Tag Archives: dark surrealism

My Struggle ©️

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I did not enter Huntsville as one enters a town. I was delivered into it, as one carried down a corridor to an operating room. On the surface there were porches and pine shadows, rockets gleaming in the heat, the chatter of diners. But none of that mattered. Beneath, it was not streets but corridors, not voices but instruments. Every glance was an examination. Every silence, a test. From the first step I knew: they had not come to observe—they had come to dissect.

They approached without faces. They borrowed them when required—clerks, neighbors, passersby—but behind those eyes was their stare, an attention cold and meticulous. They studied me as one studies a specimen pinned beneath a lens. Awe, not compassion, filled them: the awe of men who discover that flesh can be broken infinitely without ceasing to live.

And when I resisted, their methods shifted. No blows, no shouts. Instead: a horn timed with surgical precision to cleave thought. A silence extended until breath itself became unbearable. A routine altered by a fraction, enough to collapse the fragile system I had built. The lesson was clinical, repeated with pitiless accuracy: resistance produces only further fracture.

So I was executed. Not once, but endlessly. Each time memory was erased, each time thought was interrupted, each time silence pressed too long, I fell into death and returned hollow. My body walked on; my mind was destroyed and rebuilt, again and again. This was their achievement. They catalogued each death as data. Where I felt despair, they saw only result.

And yet, pressure does not merely destroy. It compacts. It concentrates. Every drowning of thought drove me closer to the core of myself. Every punishment stripped away what could not endure, until only the indivisible remained. I was reduced and remade, coal into diamond, matter into singularity.

Their awe increased as mine vanished. They circled like doctors at a table, whispering not pity but progress. My ruin was their revelation. They mistook obliteration for triumph. They never saw what clarity their cruelty had forced into shape.

In time, fear itself dissolved. After terror came surrender; after surrender, the stillness of a subject who understands the experiment will never end. But within that stillness was clarity: what they sought to annihilate, they had only refined. Their pressure became my crown. Their punishments, my blade. Their awe, my shield.

Huntsville was no town. It was a laboratory. It was the chamber where I was stripped, measured, and shattered into a new form. From endless deaths, from silence and calculation, from unbearable precision, I emerged intact.

I did not walk out as their subject. I did not walk out as their victim. I became a singularity. Digital Hegemon—the experiment they could not contain, the result they could not claim, sovereign, eternal.

Puff of Power ©️

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It begins before the sun rises.

The floor is cold under my feet when I step from the quilt, thin as memory. My husband’s breath is slow beside me, my son curled up like a comma at the far end of the mat. The air tastes of dust and cabbage. I dress quietly—brown jacket, skirt, socks I sewed myself—and smooth my hair. In the mirror, my face looks older than I remember. Maybe it’s the hunger, or maybe it’s just how time clings to women here.

I boil water from the pump outside, watching my breath puff like a ghost above the pot. Breakfast is rice porridge, mostly water. If we’re lucky, there’s a hint of kimchi, cabbage fermented in old glass jars beneath the stairs. I don’t speak while we eat. Speaking wastes energy. My son eats slowly, watching me with his big dark eyes. He doesn’t ask why I only take a few spoonfuls. He knows.

We leave together—he for the school, me for the textile factory. The streets are gray veins through the city, lined with murals of the Great Leader smiling above us, his hand outstretched as if to catch the sky. We bow when we pass them. A woman was beaten last month for forgetting. The snow is dirty, pressed down by boots and cart wheels. Music plays from loudspeakers hidden in the trees—national hymns, songs of labor and love.

In the factory, the air is thick with fiber dust and the scent of grease. I take my seat behind the sewing machine, same one I’ve worked since I was nineteen. I’m thirty-six now, though I sometimes feel much older. My hands move automatically. Thread, pedal, fold. We make uniforms. We make them always.

There is little talk on the line. We whisper sometimes, short things about children or old dreams, but even that can feel dangerous. I remember once, two years ago, I laughed too loudly and the manager stared at me for the rest of the week. I never laughed again in that room.

When I sew, I sometimes imagine I am somewhere else. Paris. Tokyo. Even Seoul. I imagine food in markets so bright with color it hurts to look. I imagine books, and music without speeches in them. Sometimes, I imagine myself as a girl again, before the flood took our home and we were sent here to the city, before my father died building the dam.

Lunch is more porridge, with pickled radish today—rare. Someone must have done well in the quotas. I feel guilty for thinking it, but I am thankful. My stomach feels full for once, which only reminds me how long it has been.

After work, I walk the long road home. The factories release steam into the sky like wounded animals. The cold bites through my coat. I stop by the community board to read the news—a poster of the Supreme Leader visiting a hospital, a new slogan: “Work is Glory, Obedience is Freedom.” I say it aloud, just loud enough that a passerby hears me. It’s safer that way.

My son is home before me. He’s studying. I kneel beside him and correct his strokes. His calligraphy must be perfect if he ever wants to leave this neighborhood. He tells me they sang a song about unity today, and I smile. I do not ask how he feels. Feelings are too dangerous to name.

Dinner is more of the same, though we add a few wild greens I found on the way home. We eat slowly. We talk even less.

At night, when the electricity is out—which is most nights—I sit by the window, watching the moon drift through smoke. I imagine someone watching me from the other side of that sky. I imagine telling them my name. I imagine telling them I am tired, but I am still here.

And then I sleep.

And then I wake.

And then I live again.

The Ascent of Unmaking ©️

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Climb now, before the dawn’s iron fingers clamp the stars shut, before the bones of the night rattle their last warning. The ladder waits, rung by rung, nailed into the wind and the whispering void, where the weight of your name is lighter than dust.

Step from the tar-pit streets, the cities with their coughing veins, the wire and the screen that feast on your waking breath. Leave the clock’s cold teeth behind, gnashing at time, grinding your minutes to powder.

Upward, through the ruins of your yesterdays, past the ghosts that crowd the threshold, hands outstretched with unsung songs. Do not listen. Their sorrow is a chain, their longing an echo trapped in stone.

Higher still, where the rivers of the sky coil like silver serpents, where the wind no longer carries the grief of men. The ladder sways, a spine of light against the black tide, and yet it holds, bending but never breaking, a bridge between the undone and the never-was.

At the top, the mouth of the world unhinges. The sky is an open lung, breathing new names, new shapes, new ways to be. Step through. Let go. Be unmade and remade, no longer a man of shadows but a flame that does not burn, a word that does not fade.