[ID: a banner featuring bright red apples, prison bars, and medieval looking text of the story's title, Rain and Apple Blossoms. End ID.]
A nameless convict suffers in a prison camp, sentenced to years of hard labour for his crime. There, he is tormented by cruel guards and an even crueller chief overseer who seems to enjoy humiliating him.
Eventually, he escapes, and he finds himself cared for by a kind stranger who is on her own journey of grief and self-discovery.
With soldiers still hunting for the fugitive, every moment he spends in his unlikely caretaker's company is a risk to them both.
Heavier on whump than plot. Heavier on hurt than comfort. But it's all there.
Full list of CWs at the bottom of this post.
Written for The Merry Whump of May 2024. All drabbles, exactly 100 words. All connected, but many can be read as standalone pieces. However, if you want to read it as a full "narrative," the suggested reading order is below. (Alternatively, find the list of prompts in event order here.)
Suggested Reading Order
🌫️ The Camp
Day 9 - “You’re nothing.”
Day 27 - C for “convict”
Day 8 - A proud, arrogant fool.
Day 2 - Snake venom and molten sand
Day 2 - “Don’t you dare.”
Day 7 - “Forget about them.”
Day 10 - “I don’t have regrets.”
Day 11 - “Pretty little thing.”
Day 12 - “Let me hear you.”
Day 3 - “See what happens.”
Day 14 - “Leave him alone.”
Day 16 - Your neverending insolence
Day 16 - Twenty-nine and one
Day 16 - “Naïve fool.”
Day 1 - Swallowed by the dark
Day 28 - The indistinct phantoms of nightmares
Day 14/23 - Deserving sinners
Day 5 - The chance to flee
Day 6 - Disobedient dogs who try to run
Day 13 - “To know you'll only fail again.”
Day 8 - “I’m fine.”
🌫️ The Escape
Day 13 - Leave no trail.
Day 7 - The world beyond
Day 6 - A sombre dawn
Day 15 - A fool, a dead man
🌫️ The Cellar
Day 4 - “Who are you?”
Day 15 - “Let me help you.”
Day 17 - “Wait, are you afraid of me?”
Day 24 - “Lean on me.”
Day 23 - Cursed, hunted, condemned
Day 27 - “You’re trembling.”
Day 12 - “I’m dangerous.”
Day 17 - “You’re not a prisoner here.”
Alt Prompt - “No one knows you’re here.”
Day 15 - Her foolhardy selflessness
Day 25 - “Is that wise?”
Day 24 - “Just forget about me.”
Day 30 - “I think you might be a good man.”
Day 29 - “Just another few days.”
Day 15 - Endless pools of sorrow
Day 20 - “Are you alone here?”
Day 24 - “What’s with all the apples?”
Day 13 - “I just wish I could repay you.”
Day 28 - “You've found your smile again.”
Day 25 - “I’ve always loved the rain.”
Day 2 - “What are you doing in my house?”
Day 1 - “What were you thinking?”
Day 18 - “Why do you love him?”
Day 11 - “An arrangement, and nothing more.”
Day 6 - “He would never hurt me.”
🌫️ The Recapture
Day 18 - “Nowhere to run, crook.”
Day 19 - “Rot in hell.”
Alt prompt - “It was her.”
Day 4 - He with no future
Day 20 - “Don’t tell me you forgot about me.”
Day 22 - “It’s been too long.”
Day 22 - A death sentence disguised as mercy.
Day 31 - “Enjoy your last night here.”
Day 31 - “Now you’re a broken man.”
Day 28 - “Hope you enjoyed the last taste of freedom you'll ever have.”
🌫️ The Pits
Day 29 - “You ought to be grovelling at my feet.”
Day 26 - A shambling spectre that once was a man
Day 21 - Leashed, muzzled, and ordered around like a beast
Day 3 - Half-lives in the dust
Day 30 - A creature soft, yet wild
Day 25 - “I’ll always love the rain.”
