THE UNFEELING

“They are taking me to a museum? A museum made of glass? What the hell is this? At least it’s probably easier for word to get to Uncle…he’ll come…” Sighs. If only I knew that the transparency of the glass wasn’t there to protect anyone. It might have seemed that way to whoever wanted to believe in it. Hypocrites like most or naives like me. Societies like the Embers are not afraid to show what they are—actually, they depend on it. It’s easier for people to be bad when they think they are good, pretending that enemies are being punished and that they are the ones with the right worldview. Our brains are still primitive in that sense: easy conclusions, comfortable opinions, cozy homes for the herd. Flames and whips for the damned.

“What the hell is this place?” I remember thinking over and over while they dragged me inside. And hell it was. The admission process was conducted by one smiley guard.

“Hello, Ma’am. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. Look around, everything is transparent and clean. There’s no shady business. No funny business. Nothing that you might be scared of or… let’s face it, enjoy a little bit, eh? Your kind always does. That’s why The Flame moved us to this glass lasagna, haha! Just take a seat.”

I tried to be strong, to pretend, at least. “My name is Reese,” I said, gathering as much courage as I could. Nevertheless, my voice trembled a bit. It seemed to have tickled him. “Very well, Reese O’Reese, just strip and sit on that chair. It will all be over in a few moments. That is, if you behave, of course.”

I’m not sure if I’m twisting memories now, but I may have been fooled by his act before he said those words. Fucking words. At least for a very short time. After all, I was vulnerable, afraid, desperate for a helping hand. Yes, I think I even trusted him. Simple-minded animals we are. Even if only for a few quick minutes, I fell for the same theater as that sick group of deranged individuals, self-named Embers. Fuck you, Embers, before I forget and continue with the story. Anyway, it didn’t take long for me to realize the mistake, which meant that the lapse was followed by eons. Ages. Medieval ages. Prehistoric ages that dragged time and muscle to the bottom of a glass cage.

I… I… No…

Screw him and his phony smile. Screw all SMOKE operatives, and screw the Flame and his glass show of horrors… to the depths of all hellish places that exist with all of them. Ironically or not, they all deserve to be engulfed by flames. To burn in the cozy hell they call a society. Such pride in being Anti-Paxxers, in not being Wildhearts. The first ones they call robots, inhumane machines; the latter, animals, demons. All that hatred disguised under a thin layer of pretense religious righteousness. I think they never looked at anyone with true empathy. Never gave a helping hand or turned a cheek.

God, a helping hand… that… that takes me back to the story. I hate that memory. I hate that moment. That was when fear truly settled in my heart. If I had any hope that things would be alright, that was when I realized they weren’t. The admission process. That fucking room. That fucking chair. That fucking pretense inspection. I think I’ve blocked that memory for a long time. But sure as hell, I wanted to break all his fingers every time I would see him. Fuck him. All of them. Everyone stopped to see, as if I was a fish in an aquarium. A molested fish, that is. In Satan’s aquarium, to use their religious theme. They should burn…

After that criminal admission, served with a sickening crowd of sickos, the rest was almost like a blur. Everything and everyone became a threat. Every shadow, every man; every inmate, every rat; everyone had fingers, and everyone had a knife ready to plunge inside my guts.

During the night, there was darkness and fear. During the day, there was exposure and anxiety. During the whole time: despair, regret, and dread. They kept everything clean, spotless even, as if that glass was meant to reflect the emptiness we felt inside. It wasn’t just a prison; it was a stage. They put us on display, the “disgusting female specimens,” as they liked to call us, preserved in their transparent cages for the world to see. We were their cautionary tales, their exhibits in a sick museum of shame. Easy deposits of everyone’s frustrations, failures, and fears. We expired their sins.

The guards patrolled with smiles that dripped with smug satisfaction. They didn’t need to yell. Their words were cutting, smooth, laced with mockery, and filled with the confidence of men who knew they held all the power. The glass was their tool, their way of keeping us locked in and exposed, like insects trapped in amber, frozen in time, suffocating from the air they let us breathe but barely enough to live. Not even hope was able to live inside, the transparency was loud to tell us that they were acting righteously and we were there to endure whatever they wanted us to suffer. And if I’m getting repetitive, well, that’s because that was a repetitive threat, an evil mantra that everyone agreed to sing.

I had been in that glass cage for what felt like an eternity, though it had only been a few weeks by that point. Time was blurred in there; hours felt like days, and days stretched out into months. I barely moved unless I had to. I was too tired, too broken, too overwhelmed by the suffocating routine of fear and shame. The smell of cheap disinfectant clung to the air, mingling with the faint stench of sweat and decay. They kept the place so clean that it felt wrong, like the cleanliness itself was part of the torture. It reminded me of how much filth they saw in us, even as they scrubbed the floors spotless. But I repeat myself. Fuck off, trauma is not meant to be a pretty round-up story.

Anyway, I was forgetting about the food. If you could call it that. It arrived in small portions, barely enough to sustain us. They did that on purpose. Keeping us weak was part of their game. Weak bodies mean frail spirits, and weak minds can’t resist and fight. But eating wasn’t just about survival. Eating was a game, a dangerous game of chess. Every move you made could be your last; every piece of bread you took could mean a fight, a threat, a punishment. Some of the women—no, not women, unclean animals, as they said—would stare at your food as if it were gold. Enemies were made over scraps, alliances broken over a spare piece of moldy bread. You learned quickly not to draw attention to yourself. To eat quietly, in the corner, hoping no one noticed you at all, as a rat would do. Pests, creatures of the night.

