The Emperor's Theater

Slowly, the audience filed in. Down the aisle that ran down the
middle of the theatre, they separated in pairs and moved to seats right
and left. All dressed in red, robes with gold ties and headresses that
hung like hair. Quietly, they seated themseleves and awaited the
arrival of the great showman.
The showman came to the empire a score ago, and brought the theater
with him. The actors were faces seen through televisions, internets,
and books of old. The great showman called himself Levi, and his
actors, the dead souls ensemble.
The lights in the theater dimmed and the hush continued. In the perfect
silence that surrounded the seats, a faint violin cord was struck. It
moved on, louder and louder and then was accompanied by a trumpeteer.
Large banners fell down onto the stage as the curtains opened to a
dead, black stage.
"Welcome, dear guests, to the Emperor's Theater. I will be your host
and guest, Levi. This will mark the twentieth annual extravaganza of my
gift to you."
The lights opened up and the stage lay bare. For all of twenty years,
no one had ever glimpsed the great showman.
The wooden stage began to stir and the walls and beams followed suit. A
crackling, like slow-fry, made it's way across the stage that now
seemed to move back out into an unknown void. The back of the stage was
now eons away and the wood was ripped with veins of tremor. Blood began
to seep up the cracks and flood the stage and it dripped down onto the
unknown orchestra which played from the pit.
"And what do you want?" Levi shouted from the void.
The audience responded in unison, breaking their dead silence. "LET IT
BLEED!"
The lights fell back down and the audience resumed the dead
silence.
A golden stream of light came out from behind an emerging cloud, which
floated in the void. On the stage a man, skinny and dark looked up
towards it, his hair hung down past his beard.
"My children, I have let you down and now I am but another actor on the
stage." As walked out to the edge of the pit his scars became visible,
both circling his head and marking each limb. The savage tear in his
gut still ran red.
"Look at me! Look at me! Please bleed for me!"
The curtain closed and the light got brighter behind the curtain and
faded red.
"And what becomes of a carpenter who tries to lead?" Levi's voice
boomed.
"WE LET HIM BLEED!"
The curtain then dropped, fell onto the stage. A fire emerged from the
stage and consumed the curtain. The audience could feel the heat
searing the stage and threatening to move into the pit. From out of the
fire arose a great drageon with seven heads and seven tails. It
regarded the audience for moments and gave a small grin before jumping
form the stage and into the pit in an impossible angle. The pit blew
into a chord of dissaray and was at once silenced. The fire began to
disipate and the stage faded into the void.
The stage lit again and the audience found themselves staring at an
audience. But, this audience was diffent, this audience was something
from the cove r of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The first row
consisted of Sigmund Freud, Muhhamad, Shakespeare, Jim Morrison, Attila
the Hun, Rasputin, Abraham Lincoln, Joseph Stalin, Kurt Cobain, John
Lennon, Karl Marxx, Henry Ford, and John F. Kennedy.
They stared at the original audience and seemed bored with what they
saw. "Please, do womthing!" Martin Luther King demanded from the second
row. "It's our turn, now!"
"Light them up!" John Lennon shouted from somewhere in the fifth row.
"Light them up, now!"
Not a word came from the original audience and this seemed to coax the
actors on. Now, screaming with a blood lust, the actors began rising
and advancing on the audience only to fall into the pit, row after row.
The pit erupted into Sympathy for the Devil and the void returned. The
actors chairs melted into the floor and Levi addressed the
audience.
"And what do we do with the piss poor leaders of our time, do we keep
them in the books we read? Or do we&;#8230;"
"LET THEM BLEED!"
Out in the void an orb floated in a blackness that was acne'd with
stars. A slow satelite circled the orb, and a far away sun glinted off
the horizon.
As the audience watched the orb grew from fed, to orange, to yellow and
then to brown. A series of veins opened up on the orb, moving toward
the light like refugees. The brown became muddled with blues and greens
and movement could be seen as the orb grew ever closer to the pit.
Movement in the blue, movement of corals growin purple under the blue.
Then small beasts emerged from the blue to be struck by the light of
the star. Then they proceeded out of the ocean where they grew huge in
a series of reptilian patterns. The slow fall of the light drew a
breathe from the audience as a large cratered mass fell onto the orb.
Now, it grew black and faded into the orb.
A shrill trumpet erupted and the orb pronounced itself in a white disc.
The white began to slowly melt and movement could be seen again. Now
the movement was slower, but began to speed up. Clouds moved across the
orb and small patterns emerged once again on the orb along the
equatorial line. These patterns grew as the white receded and slowly,
they went from the colors of the orb, to the colors of the void. They
grew large and dotted the orb and choked the clouds from the sky.
Explosions tore into the orb and bright lights shot on and off across
the blue. The blackness still grew deeper and more dense, until the orb
was black again. Then a trumpet shot a note and the blackness became
pimpled with large explosions that lit the orb enough to see rockets
leaving the orb as it became black again and imploded.
"And what do we do once we've used our Mother for all our needs?"
"WE LET HER BLEED!"
The void filled the stage again, then lit up with spotlights. What the
audience found on the stage was themselves, watching themselves. The
stage audience got up and moved toward the pit like zombies. The
original audience began to clap and laugh at the absurd situation,
waiting for the stage audience to fall into the pit like the dragon and
the rest. But the stage audience jumped over the pit in one unifiormed
bound and engulfed the audience.
Jesus appeared again and looked at the cannibalism from the great
stage.
"Oh, savior, our savior, what do we do with an audience that would let
you bleed"
"We give them what they need."

Somewhere in the void a loud ovation began to fade back into the
blackness.