🌫️ A Free Man
Day 1 - Retribution well-deserved
Day 29 - “You are free.”
Day 29 - Charcoal and silver
Day 26 - Fading stars and blooming sun
Alt prompt - Rain and apple blossoms
Full List of Content Warnings
pain, angst, prison, prison camp, labour camp, forced labour, chains, blood, restraints, cruel law enforcement, branding, taunting, humiliation, physical violence, beatings, very brief minor whump, whipping/flogging, gag/muzzle, exhaustion, thirst/dehydration, mine collapse, minor character death, death mention, failed escape, torture, barbed wire, exposure, guilt, fear, grief, loneliness, prospect of a loveless marriage, betrayal, recapture
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Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem making content in front of the imprisoned men of El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center mega-prison
It’s currently being used as a prison camp for people accused of illegal immigration into America. People who haven’t been formally charged with a single crime.
"The idea of mothering and procreation morphed into Gorky’s fascination with prisoner transformation and perekovka. The labor camp would be the mother of a new working class. Both god-building and the maternal impulse dovetailed with the author’s largest philosophical and intellectual preoccupation: human fashioning. Whether it was the literal, biological creation of the human by the maternal womb or the transformation afforded by a personal journey or individual greatness, Gorky remained intrigued by the individual’s ability for creation, journey, and self-discovery. Maintaining that humans were inherently malleable and eternally improvable, he believed in the potential for endless refinement through diligent effort.
Gorky’s special relationship to the Belomor project allows for an understanding of his career as a symbolic representation of the ideals promoted at the camp. Gorky was a staunch enthusiast of prisoner labor and even predicted the possibility of a waterway similar to Belomor in his early works; in the April 1917 issue of his journal New Life (Novaia zhizn’) he writes
Imagine, for example, that in the interest of the development of industry, we build the Riga-Kherson canal to connect the Baltic Sea with the Black Sea […] and so instead of sending a million people to their deaths, we send a part of them to work on what is necessary for the country and its people.
Gorky’s condoning of Gulag camps such as Solovki and Belomor seems paradoxical to many scholars in light of his humanitarian endeavors, and some speculate either that Gorky was ignorant of the full extent of Stalin’s butchery or that he was aware, but was in a position that necessitated acquiescence to safeguard his well-being. When viewed in the context of his philosophical outlook on literature and labor, however, his support of prison camps seems not like an aberration but rather a natural extension of his belief in violent re-birth, a belief related to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the concept of god-building. Gorky sees people and language alike in the framework of craftsmanship. Perhaps his mistake was not so much his general support of Gulag projects, but his belief that human flesh can be formed like words on a page or cement in a factory. Gorky, after all, cared more about the craft than people themselves; in his 1928 essay “On How I Learned to Write” (O tom, kak ia uchilsia pisat’), he claimed that “the history of human labor and creation is far more interesting and meaningful than the history of mankind.” Gorky was key to the canal project because his philosophical interests exemplify the very core of Belomor: the violent transformation of people through creative acts.
Technology’s magic demonstrated humans’ usurpation of God in a tangible way, with the ever-widening capacity to harness and transform the natural environment showcasing the potential of man-made machines. Soviet pilots were imagined as literal incarnations of the New Man, and the massive expansion of the Soviet aviation industry in the mid 1920s provided some of the most concrete evidence of human superiority over the divine. Short voyages known as “air baptisms” (vozdushnye kreshcheniia) supposedly eradicated peasants’ belief in God while highlighting the majesty of Red aviation. In such “agit-flights,” pilots would take Orthodox believers into the skies and show them that they held no celestial beings. Those who participated in the flights would narrate their experiences to neighboring villagers, describing “what lies beyond the darkened clouds.” This phrase served as the title of a 1925 essay by Viktor Shklovskii in which a village elder embarks upon a conversional agit-flight that he later recounts to his fellow peasants. Six years later, Shklovskii participated in the writers’ collective that coauthored the now infamous monograph History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, in which a different, often deadly, type of technological program offered the promise of conversion. In both instances, darkness will be overcome by the enlightening potential of socialist rationalism: aviation will liberate the peasants from their ignorant beliefs, just as labor will supposedly bring the Belomor prisoners to the light of Soviet ideology. Such endeavors occurred before the backdrop of a larger civilizing project, since both the rural reaches of peasant villages and the wild expanses of untouched Karelia necessitated modernization.
