The Human Heart

The Monster

January 5th, 1935

I was seventeen years old when the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs dragged me into a train without telling me our destination. Although I wasn't told where we were headed, I already knew our where I would have my last stop. More than likely, I was on my way to be taken to one of the legendary Gulags that the people rarely dared to whisper of.

I spent hours in what I believed was an empty freight car with a bag over my head and became dizzy with the ardeous scent of straw and fresh paint violating my nostril. The train remained silent, motionless for God knows what reason. At the time, I thought it was some sick psychological torture to drive me insane before I even got to the labour camp. Later I found that it was much worse than that.

"Put it with the counter-revolutionary!" I heard someone yell. My head-beating session was interrupted when a huge ruckus coming from outside the train arose from out of the blue. It sounded to me like a panic, like the men outdoors were struggling to get to safety, or otherwise to confine the danger. Out of boredom and stupid curiosity, I was dumb enough to place my ear against the cart doors when seconds later the latches unhatched and before I knew it, the wide open skies exploded onto my face.

I fell back, overtaken with tremors when I saw the horror before me. "NO! NO! DON'T CLOSE THE DOORS! LET ME OUT!" I screamed with every molecule of air in my lungs. I shuffled across the cart and took a leap for safer ground on the floors below only to be shoved back in by a push to the chest with the end of a long stick.

I landed back inside with the wind knocked out of my system. Coughing, hacking, and gasping, I lied there in fetal position scared halfway to death. The cart itself was shaking, jumping, and rocking back and forth to the force of a raging monster in there with me.

Standing at no shorter than three meters tall, it was the largest damn bear I had ever seen. "LET ME OUT!" I begged for freedom alongside the roaring animal. "LET ME OUT, IT'LL EAT ME!" I didn't realize it then, but we were both just as alone and afraid as the other. To her, I was just another one of the monsters that had locked her in here. But to me, I was a gourmet meal.

Eventually, the bear's powerful pushes began to grow weaker and more tired. The punches it threw stopped leaving dents, the loud ground-shaking booms downgraded to deep thuds, then to soft kicks, and finally, I thought I heard a weak human palm slapping the metal effortlessly before sliding down the door and plummeting to the floor.

"Is that— it— it can't be." My voice quivered and broke. "That's not possible."