26 posts tagged with "Kafka"

Mr. K received a letter. The envelope was stamped with an unfamiliar seal, the specific department unclear, only a vague impression of the word "Declaration" showing through. The content of the letter was simple: it requested that he fill out a declaration form and submit it within seven days.

Mr. K was puzzled. He couldn't remember needing to declare anything. But he followed the instructions anyway, and took the form from the envelope. The form was long, densely packed with various items, each item subdivided into countless smaller sub-items, and the sub-items further branching out, like an inverted tree with endlessly extending branches.

When Mr. K walked into the office on Monday morning, everything was as usual. Files were piled high, phones rang incessantly, colleagues numbly tapped on keyboards, and the air was thick with the stale smell of coffee and stifled silence.

But Mr. K's gaze was drawn to something on the wall.

The room was dark and damp, only the ticking of the old-fashioned wall clock, like a dull judgment, knocking on Old Man Li's heart one sound at a time. He sat on a hard wooden stool, hunched over, his cloudy eyes staring at a stain on the floor. The shape of the stain resembled a distorted human face.

Mr. K stood on the platform, enveloped in a restless crowd. The mechanical female voice repeated over and over again on the loudspeaker: "Train G2985 is temporarily stopped due to an incident. The resumption time is to be determined."

Chicken number 9527 opened its eyes.

To be precise, it didn't know if it had "opened" its eyes, because there was no light. There was only the endless sound of clashing metal, and an indescribable, humid, nauseating smell. It instinctively felt that it was in a narrow space, surrounded by beings like itself – crowded, trembling, exuding the same fear.

Li Weiming stared at the calendar. The bright red characters for "Spring Festival" were surrounded by dense annotations of "adjusted holidays," like a solitary island encircled by an endless cage. He felt a wave of dizziness, as if the entire world were spinning, the dates like runaway horses, galloping towards an unknowable black hole.