Prisons stretched across every place; some built for comfort, some for brief visits; those are what you know as holiday chambers. Some rose with towering walls, others trapped the stars of the night.
They multiplied, crowned with thorns and lines of advanced electric sting distilled from solar panels, with mines and shrapnel. In their pits lay rooms for living and dying, and floors buried beneath cemeteries… floors like inverted skyscrapers, so that the human becomes a worm.
No… a story like this cannot happen. It is forgery. This story never happens anywhere on earth…
No! It happens. It always happens. Why did the raven teach us how to bury our brothers after killing them, and why did the worm teach us how to dig coffins of clay at the bottom and bury the dead?
“Listen to me… do not cut my words with stones of stoning! I will not write a myth born of slander, unless its author is sick in his eyes, his ears, and his mind. I am not sick, but I am in the awakening before death. This is your chance to hear me, and for me not to forget, and for you not to forget, that the story happened…”
After epochs, decades, and years, the governor issued a decree:
“So that corpses do not fall exposed across the streets, caught by cameras and the hooked horns of flies, let the people move freely, and from corners and houses take them in the silence of night, then place them in the inverted towers of earth. There they will cost us nothing; no fatigue, no distraction, no talk.”
The story they tell did not happen… and the witnesses say their eyes have no windows. Generations, ages, and pregnant women no longer give birth. They fled, but we chased them always, until no space remained in the inverted towers for more inhabitants. They were allowed, at the bottom of the pit, to sing one song a year—begging me… waiting for the ends of history.
Clean the streets, for this story did not happen, and the streets carry no blood. Where would they find pens to write on filthy walls? Where are they, if the story did not happen, and we are the beloved ones, and the place is safe with the silence guaranteed by tongues we created? You will hear no screams of pain in what we do, for pain has no time to arrive.
… Strange things crawl out of the cracks, and the clay walls are thirsty. Hunger reddens the piles of hard watermelon rinds. Are they humans or ghosts? One day they emerged like sun-colored chrysanthemums, their bodies embroidered with red threads of anemones. We believed the story had not happened, and would never happen. We are the kings of the earth, and Ramses remained unburied, still ruling the land with the inverted pyramid… indeed, we are the ones called Ramses.
“Come on, heroes!” They swore the oath of freedom. They are the spray of a barren summer. Take their few belongings from a hungry waist! Rip open the belly of the pregnant! We want no one to scream from hunger or pain… We want slaves dancing joyfully on the bones we left scraped clean.
We have enemies! Listen. Come closer and we shall reward you, if you are with us for the sake of the homeland we built…
Summer turned into breasts dripping cascades of light, and the lower earth began to sense the quake. Nothing will remain. Nothing will ever remain. The best trees are those that feed on the warmth of buried organs.
They became a human flood groaning like the rock Sisyphus carries in eternal weight. But Sisyphus must triumph at the end of the tale, even if fate decrees otherwise. Come, O grave of the blind! Open your eyelids to the light and there is no light unless the Great Pyramid turns toward the sun.
The history written in the bottom of the bottom will be swept away by hands revealed as fossils of bone, still wrestling the naked burden of the world. Enter the inverted tower… the time has come after thousands of years. Awaken Spartacus and his soldiers, even if their spears have become reeds. Awaken all the oppressed, victims of our unjust, wounded world. The Bastille will not be the only symbol overturned by arms, now it is the turn of the inverted tower…
Enter through the pores of the black stone… Come, for all doors begin from this door.
The miracle of the Great Pyramid became tales before dreams. Thousands died building it, and the inverted tower swallowed countless unknown corpses. The shattered gate devoured all whose eyes spilled stunned tears… waves of human masses pushed forward to discover whether anyone remained breathing the scent of the dead.
The grieving people stood over the spilled bodies of victims. Torture machines everywhere… world wars deny the days of death, and in the house are stories no eyes have drawn, no paths have dug, no flags have risen for… there are only the traces of the hyena-human.
The day came… Every two strangers carried a dry corpse from the depths of the inverted tower. The moment arrived: the gate shattered beneath shallow, thirsty, broken bare feet.
Crowds upon crowds emerged from between the jaws of a hyena known to history since the cursed Neanderthal… betrayal has existed since written history.
Hurry, for corpse after corpse, the caravan moves toward the unknown… stretching, stretching, stretching… frightened faces rejoicing because the orders ceased when the gate was torn off… and the caravan did not cease, until silence prevailed and the traces of rot scattered across the heavy breeze to every land where oppressed humans are scattered.
Sisyphus stepped on the collapsed gate, its fragments unstable, and behind him Spartacus, with his old sandal, stepped. Only they dared enter the darkness to learn the secrets of the inverted tower and the inverted pyramid. Only they still had eyes in their faces.
Deep inside the gate… they saw what no human expected. The depth was covered with black masks… Black masks covering everything, including the weapons of death.
Sisyphus asked: “Why is everything covered with black masks?”
Spartacus answered: “O Sisyphus, you carried your rock on your back always, and never knew what was happening. Poor Sisyphus… these black masks are the masks of executioners! In their masks they are stronger at hiding from the eyes of their victims. And when the human earthquake came, refusing humiliation, salvation lay in removing the masks, and carrying their victims as if they were their kin, taking them to bury them with dignity… but the truth is they were feeding them to the hyenas of the universe.”
Sisyphus was foolish, carrying his rock through all time, while the Gods laughed.
Blind history forgets, and the executioners become the heroes who carry their victims and replace the wombs of mothers with poisoned embraces.
Zouheir Al Shalabi
Nicosia 12/09/2026