Underground Absolute Fiction ASL

“I wish you great journeys, nightmares, and an afterworld…
…I wish you tears, a knife, and blood…
That you should sing and conspire.
That God should watch over you
and that you should not need Him.
That they should not hang you
before you’ve had time to pack your suitcase
my friend…”

It’s summer, and you’re standing in the centre of a low-income housing development. It’s a generation after your mother left, and time or capitalism has made everything palatable. She said the apartments were brutal grey slabs. Now, after the fall of Communism, they’re painted pastel pink. She said there was no playground, only a single iron monkey-bar and a dry tuft of yellow grass. Now, the EU money has paid for fresh wood-shavings, slides, swings, and climbing contraptions, all in primary colours. You squint at the schoolyard, where your mother and her classmates wore black, sung political anthems and defied their Communist teachers. Now, kids giggle and swing tennis rackets.

It feels almost idyllic, and you think of the propaganda postcards — posed, curated images of families suntanning outside the Falowiec, filtered yellow. Outside the frame, tanks rolled by, the phones were tapped, and your mom’s friend cried on the stairs in a torn dress.

There. You see it. The window on the top floor, in the corner. Your grandfather’s apartment. He waited ten years for the government to give it to him. He was rationed out this meagre square home and a small garden plot by the dumpster, concealed by a corrugated iron sheet.