by Comrade Hyeran, Black Hammer Member
When I was young, my mother travelled to the alabaster palace of hell to strike a deal with the devil. We could have made any world we wanted, but this is what they chose to create, she pleaded. I am but one, but I will give myself if you can protect my family.
The devil blinked, bent his head to the side, then devoured her. He did not understand her language. I lived with my father then, but I never understood him, could only taste rancid fury, until even he was carried away by winged leeches on the eve of my fourteenth birthday.
Two military planners are bent over a table, over a National Geographic magazine, over a map, over a peninsula, over a creeping empire, “Look, latitude 38 kind of cuts through halfway. Seoul is in our half.” the other leans forward, then agrees, “sure, we might as well just draw it here.”
With a shaking hand, he etches across the line. “Wait, doesn’t it look like there are a lot of mountains and rivers we are splitting?’ the other shrugged. Lamplight flickers. “Fine for now. We can change it later.’
A small void opened in the corner of my chest, and into it sprinkled the knowledge, I, production of the Occident, the displacement of assimilation, the displacement of departing a land no one wanted to leave. Stripped of its right to self-determine, and agency to choose differently.
I poured in my mother’s fish and radish stew, schisms torn through family and generation only to be diagnosed depressed, an alcoholic or Communist. The gradual realization that the devil didn’t speak our language because he refused to learn, nearly anything and everything that did not deposit gold at their feet, bowed.
By 1953, 80% of all infrastructure was left demolished. 3-4 million civilians murdered, 32,500 gallons of napalm dropped, more bombs dropped than that dropped on entire Pacific Theater, North Koreans all living underground, Lemay crowing “We killed 20% of their entire population.’
Macarthur lamenting, “I have never seen so much devastation, it just curdled my stomach, after I looked at the wreckage, women and thousands of children and everything, I vomited.’
At night, I hold a gun and look out my window. I bought one because I know of the war I fight, one that has been fought for centuries, and that the front is wherever the power is abused.
So while my wife sleeps, I look out my window, and I imagine opening it and gripping the gun aimed at the tallest skyscraper, and the bullet flying across this city.
It will bury itself into the center of the devil that sits atop a white throne, silencing an ancient avaricious granite beast at last.
