Where the Drains run

It was not a school, though it insisted upon being one.

At first glance, it resembled an institution of learning—vast, disciplined, familiar in the way of places one believes they has outgrown. Yet within its boundaries lay an entire neighborhood: narrow brick streets where bicycles and cars moved with quiet purpose, as though obeying laws no one had spoken aloud. Children wandered freely between worlds that should not have coexisted—playgrounds, alleys, roads—and none questioned the arrangement.

Near the heart of it stood a great mound of yellow sand.

Children climbed it. Older figures lingered there too, laughing, watching, even skating across its shifting surface. The sand seemed alive—not in motion, but in presence—like something that permitted joy only temporarily.

Not far from it, half-hidden, were the rooms.

They were small, low, and easily missed, tucked like wounds into the walls of the school. Within them ran open drains—thick with black, sluggish muck that moved without sound. In each room sat a woman, older, still, watching the flow with an attention that bordered on reverence. They did not clean. They only observed.

The bell rang.

It was the end of the day—or something like it. Children gathered at the main entrance, waiting for their parents, their voices thin and distant. The air held that peculiar pause, as though time had exhaled and forgotten to draw breath again.

And yet, there was no reason to be there.

No uniform. No belonging. Only movement—wandering through corridors and streets alike, as though searching for something that had not yet revealed itself.

That was when the familiar faces appeared.

A girl—called Rose—moved atop the sand mound with careless ease. Her sister lingered nearby, and their mother, once a teacher, stood close, capturing moments in photographs that already felt like relics. There was warmth there, a softness, a memory of something real.

And yet—

There was a smell. Faint at first. Then undeniable.

It clung to Rose, rose from her, thick and humiliating, like the unmistakable scent of something spoiled, something bodily and wrong. Others wrinkled their faces, exchanged uneasy glances—but they did not understand it. They did not name it.

She did not seem to notice. Neither did her family. Only the awareness remained, hovering, unresolved.

So the wandering continued.

Through the strange neighborhood where roads cut through school grounds, where grey streets narrowed into brick veins, where the air dimmed without warning. And eventually—inevitably—the path led to the alley.

It was no different from the others. That was what made it wrong.

To the left of the main entrance, beyond a simple footpath, it lay in quiet imitation of every other place that had already been passed. Children stood there. A road stretched ahead, marked with white lines. Beyond it—the gate.

A small figure stepped forward. A child in a red beret, a dress the colour of fire, crossing where she should not.

The shout came suddenly. The gatekeeper’s voice tore through the stillness, sharp with panic—not anger, but fear disguised as authority. She was not supposed to be there. None of them were.

The road, he said, was not to be crossed. Not now. Not with the officer present. Not with the investigation.

Murders.

The word settled like dust over everything.And in that moment, something aligned: The sky—blue, always blue—revealed itself not as colour, but as condition. A tint over reality. A drowning hue. The kind that belongs not to air, but to depth.

Then the world shifted.

The road dissolved.

The distant trees bent inward, closing ranks, swallowing space until only the footpath remained—narrow, insufficient, leading nowhere.

There was no choice but to run.

Through the neighborhood again, past the impossible coexistence of homes and halls, until the vehicle appeared—a stark intrusion of order that confirmed what the world had already implied.

Something had happened. Something irreversible.

Movement blurred—bike, then foot, then breathless escape—until, once more, the familiar faces emerged.

Rose. Her sister. Her mother. Unchanged. And yet not.

A greeting was offered. A distance maintained. The smell persisted—worse now, undeniable—and though others recoiled, though faces twisted in shared disgust, no one spoke it aloud.

No embrace was given. That absence lingered.

The return to the alley was not a decision.

It simply occurred. And then—the sand. Larger now. Towering. No longer a place of play, but of passage. It parted at the centre, splitting open with quiet intention, revealing a path that had not existed before.

There was no hesitation. Only entry.

On the other side, the absence was immediate. No Rose. No laughter. No witnesses.

Only the pull toward the rooms—the narrow chambers where the drains ran. And there— A glimpse. Three figures. Submerged. Not struggling. Not rising. Suspended within the black current as though already claimed by it. Their forms distorted, their presence undeniable.

Then gone.

When the chamber was finally entered—from another direction, another angle—they were no longer there.

Only their clothes remained. Folded. Clean. Placed with care upon a surface too ordinary for what it held.

The woman sat beside them, as she had always sat, watching, waiting. The question came before thought.

Where were they?

Gone. Sent away. To be burned.

The words struck wrong—not in meaning, but in placement. The ritual did not belong to them. It had been assigned without consent, without correction. Protest rose, instinctive, futile. It did not matter, the woman said.

The dead have no choice.

A request—to see them—was denied. But another was offered. The clothes.

Memory, she said, lived within them.

Refusal wavered. Curiosity—grief—something deeper prevailed.

The blue fabric which belonged to her mother was lifted.

Held close. And then— Everything returned.

A classroom. A voice. Lessons spoken with patience and warmth. Recognition. Care. The quiet shaping of a younger self by someone who had seen something worth nurturing.

The grief did not arrive gently. It broke.

Tears came without restraint, each breath pulling more memory to the surface, each memory deepening the loss until it felt bottomless.

The other garments remained untouched. Not from indifference. But from distance.

Directions were given: Behind the mosque. A place where bodies would become ash. The desire to go warred with something stronger. Fear. Not of death—but of witnessing its completion.

The shift came without warning.

A house. Familiar. Above a place of worship.

Inside, two figures passed without acknowledgment—eyes forward, steps unbroken, as though the presence that watched them did not exist.

They did not know. That was the weight. Knowledge without voice. Grief without outlet.

Then—Recognition.

A woman emerged, her face marked by sorrow so visible it required no words. An embrace followed. Tears—silent, shared—bridged what speech could not. Others gathered.

The space changed.

Brightness overtook everything—green, white, almost radiant in its intensity. A place that suggested peace, yet felt constructed, as though layered over something unresolved.

There, stories surfaced. Loss spoken plainly. A husband gone—welcomed in his absence. A child lost—carried in memory.

And above— Figures. Many. Colourful. Still. Arrayed in the clouds like witnesses or relics, bearing expressions too distant to be called joy, too serene to be called grief.

The dead, it seemed, had found something. Or had been placed within it.

And then— The final fracture: 

A room of glass. An apartment suspended in quiet luxury.

A woman entered—adorned, deliberate, changed. On the bed lay another, dressed in the same strange attire, differing only in color.

Comfort was offered. Spoken softly. Relief expressed—not for survival, but for the absence of a man who had once held power.

Recognition came slowly. Then all at once: Mother. Daughter. Boundaries dissolved.

Grief transformed into something intimate, something that blurred roles, rewrote meaning, erased the structures that once defined them.

It was not the act itself that unsettled. It was the collapse of order.

The sense that nothing—neither life, nor death, nor love—remained within its rightful place.

 Waking did not end it.

Because the unease was not tied to images. But to a single, enduring realisation: beneath every familiar place, behind every proper ritual, within every memory carefully preserved—something had shifted. Quietly. Irreversibly. And no one—not the living, not the dead—seemed able to put it back.