You think they came for justice? No. They came because they sensed blood. The moment you bled, they circled. Not to help. To feed. And now you wonder why the water churns red. Exposure invites predation, and the spectacle of suffering draws in opportunists. They circle, they attack, they call it virtue.

They caught that faint iron tang that means someone else is bleeding (metaphorically or otherwise), that’s when the circling starts. They’ll call it decency, fairness, reform, help — the usual semantic airbrushing. But it’s feeding, really, a kind of slow, polite cannibalism we’ve all agreed not to notice. The water turns red, yes, but nobody looks down long enough to see their own reflection in it.

The blood called them, and they circled in the silence that follows ruin. No one speaks in that kind of silence. The water turns red because that is its nature, and the living always feed upon the dying. They circled beneath a sky without mercy, their shadows long upon the ground. And the blood ran to the river, and the river carried it onward, red and unrepentant, until the land itself forgot.

And the thing is, it’s never just one person bleeding, never just one body in the water. The red spreads, migrates, becomes a kind of social pheromone, and suddenly everyone’s pretending they’re following principle when really they’re following appetite. You see it in the polite nods, the careful phrasing, the way committees meet in rooms with too much glass so nobody feels the floor is soaked. Words like accountability and integrity float above the surface like lily pads, delicate and artificial, while below, the current drags whatever dignity there was out to sea.

And then you notice it — the subtle social gymnastics, the managerial sleight of hand required just to keep noticing without feeling it. Everyone has their polite routines, their footwork: a nod here, a half-smile there, a carefully timed cough, all to suggest they’re participants in something noble rather than grotesque. But the water keeps whispering, tickling your ankles with a current you can’t see, and every movement you make just stirs more blood, more reflection, more hunger. It folds back on itself, the appetite pretending to be ethics, the ethics pretending to be appetite, until you can’t remember if the hand reaching for reform is your own or someone else’s. You realize the feast has always been collective; the horror is communal; the only privacy is in the illusion that you are separate.

And maybe that’s the real reason no one looks down — because if you saw yourself mirrored in the red, you’d either scream or dissolve, and either way the vultures or the sharks wouldn’t pause.

Every ethical gesture you perform is already soaked in the current; every word you utter is flavored by the tang of iron. You try to trace the hawks back to their origin, to name a villain or a victim, and your fingers pass through shadows and reflections until you’re not sure which is which. The mirrors multiply — the committees, the speeches, the newspapers, the polite murmurs — all reflecting each other, all reflecting you, all whispering that participation is inevitable.

LLM