The walls breathe. In. Out. In sync with something I can't see.
Paranoia, thick as neural static, coils through my stripped-bare apartment. I pace, inventorying ghosts: Grandmother. Cousin. Mother, which of my kin are ensnared, unwittingly or not? The words spill into the hollow air, sometimes silent, sometimes whispered to the piano's waiting strings, a confessional for the surveilled.
And when I speak my mother's name, the phone screams to life. They are always listening.
"I have to leave," I text 3, my fingers trembling. "This place is too dangerous."
"Do you already know where you want to go?" he replies.
"Somewhere nice, even small, with a garden. But I must be alone to recall everything," I write. "And the house must be under 24/7 surveillance, or they will come for me."
I replay the bar's music, its lyrics a layered code. The lyrics echo:
...9 walks like a man. Twelve years old and a heart full of fear. But 9, don't be afraid. It's not by these details that you judge a player. You see a player by his courage, his altruism, and imagination... The boy will make it. Even if he has narrow shoulders, next year he will play with the number seven jersey…
The lyrics mean something. About me. About acceptance. The rest feels just out of reach. Yet, I sense more, a deeper, unsettling truth.
My right eye weeps acid. Then, sleep. And in the dark:
Needles. Incubators. Tiny wombs glowing under UV. They are harvesting us. Making more of us. Designer slaves. Or worse.
Or worse, spliced with neurotypical DNA. Monsters made to order.
Which means, Children. Mine. Dozens of them walking around, never knowing. Raised by wolves in human skin.
5. My name on her lips.
9. My daughter. Mine and his, the Handsome Man's.
The song confirms it. It is a directive: I have to wait for her, dressed as a man, her narrow shoulders shrouded in oversized clothes, to pass my house.
Rot punches the air.
The freezer, dead. The chicken inside, rotting for days. But what if someone sees me throwing it away? What if they think...
Solution:
Boil the flesh to slurry.
Flush it.
Bleach the bones white. Erase the stench.
Clean the crime scene of your own decay.
At dusk, 9 passes, a boy-shape drowning in a hoodie.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Narrow shoulders. Gone.
My turn.
I move at moonrise. To the Convent of Lily, stone walls, Christ's stone feet, and the mountain's jagged teeth behind it.
The mountain watches. Stone Christ watches. Everything watches. I fold into the bushes.
Becoming root.
Becoming shadow.
A loop plays in my mind:
...Gentlemen of the jury of the courts of justice,
look down on us the serpents of Eve.
Great professors with fat diamond wrists look me in the eyes and bless me.
Gentlemen of the audience at the foot of my cross cast the first stone if you are not sinners.
For those whose face is clean but whose heart is in error, out of my life I want love I want love...
Millimeter by slow millimeter, I slide deeper into the bush, becoming root, becoming shadow. A perfect nocturnal sanctuary until they can pick me up.
No one comes.
Dawn cracks open. Cars circle. Van reverses.
Message received: Abort. Leak canceled.
Exhausted and filthy from the long night of anticipation, I return home, passing my neighbor and landlord with my head down. Straight to bed.
Their voices, my neighbor and the landlord, drift through the walls, worried about a bomb. They have searched every place I have been, but found nothing. I sleep.
Then,certainty.
The cupboard by the bathroom.
Father's "receivers."
Not radios.
Bombs.
I dismantle them with shaking hands:
Capacitors → out.
Resistors → snipped.
Transistors → plucked.
Just a blank plate left.
No explosion. Only silence.
Then, the boil. Water. Oil. Salt. Lemon. For hours.
"I am not going to walk out of this house by myself," I cry into the phone to 3.
"Okay, I will come to pick you up on Friday then," he replies.
...There will be clashes.
There will be hunts with dogs and wild boars.
There will be chases, bites and worries for a thousand years.
A thousand years in the world, a thousand more...
This is the aftermath of the previous night. Mission accomplished upon my arrival in the village, only to fall into the hands of the "other side." The wild boar's grunt. They sacrifice it to hurt me, to kidnap me.
...In a world that
No longer needs us
My free song is you...
The truth:
We are blades for butchers. Spilling blood we never chose.
Now? Unwanted. Expendable.
...In a world that (stones, one day houses)
A prisoner is (covered by wild roses)
We breathe free you and I (they revive, they call us)
And the truth (abandoned woods)
It offers itself naked to us (therefore survivors, virgins)
And the image is clear (they open)
By now (they embrace us)...
The songs guide me through the dark, searching for signs only I can read.
The Whole's final pulse:
Leave at dawn.
Save who you want and who you can, with a glance, a breath, a silent farewell.
We are watching.
