Post Oppression

Just one little tidbit from another project. I've chosen a boring part on purpose.

Does the cold earth swallow the grievings and regrets of a lifetime when it finally admits the body carrying these to its final and everlasting embrace? 

Is there truly no passion, be it fueled by hate or love, regardless of its harrowing power driving a soul in life, just one, which can transcend death? 

They say: A cat's anger lasts seven generations… 

***

Remnants of a failed dictatorship, the abandoned ruined and roofless concrete boxes seemed especially bleak and gray with the light fog draping the sleepy town. Most of the doorways with one square window on either side made the structures resemble a horribly distorted, stretched downward, liquid and nearly featureless visage of a hollow specter, frozen stiff in an eternal moan of dismay. 

**

All that's missing is that ungodly red glow… 

Gyula mused in his thoughts. 

God… huh, the last waddling and jittering Soviet tank barely crawled through the border… and I'm thinking about religious nonsense. 

Gyula was by no stretch of the imagination a religious or superstitious man, not even as a child, having grown up under the ever watchful eyes of the communist regime imposed by the soviets, though his father, a party member and policeman would be first to stomp out such ideas and thoughts in his mind back then.. 

And now, looking at a former source of very real terror, through the dirty and stained bus window, all he saw was desolation, boring sameness and man's natural need and tendency for rebellion against strict order, all embodied by the ruined block, all in one…

If anywhere, then Gyula felt certain, in one of these former correctional facilities, specters could be found in their masses. 

If they were indeed more than the product of idle minds investing too much into flights of fantasy. 

Gyula sat quietly by the window, ignoring the tense glares finding his uniformed figure every now and again. 

If only I'd chosen to be a mailman… But I was too good for it. Or maybe I just wanted to impress my old man so much.. To just once get a ‘I'm proud of you’ from him.. Wanted it so bad I've become an imitation of him and his ideals… Huh. There must be something in the air today. 

But even the bittersweet embrace of distant memories offered no shelter from the contempt and spite of those he supposed to serve and protect. 

He felt in the odd silent stares a sense of that desolate hopelessness he'd felt in the cries rising from those now ruined buildings, back then… back when some people needed to be corrected and the state did just that, or so they kept saying. 

Back when his father worked there and threatened him with a more personal tour of the place should his grades suffer from his negligence. 

By now he's just like these buildings: in total disrepair. A hollow shell of what he was. 

It took him a moment to register the engine's constant noise, waking him from the unpleasant recollection of an old man kept alive by machines, dear life hanging on by the last thread, dependant on the diligence of nurses and doctors..  

The engine once more shook the bus… Its weary, forced pleading howl was a perfect analogy, he thought, of how the country stood now, a year after the red army left and with it any illusion of order and control: Not fit to carry the kind of burden it did, not anymore, but those in charge ignored that fact and kept fiddling with it anyway until finally, the depleted and worn down component resumed its function at half capacity if that much. 

The engine howled and roared up briefly as the stop light changed and the constantly vibrating and shaking vehicle jolted forward, halting an instant before the driver changed gears and once more, Gyula was back on track toward the station. He didn't bother looking to his right, all he'd see would have been faces unsuccessfully hiding mistrust and contempt for him, for his uniform, and beyond those, the slowly but steadily growing and spreading signs… Signs hinting at the eager invasion of wild capitalism, the pitiful copying of the western world. To him it seemed like a cancerous growth, a sure indicator of an approaching western oppression: different methods to the same end. 

The flashy commercials and advertisement boards placed atop and on the front of structures built to be identical, uniform, boring, still housing scarred and jaded people, still representing the oppressive powers that built them up�"both building and tennant�" It all looked like a bad joke to him the first he glimpsed the foreign brand names and company logos, yet as time passed, he found it all increasingly worse.. 

Communism failed because it approached human nature wrong.. Instead of exploiting our natural weaknesses and capitalizing on our vices and desires, it sought to expunge them.. But these new conquering powers will not fail. Not for these reasons at least. 

***

The early morning sun offered little respite from the chilling October air, if anything, it seemed to make the skin prickling cold more obvious. 

The sun has a sharp tooth.. 

Gyula recalled an old saying with a quick halfhearted huh as he stepped off the bus, glancing through the jaded and weary faces of various workers waiting for their own to arrive. 

To them not much changed. They keep slaving away, day after day, to provide for their families the mockery of a human worthy existence. 

Nothing really changed beyond the powers which sought to rid everyone of their souls, of their humanity, or so Gyula told himself, in part to stay captive within the lethal and illusory sense of purpose and in part to survive the cruel reality: the world wasn't black and white, it didn't matter what he believed and thought correct, there'd always be someone different. 

With the world needing this constant motion of things, an ever transforming change he couldn't help but feel out of place every now and again. 

Change, not only in the physical reality, but also in the intangible, abstract realm of intellectual war, something he long ago dubbed: The realm of Obscurity. 

***

As he paced on toward the front steps of another, worn down building �"which no less represented the terror of the state's rule than those bleak, concrete blocks�" just two concrete steps before the doorway to the police station.. 

Gyula felt the odd, spectral cold of uncertainty lingering above the decaying brick building. Something he could do without, for the world might've wanted a constant motion, uncertainty, a metamorphosis without an end, he preferred the stability of what was tried and true. 

Still, his light fuzz filled guts told him:

There would be something extraordinary happening.. 

Author's Note

Yea yeah.. I know. Nothing is really happening in here.
That's why I decided on this part...a little break before the next hair raising horrific encounter with the monsters. 😁