Yet could such projects ever be completed? Did the New Man really exist, and could his creation ever be achieved? The messianic vision of Soviet socialism necessitated that paradise lie always just out of reach.
Similarly, Nietzsche posits the development into the Übermensch as a perennially elusive goal; like the Faustian concept of striving, the individual is forever trying to perfect oneself without necessarily ever achieving perfection. This constant yearning renders the present as the future, as the purpose of today is necessarily the reward of tomorrow. In the Soviet Union, the regime assured people that the difficulties they endured were required in order to reach the svetloe budushchee (radiant future), a utopia found at the end of an interminable road. In the absence of an end result or final destination, the voyage itself becomes the site of cultural exploration."
- Julie Draskoczy, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. p 30-32
Russians continued the placement of flowers on the grave of Putin's nemesis, Alexei Nevalnei, despite mass arrests and police violence days ago at his funeral. Nevalnei had been the victim of two covert KGB Novachuk poisoning attempts for running an opposition news service and having the audacity to not only survive, but to also run for President of Russia against Putin. He was sentenced by the Russian court system to an isolated Siberian Penal Camp where, despite being interviewed last week in good health and high spirits, he died of what the Russian government OFFICIALLY claims was a simple heart attack.
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Camp de prisonniers italiens – Jardin Orto Fontanelle – Opération Husky ( Débarquement en Sicile) – Bataille de Gela – Campagne d'Italie – Gela – Sicile – Juillet 1943
The Latvian guards tried to resist, but Vanessa and her girls were like lightning. Within minutes four of the men lay dead, despatched by expert submachine gun fire or the lethal blade of Veronique. Without their German officers the men were little more than a rabble and soon their barracks were ablaze. As another of the guards tumbled, slain, from the watchtower, the remaining male soldiers gave up. “Mes padodamies, damas!” they called out to the three Frenchwomen, flinging their rifles to the floor and raising their hands. “Ludzu, panemiet mus gusta, jaunkundz!” added the soldier whose neck Vanessa now had trapped by his own rifle. The former maquis leader knew enough of the Baltic tongue to work out what the desperate choking man was pleading. She signalled to her comrades to cease firing. “Ramassez leurs armes,” she ordered the other two women, smiling, “et attachons-les, les filles!” The six surviving and cowering Latvians were forced to their knees, including two who clambered down from the watchtower at gunpoint, and were tightly bound and gagged by the girls with material they tore from their own skirts and dresses. Vanessa, Veronique and Isabelle looked with satisfaction at their terrrified looking prisoners and the burning camp. According to the broadcasts, the Americans would be here tomorrow, Vanessa estimated. “Cousons-nous une tricolore.” she suggested with pride. The other two women nodded enthusiastically. It would be fitting, their leader thought, for the US soldiers to see the French flag flying over this German hellhole as they approached, and with the humiliated Latvian lackies gagged and tied to gateposts to greet them!
My interpretation of the story behind the cover to The Piedmont Harlots, Adventure Magazine (October 1963). Translation of the Latvian and the French available on request!
"Life under an occupation": 12-year-old Palestinian rapper MC Abdul
“Life under an occupation”: 12-year-old Palestinian rapper MC Abdul
(20) S.L. Kanthan on X: “”Life under an occupation”: 12-year-old Palestinian rapper MC Abdul. #Hamas #Gaza https://t.co/7DcOMKrEW6″ / X
"Life under an occupation": 12-year-old Palestinian rapper MC Abdul.#Hamas #Gaza pic.twitter.com/7DcOMKrEW6— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) October 7, 2023
