Passage

In the padded leather recliner, the air is moist with fear and disinfectants. A syringe hovers over your taut bicep, buzzing the promise of a fresh creation. You’re in a sort of paralysis that throws you back into the infantile haze of your first vaccination – the doctor towering over you, pasted with a sickly-sweet […]

Ashes to Ashes

Thin, silvery wisps texture the stale air choked under a sky of tarpaulin. They mingle with the musty vapours, which now condense on the soldiers, a shroud of humidity. In the back of the Humvee, nobody speaks. The only punctuations in the air of horror are the stifled sobs of soldiers, overcome with the revulsion […]

Deliverance

“Society honours its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.” Mignon McLaughlin Lei Zao Xun was a pacifist by nature. It was a trait he cursed daily, for in Chairman Mao’s China, such a philosophy was considered heretic, bordering on treacherous. In his early years he had walked a flimsy tightrope, caring to air his views […]