amrealurban
Suddenly Mortal
A phone rings at five a.m. No siren. No knock. Just a call - and the world you knew is over. You are no longer a person. You are a resource. A line in a budget. A unit awaiting write-off.
An engineer. A philology student with a worn Brodsky. An old Afghan veteran. A history teacher. Each overtaken by the same knock. The State Machine sets its conveyor belt in motion: a draft notice, a medical board, a training camp, a freight wagon, a trench, a stray fragment, a death notice. People become figures. Figures become accounts. Bandages run out faster than soldiers. Heroism becomes a bookkeeping entry.
This war is not waged for victory. It is waged to hold power. To preserve revenue. To justify a regime that would collapse under its own emptiness. The Machine does not want peace - peace would stop the conveyor.
But somewhere on that conveyor, a book remains. A copy of Brodsky, wrapped in plastic, passed from hand to hand - from the one who died to the one still alive. To a medic who had no bandages. To a mother who received a death notice but never a grave. While the book is intact, the Machine is not absolute. While its pages have not stuck with blood - someone still remembers. And memory is the one thing that cannot be written off.
Written in a grotesque, tragicomic manner, with epigraphs from Nietzsche to Brodsky and an intonation echoing Bulgakov's satire, Suddenly Mortal is not merely a novella. It is a document. A testimony. A fragment lodged in memory.
What will you do when the Machine wakes again - and the dead ring louder than any anthem?