Dead in Long Beach, California: A Novel

by Venita Blackburn

We have theories on the concept of debt as a method for humans to enslave one another through a rhetorical magic that results in possession or being possessed. Our theories were quite elaborate once, but most have been discarded due to a space-saving campaign in the archives. Still, the concept is quite intriguing due to the carnage and devastation enacted in the name of debt over thousands of years. If there were a beast at the heart of human suffering, a gnawing, drooling, stinking, hungry fiend of crowded teeth and eyes yellowing from hunger and thirst, that beast would be greed, and its feces would be debt. We are not sure if that image is accurate; we can only speculate that it might convey the magnitude of the consequence that debt held over humanity.