the ills keep suffocating the laws keep its despicable nose clean releases a Man in red when I died, they put me in a glass room and they lowered me down and I stood right back up and spat of their faces I made fun of their guns and uniforms but the noise never stopped efficacious pounding and pounding in my brain and their faces was all red and round and they cut me with their knives but I didn't complain or cry I stared back

The air grew colder as the noise swelled, a symphony of cracks and grinding gears that played just for me. Their faces, flushed crimson like overripe fruit, loomed closer, eyes hollow and glistening with something that was neither anger nor pity—just hunger. They twisted their knives deeper, not into my body but into my existence, carving away pieces I hadn’t realized were there. I didn’t flinch; I let them take what they thought they could, meeting their gazes with the same dead, unyielding stare.

Their hands, cold and slick, pressed against the glass walls of my prison as they whispered things I couldn’t understand—things I didn’t want to. The room filled with their rancid breath, their words wrapping around me like smoke, choking and suffocating. I wanted to laugh, but it caught in my throat, strangled by the pounding. It never stopped—always there, a relentless drumbeat that turned every second into an eternity. The glass walls shuddered with each breath they took, their whispers seeping into the cracks like mold, like rot, like something older than words. My reflection twisted in the curved surface—stretched, shattered, reforming in ways that didn’t make sense. My limbs weren’t mine anymore. My mouth wasn’t mine. I tried to move, but the pounding in my skull was louder now, a voice without words, an itch I could never reach. It told me to listen.

The faces pressed closer, their teeth too white, too perfect, like polished bone set into raw meat. Their lips stretched wide, but no smiles came. Their hands slid down the glass, leaving behind streaks of something thick and dark, something that pulsed as if it were alive.

Then the knives came again, slicing through the nothing between us, carving shapes in the air, in me. I didn’t bleed, but I felt it—each cut a dull ache, each wound another crack in a body that wasn’t breaking the way it should. I should have screamed. I should have fought. Instead, I only stared, and something about that made them furious.

The whispering stopped.

The pounding stopped.

For the first time, I heard silence.

And in that silence, something shifted.

The glass walls didn’t lower this time. They breathed.

And then, ever so slowly, they began to close in.