Friday, 26 April 2002 2:53:55 AM (+9:00GMT)

Marilyn Chua

I feel the breaths gently treading out of my lungs, through my throat. They exit my nostrils, flitting out in vapours.

I was seeing things again and again.

They'd looked pretty good to me earlier, before I ended up tied to this fence. Before it all happened. Then my memory began to become slightly tinted red. Now all I remember of them is red. Primary and at once violently explosive. A sense of anger seemed to lurk in them, so much that the red has been gradually mixed with black.

They were blocks of red. The trails they left behind them, like slugs, are red.

And then they hold me. Pin me down, render me helpless, naked, vulnerable. Battered me.

Swirls of black in red.

Plain boredom seemed to trail in their words, red that's lost their tints. They trail lifelessly after these blocks of red, words of grey. Like fish blood, that trails after fishes that's died and were floating around.

Though my eyes are now open, I can't see much.

All I can hear is the sound of my breaths. The air flitting in and out.

More out than in. My lungs feel like they're barely functioning. They feel like they've been stabbed with icicles.

I feel barely alive.

I felt alive back then, with terror. When they stripped me. When they thrust themselves into me, tearing me. And battering me.

I remember seeing a house nearby, when I just came. I saw the cold, the frost. And I felt it, after they'd tied me here, left me here, to die. In this weather where no colour could be seen for miles and miles. They haven't bothered to blindfold me, because they've left me here to die.

…Tied me here, left me here.

…To die.

…People whom I don't know. You faggot, they'd said, and laughed.

Like they were enjoying killing me. Like they fed off the sounds of my screams. Like they'd grown stronger with it, piercing the knife through my guts, ripping them apart.

The blood that has spilt out have dried, more or less, although it'd been wet initially.

…But my lungs were working initially.

And my memory hadn't been filled with those blots of red.

…That is now gradually darkening, darkening to black.

It's almost become scary. Like an Edvard Munch paintings, some of them. Most of them recorded associated with the theme of death.

I wondered how many people endured what they'd done to me. I have a hunch it's not just me.

And I fear.

I fear even as it fades to black. Everything, a deep, dark, disturbing black.

That seems to be of this world, seems to encompass this world. The world, that's filled with those people, the people whose memories seem to have faded to black as well.

I remember that. The last thing I remember, amidst the swirls of black gradually spreading, like cancer.
…And I fear.

I fear for this world, this world enveloped in this chasm-like black. I fear because the world is already overridden with it, like a cancer patient wasting away. I fear that those dyfunctional lungs will one day stop working.

…Because it's not just me.

…Darkening. And darkening…

Friday, 26 April 2002 3:19:37 AM (+9:00GMT)