Written During Political Imprisonment

These stories were written by the author while imprisoned.

From 2019 to 2020, my home was engulfed in protests and mass resistance. We lost. I lost. For my involvement in the demonstrations, I was sentenced to more than three years in prison.

In the place where I live, some basic rights that others take for granted do not exist. Here, prison does not only mean the loss of physical freedom—it means the deliberate dismantling of one’s personhood.

I was fortunate that a narrow sliver of reading freedom remained. Perhaps the censors, like machines or livestock, did not fully grasp the meaning of literature. Fiction, in particular, escaped their attention. So I began to read. Then, quietly, I began to write.

Writing and reading gave me a window in the walls—a space of freedom, however imaginary. A sanctum constructed within my mind. Slowly, line by line, a character emerged. Page by page, discarded drafts piled into stories.

No character can exist without echoing the world we know. No fiction is wholly separate from reality. All stories bear a faint shadow of the real—and this book is no exception.

The characters in this book speak in fractured memories. They burn, walk, and vanish across cities where speech is dangerous, and remembering is forbidden. Some try to survive by staying quiet. Some try to fight, and lose everything. Some turn against one another.

Each of them chooses, or believes they do.

——But in places like these, even choice fades before it’s heard.

***

Split in two, these six short stories were written from confinement. Their lengths differ, their tones shift, but they echo from the same prison of silence. Together, they speak of cities where speaking is risk, and remembering is rebellion.

“The Potato”

A Girl is sent by her grandfather to buy potatoes—but the fat woman at the stall insists they’re called “Soil-bean.”
For thousands of years, the people of Balaire have lived as exiles within their own city, confined to slums carved from ancestral streets. Their traditions are banned, their history erased, their gods defiled. Yet they remember.
A truth known only to adult Balairer—a twisted, yet necessary method of survival under authoritarian rule.

“The Heretic”

A man watches as his wife is dragged into a locked chamber by a group of bloated, hideous nuns.
Her screams come muffled through iron, distant yet unmistakably full of desperation—like a voice that only exists to echo inside sealed walls. Flames flicker through the door crack; metal strikes metal.
He wants to lunge forward with his broken, raw body—like an overboiled sausage splitting at the seams—but he can’t even crawl.
When his wife is returned to him, blood runs from the inside of her thighs to her heels. She collapses beside him, reeking of burnt flesh.

“I… am no longer a woman,” she whispers.

And their son is dressed in immaculate white robes trimmed with gold, sitting silently on a Cardinal’s lap, bearing witness to purgatory.

“Slave and Cattle”

On the farm, there’s a strange old serf who doesn’t work—just talks to a white cow all day. The others laugh and toss him rotten beans, amused by his absurd tales of past glories, his and the cow’s alike.
But a recent convert to servitude, begins to notice something within those stories. A thread of logic, a glimmer of truth.
Only he hears the weight behind the cow’s full name—"Alexander Carinmelo Alphonse Franklin"—and begins to glimpse treasures the other serfs can’t even imagine.

“The Old Man and the Boar”

The woodcutter’s son vanished years ago, pursued by soldiers for an unspoken crime. Exiled and unheard from, the boy left only silence behind.
Each day, the old man checks the mailbox for a letter that never comes.
Then wild boars descend from the forest in hungry herds, forcing a military purge.
The old man remembers meeting boars while chopping wood in his youth—how they never came near people without reason.
He does not know why he begins sharpening his three rusty axes. Nor why, when the village and government call for slaughter to boars, he finds himself standing in the way.

“The Homecoming”

Four defeated gladiators return to their homelands.
Two come from empires; two from forgotten provinces.
The people await them—not with garlands, but with ropes and raised platforms.

“Wolf Mountain”

Since the unspeakable event years ago, she has been lost.
Her friends are dead, exiled, or distracted with the remnants of ordinary life.
Only she is left behind, unsure of what to want, what to do, or whether anything matters.
Then comes an invitation—from a mad friend—to climb a mountain full of strange beasts.
And in a place where everything is unfamiliar, she learns that being lost might not be something that needs fixing.