OVULE HARVEST

The walls breathed. In. Out. In sync with something I couldn't see.

Paranoia—thick as neural static—coiled through my stripped-bare apartment. I paced, inventorying ghosts: Grandmother. Cousin. Mother—who among my kin were ensnared, unwittingly or not? The words spilled into the hollow air, sometimes silent, sometimes whispered to the piano’s waiting strings—a confessional for the surveilled.

And when I spoke my mother's name—the phone screamed to life. They were always listening.

"I have to leave" I texted 3, my fingers trembling. "This place is too dangerous."

"Do you already know where you want to go?" he replied.

"Somewhere nice, even small, with a garden. But I must be alone to recall everything" I wrote. "And the house must be under 24/7 surveillance, or they will come for me."

I replayed the bar's music, its lyrics a layered code. Lyrics echoed. '8 walks like a man. Twelve years old and a heart full of fear. But 8, don't be afraid. It's not by these details that you judge a player. You see a player by his courage, his altruism, and imagination... The boy will make it. Even if he has narrow shoulders, next year he will play with the number eight jersey.' The lyrics meant something. About me. About acceptance. The rest felt just out of reach. Yet, I sensed more—a deeper, unsettling truth.

My right eye wept acid. Then—sleep. And in the dark:

Needles. Incubators. Tiny wombs glowing under UV. They were harvesting us. Making more of us. Designer slaves. Or worse.

Or worse—spliced with neurotypical DNA. Monsters made to order.

Which meant— Children. Mine. Dozens of them walking around, never knowing. Raised by wolves in human skin.

5. My name on her lips.

9. My daughter. Mine and his—the Handsome Man’s.

The song confirmed it. It was a directive: I had to wait for her, dressed as a man, her narrow shoulders shrouded in oversized clothes, to pass my house.

Rot punched the air.

The freezer—dead. The chicken inside, rotting for days. But what if someone saw me throwing it away? What if they thought...

Solution: Boil the flesh to slurry.

Flush it.

Bleach the bones white. Erase the stench.

Clean the crime scene of your own decay.

At dusk, 9 passed—a boy-shape drowning in a hoodie.

Narrow shoulders. Gone.

My turn.

I moved at moonrise. To the Convent of Lily—stone walls, Christ’s stone feet, and the mountain’s jagged teeth behind it.

The mountain watched. Stone Christ watched. Everything watched. I folded into the bushes.

Becoming root.

Becoming shadow.

A loop played in my mind:

'Gentlemen of the jury of the courts of justice,

look down on us the serpents of Eve.

Great professors with fat diamond wrists look me in the eyes and bless me.

Gentlemen of the audience at the foot of my cross cast the first stone if you are not sinners.

For those whose face is clean but whose heart is in error, out of my life I want love I want love.'

Millimeter by slow millimeter, I slid deeper into the bush, becoming root, becoming shadow. A perfect nocturnal sanctuary until they could pick me up.

No one came.

Dawn cracked open. Cars circled. Van reversed.

Message received: Abort. Leak canceled.

Exhausted and filthy from the long night of anticipation, I returned home, passing my neighbor and landlord with my head down. Straight to bed.

Their voices, my neighbor and the landlord, drifted through the walls, worried about a bomb. They’d searched every place I’d been, but found nothing. I slept.

Then—certainty.

The cupboard by the bathroom.

Father’s 'receivers'.

Not radios.

Bombs.

I dismantled them with shaking hands :

Capacitors → out.

Resistors → snipped.

Transistors → plucked.

Just a blank plate left.

No explosion. Only silence.

Then—the boil. Water. Oil. Salt. Lemon.

"I am not going to walk out of this house by myself" I cried into the phone to 3.

"Okay, I will come to pick you up on Friday then," he replied.

There will be clashes.

There will be hunts with dogs and wild boars.

There will be chases, bites and worries for a thousand years.

A thousand years in the world, a thousand more.

This was the aftermath of the previous night. Mission accomplished upon my arrival in the village, only to fall into the hands of the 'other side'. The wild boar's grunt. They sacrificed it to hurt me, to kidnap me.

In a world that

No longer needs us

My free song is you.

The truth:

We were blades for butchers. Spilling blood we never chose.

Now? Unwanted. Expendable.

In a world that (stones, one day houses)

A prisoner is (covered by wild roses)

We breathe free you and I (they revive, they call us)

And the truth (abandoned woods)

It offers itself naked to us (therefore survivors, virgins)

And the image is clear (they open)

By now (they embrace us)

The songs guided me through the dark, searching for signs only I could read.

The Whole’s final pulse:

Leave at dawn.

Save who you want and who you can—with a glance, a breath, a silent farewell.

We are watching.