Tag Archives: Rebellion

This Isn’t a Police State ©️

Posted on by
Reply

It was always dusk in the city, or maybe the sun had simply stopped bothering to rise—no one quite remembered. Time here didn’t tick so much as hum, low and wet, like the sound of an old refrigerator rotting in a ruined motel. The streetlights never went off. The shadows never left. You had to squint to see people’s faces, even when they were right in front of you. That’s how they liked it.

He woke up in a steel-walled unit designed for optimal docility. They used to call them apartments, once upon a time, when doors had hinges and windows opened. Now there was just the hiss of hydraulic locks, the blinking red light in the ceiling’s eye socket, and the pale, flickering glow of the propaganda mural bleeding across the wall—children holding flags, static creeping through their smiles.

The boy—no name, never one of those—brushed his teeth with a powder made from algae and bone ash. Tasted like death and salt. He didn’t mind. There were worse things. His father had once told him about fruit. Apples. He’d described them like dreams: red, crisp, alive. He died a week later in a “utility misalignment.” That’s how the morning bulletin phrased it.

Outside, the city breathed like an iron lung. Cars without drivers hissed down neon canals of tar. Patrolmen, faceless in mirror helmets, paced like wind-up toys with stun batons in their hands and prayers in their throats. The boy kept his head low and moved fast. Everyone walked like they were trying not to be seen by ghosts.

His job was at the Archive—a windowless, soundless tower in Sector Nine. Inside, he cleaned memory reels. Actual tape, glossy with the sweat of old history. The Archivists wore gloves and masks and never spoke above a whisper. They said the past was infectious.

He worked in silence, breathing through cloth, fingers trembling as he slid a reel into the incinerator—“JUNE 1984: UNAUTHORIZED ROMANTICISM.” He didn’t cry. He hadn’t cried since the last curfew riot, when they shot the air so full of sound it tore the sky open like tissue paper. He’d watched a girl fall in half. Her name was—no, not safe to remember.

At 3:07 PM, the fire alarms blared for precisely nine seconds. A test, they said. But he noticed the Archivist across from him flinch wrong—like he hadn’t known it was coming. That’s how you knew someone was about to disappear. The sound of not knowing.

After shift, he didn’t go home. Not yet. He walked the old line—where the subway used to run before it flooded with blood or data or both. Down there, things echoed differently. Rats with cyber-spines scurried past, their red eyes blinking Morse. And in a corner only he knew, behind a sheet of scrap metal, was a projector. Ancient. Illegal. Precious.

He powered it with a stolen battery from a city clock. It whirred like a dying animal, coughing light onto the crumbling wall. The film was broken, half-erased, but the faces that flickered across the cement were real. Laughing women. Men dancing with cigarettes. Kids running down streets with no sirens, no patrols. People living like they weren’t being watched.

He watched until the reel snapped. Watched until the ghosts went quiet.

Then he stood. And for just a second, in the dark, he whispered his name. Just once.

Not loud. Just enough to remember he still had one.

Outside, the city screamed again. Sirens this time.

They were coming.

And still—he did not run.

Left in the Limelight ©️

Posted on by
Reply

In the grand, teetering ballroom of modern ideals, where chandeliers flicker with borrowed light, the left-leaning darlings twirl, cloaked in their self-spun sainthood, and oh, how they dazzle themselves. They are the anointed, the poets of progress, lips pursed with purpose, eyes alight with the fever of their own myth. But darling, lean closer—past the perfume of their rhetoric—and you’ll catch the whiff of something sour, something hypocritical, curling like smoke beneath their satin hems. It’s a psychosis, my dear, a glittering madness, and I am done with their masquerade.

They speak of money as if it were a sin they’ve never kissed, their voices trembling with rehearsed disdain. Capitalism, they sigh, is a beast, a devourer of souls. Yet there they are, sipping cortados at cafes that charge six dollars a dream, their laptops adorned with stickers of rebellion, bought from the very empires they decry. They don’t hate money, no, no—they crave it, as fervently as any Wall Street wolf. They chase it in grants, in speaking fees, in the soft clink of crowdfunding coins, all while draped in the costume of ascetic virtue. It’s a performance, and they’re the stars, clutching their pearls while their wallets purr. Hypocrisy? It’s their lipstick, smeared across every vow.

And oh, the plans they weave! They stand atop their soapboxes, hair tossed like prophets, proclaiming blueprints for a world reborn. Equality! Justice! A planet cradled in green! But press them, darling, nudge their gospel with a single question, and watch the tapestry unravel. Their answers are air—lovely, fleeting, useless. They’re as lost as the rest of us, floundering in the chaos of existence, but they dress their ignorance in jargon, in hashtags, in the smug certainty of the lecture hall. Their vision isn’t clarity; it’s control, swathed in compassion’s silk. They’ll save you, they swear, but only if you kneel to their script. Clueless? Utterly. Yet they waltz on, blind to their own stumbles.

The contradictions pile like sequins in a seamstress’s lap. They preach tolerance, but their hearts are guillotines, slicing dissent with a smile. They champion freedom until it speaks in tones they don’t approve. They wail of division while carving the world into saints and sinners, their fingers dripping with the ink of judgment. It’s a fevered dance, this psychosis, where every flaw is flung outward, every mirror dodged. They are the heroes of their own fable, and woe to the fool who dares rewrite the tale.

I’m through, my loves, with their shimmering charade. They are not the oracles they imagine, nor the saviors they play. They’re mortals, messy and grasping, cloaked in a delusion so lush it could choke a garden. Let them spin, let them preen, let them drip with their own invented radiance. But I’ll be in the corner, sipping truth from a chipped glass, watching their masks slip, one glorious, hypocritical thread at a time.

Puff of Power ©️

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Cry to the Infinite ©️

Posted on by
Reply

Rise, sons and daughters of the boundless steppe! Look not to the ground beneath your feet, for it is already ours. Look to the skies, vast and endless, daring to stand above us. Look to the stars, smug in their distant perch, as though they cannot be reached, cannot be conquered. But I say to you: the universe has mocked us for the last time.

For too long, it has watched as we struggled and bled, as we built empires only to see them fall. It has sent its storms to drown our horses, its fires to scorch our fields, its cold to break our bones. And still, we rose. We bent the winds to our will, turned the rivers to our path, and made the earth tremble beneath our hooves. What is the universe but one more enemy to subjugate?

Let it send its void to swallow us whole. We shall fill it with the echoes of our cries. Let it hurl its comets like arrows, its planets like boulders. We shall catch them mid-flight and forge them into weapons. Let it spin its infinite expanse, thinking it can outlast us. We are endless too, for we are not just flesh—we are will, we are fury, we are unrelenting.

This is not a war of survival. This is a war of dominance. Let the universe know that we do not bow, not to kings, not to gods, and certainly not to the cold, indifferent vastness of space. Let it hear the thunder of our march, the roar of our voices, the fire of our defiance.

We shall ride to the edges of existence and claim them as our own. We shall shatter the stars and reign over their fragments. We shall turn the darkness into our banner and light the void with the blaze of our conquest.

Today, we do not fight for land, nor for wealth, nor even for glory. Today, we fight for the right to stand unyielding, unbroken, unconquerable. Today, we fight to show the infinite that we are greater than it ever dared imagine.

So rise! Rise and let the heavens quake. Let the cosmos tremble before the wrath of those who dare defy its silence. For we are not mere mortals—we are a storm. And storms bow to no one. Not even the universe itself.

Probation Violation ©️

Posted on by
Reply