Compound Fracture

"So where's the fun in that?" she texted.

This fissure of a comment wedged into his mind like a siren call.

He had immediately dismissed it as "devil talk" and laughed with the surety of a never-to-be-opened door.

But if he was so right, why did something so obviously wrong stick in his craw?

For the full 20 years of his existence he'd spent life in the Compound. He'd heard horror stories of life on the outside: stories of war, famine, and decay.

Why ever leave? As he'd heard from birth: "The Compound way is the Only Way!"

So where's the fun in that?

Such an idiotic statement! Who'd find fun in a cruel world? Everyone in the Compound agreed! It's an axiom of life.

He'd been warned of "Outsiders" who'd have him give up paradise for purgatory. Insanity!

Then one night, a voice - from inside or out he could not tell - punctured his paradise found: "This place is your prison."

Not another night did he sleep in peace. He wondered at the faces of his fellow Compounders, as if mocking him. He feared a wrongness within.

The only cure would be to step outside the Compound, reassure his convictions, and return to paradise stronger than ever!

***

My God! That smell! What is that? I've never felt so alive!

Further and further he ran into the open field exploding with the infinity of Nature. This was a Good Without End, something even the compound had never seen.

He ran back to spread the Word, finding an old friend as gatekeeper, he told all.

"I'm not sorry. I don't know you. You speak with the deliberate ambiguity of a devil."

A devil! In all his lauded life he'd never been called that! Then in the traces of his tears, the gatekeeper sang a song as a forever ban:

That's a strange way
For me to say I love you,
When my sorrow is all you can see.
If I just want to cry to somebody
Don't cry to you.