludes and the lights crackle like the anemic wartime bulbs that they were. The crowd began to file out, mostly through the broad center aisle. He dreamed he had been in the belly of a fish and not at some official session, “...stripping away all that mankind holds dear.” The words, the hoarsely grunted syllables, appeared in his mind.
A castle hall adorned with tapestries and washing bowls feeds into a chamber laced with dials and meters, grotesque figurines anointed with human blood, bubbling cauldrons and spewing flasks, steaks of pancreas and lung, and sausages of greasy excrement. The bell announces the hour.

I was alone by the stream as my house lived this way. I will return to her soon and she will be still.