There was one woman. I never knew her name. I didn’t care to know. But she terrified me. She wasn’t big, wasn’t loud, but she had this look in her eyes, this cold, calculating stare that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up every time she was near. She hated me, though I never knew why. Maybe because I kept to myself. Maybe because I was an easy target. Maybe because, like everyone else in that hellhole, she needed to hate someone to survive. Probably she also didn’t know why.

She never spoke to me. Just watched. Always watched. I could feel her eyes on me even when she wasn’t there, like some invisible predator waiting to pounce. So I started to hate her back, with all the rotting anger festering inside me. But I was too afraid to do anything about it. Too afraid to confront her, too afraid to even look at her directly. One day she bit me. Out of the blue. We were standing in line for rations. She bit my arm and just walked off. The guards laughed, some other woman did too. Most just didn’t care or pretended not to see.

The bite got a bit infected, so they gave me whatever soon-to-expire medicine they had, which made me nauseated. I hated that. But at least it also got me drowsy. I loved that. And as it began to heal, the days began to blend together and move faster. I’d wake up to the same glass walls, the same cold bed, the same hollow routine. I learned not to show any emotion, not to let them see the cracks in my armor. The guards, the other inmates—they all fed off weakness, but after a while, I had nothing else to spare.

So I got my nickname. Birdie. Everyone had one. Not everyone would use them. But they all seemed to assimilate that one really well, so I became Birdie. It started with the guards, a name born of mockery, a cruel jab at my quiet nature, at the way I’d sit by the glass and watch the birds outside. I hated it. Not because of the name itself, but because it reminded me of something I’d lost. Every time they called me Birdie, it reminded me of Mom. She used to say I was like a bird, always dreaming of flying, always wanting to escape. But looking at the birds then was soothing, a calming, healthy habit. Here, it was dissociation, denial, fear, conditioning. They could have very well named me after Pavlov’s dogs. They would have liked the idea to call me a bitch, of course.

Anyway, now here I was, trapped. Caged. A bird with clipped wings, waiting to die. Uncle… I came to terms, after all that time… he… he wasn’t coming. The glass, the transparency that was supposed to symbolize purity or order or whatever it was the Flame and his SMOKE bastards believed in, it became a reflection of everything I wasn’t. I wasn’t pure, I wasn’t free, and I sure as hell wasn’t safe. The glass was a reminder that they could see everything, and that I was nothing more than an object on display. The glass did its job. I was hopeless.

One day, I sat there by the glass, staring out at the birds again. I watched them flit around, unaware of the world I was stuck in, unaware of the hell they were just beyond. I wanted to scream at them, tell them to fly far away, to never come near this place again. But of course, I didn’t. And that’s when she came up to me—the woman with the cold eyes. She didn’t say anything, just stood there, watching me like she always did. I tried to ignore her, to focus on the birds, but her presence was suffocating. I didn’t want to get bit again. But I wasn’t going to give the satisfaction to show fear. That is, to show anything at all. After a moment, she leaned down, her breath hot against my ear. “What’s it like, Birdie? Staring at freedom, knowing you’ll never have it?”

I froze. The words cut through me like a knife. I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. My throat was tight, my chest aching with the weight of her words. She chuckled softly, straightening up. “You’ll die here, you know. We all will. But you… you’ll die with your eyes on the sky, dreaming of a freedom that’ll never come.” She walked away then, leaving me alone with my thoughts, with the weight of her words pressing down on me like a boulder.

And she was right. I knew it. We were all going to die in there. Maybe not that day, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, I thought. The system was designed that way. It wasn’t about reform or redemption. It was about breaking us down, piece by piece, until there was nothing left. Just empty meat to be disposed of. I stopped looking at the birds after that.

Time passed, though I couldn’t tell you how much. Days, weeks, months—it all blurred together. The routine was the same, the faces were the same, the fear was the same. But something in me had changed. I became numb. The anger, the fear, the hope—it all faded into the background, replaced by a dull, aching emptiness.

Sometimes, though, very rarely, the sun would hit my cell just at the right angle. The right angle to rekindle a faint flame of resistance and hope. I don’t know if that was a good thing or not, because afterward I’d be like hungover, ashamed of allowing myself those brief moments of positivity.

Uncle.

I thought about a Deus Ex Machina fueled by sunlight. I guess that’s human, right? I thought about whether he knew where I was, whether he was trying to find me. Whether he had given up. I didn’t blame him if he had. I had given up too, in my own way. I knew SMOKE would never let me use the phone to call for help. But there was still a part of me that believed—hoped, even—that one day it would ring. That one day, somehow, Uncle would reach me through this fortress of glass and grime and pull me out. That one day the phone would ring. A magical sound for a fantasy of freedom and redemption.

But that call never came. No one got calls here. No one. Never. So I would just go back to my hollow routine. Silence, indifference, quiet desperation, and agonizing stillness.

06:00. Wake up.

08:00. Sunbathing through bulletproof glass.

12:00. Eat shit.

18:00. Eat more shit.

20:00. Go back to the cell.

Rinse. Repeat.

It’s when things are the darkest that some “alternative solutions” start to make sense. When you are at the bottom of the world, whatever was repulsive starts to be appealing. Sexy. Desirable. Preferable. And as we know, I wasn’t the best at decision-making. Like a child, I ran with scissors. I had all the knowledge, all the examples, all the proof I needed to know that there was only one fate, that there was only one way out. A stupid conclusion. But stupid I was. Would Uncle even be able to forgive me? Would they even inform him? Probably yes, just like they made me identify my parents’ corpses, they would make him stare at my way of handling things.

Nothing that lurks in the dark is more terrifying than people with absolute power and convictions. Not even the darkest of thoughts. I knew I would soon be dead. That much I knew. But fear can also be a weapon. If I was going to die, at least it should be on my own terms. With my own rope and knot.