❦ The year had passed him by rapidly, this thirteenth year of the twenty-first century, in which he laid in wait. A century and a half, it had now been, since the days of what could perhaps be called his greatest blunders in the fields of Pennsylvania. Oh, how his moronic ruler loved to remind him of it!
But times were different now, and the minds of most did not float to the long dead who had suffered and rotted and bloated into grotesque monsters on the battlefield. The sight of stiffened, dead hands reaching out from moist soil to the light of day, zombies perhaps--or rather only improperly buried carcasses--no longer tormented the minds of living women and children.
It was now a hundred and fifty years since that day at Appomattox, and no one lived to remember it but his mirror image and himself. No, not in living color, did the young recall, but of days long past in monochrome on tin and glass sheets, something to be studied in school. Something unreal, unthinkable. Those that cried of hardship now did not know the hardship that they had endured.
It was in moments such as today, when he had stood inside a restaurant and viewed young women texting and laughing with their short hair and even shorter skirts, that Confred felt infinitely old. But he was not, no, not in comparison to many of the others, and yet he could not help the feeling.
A hundred and forty-eight years since Appomattox, but not all had forgotten. The world was modern, and he was forced to adapt. They did not cry for slavery now, but rather for religious freedoms, and life, and this and that. He would take their causes only because they were what allowed him to live. New debates divided the nation, and he had to cling and tear at them to force remembrance.
It does not have to be this way. You do not have to live under these northern tyrants!
He was laughed at, of course. Himself, the thought, himself, the person, they had always been laughed at. Once he had been feared, and it was only a matter of time before the laughs ceased and their brows knit in realization of his reality. Division was where he lived, and unity in it, where he thrived.
Perhaps he could be considered the devil, in the Yankee's mind. There he was, the thought, the terrible thought, the creeping thought that lead his people to wonder.
And if he could be created by a thought, he could too destroy with a thought.
