Dark Death
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Indiana Ginglo, Grade 8
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Short Story
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2019
A fragile girl of seventeen, was now enduring her twelfth and final year in a North Korean prison camp. Her name was Ji-Yeon and it had been precisely twelve years since her incarceration. as punishment for a crime her father mercilessly committed. Twelve years earlier, Ji-Yeon’s father had heartlessly slain their family, receiving a death sentence in return.
Ji-Yeon had been fortunate to avoid death, or so she thought… As her father wasn’t quite ready to murder his innocent four-year-old daughter. Yet despite this fact, Ji-Yeon was still sentenced to twelve years as punishment for his crimes. Although, his actions were beyond young Ji-Yeon’s control.
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Faced with the same unfulfilling meal she had been given for the past twelve years. Ji-Yeon had grown used to being hungry, she often spent her days delirious with hunger. On a rusty metal tray lay a small bowl of corn kernels, roughly weighing a hundred grams, beside an even smaller bowl of lettuce. By now she was scarily thin, so much so her bones almost protruded through her skin. She barely possessed the strength to stand up, let alone participate in the forced labour expected in the prison.
Ji-Yeon was desperately waiting for the end of her twelfth year, when she would finally be freed.
She consistently felt tired but rarely slept. Her mind busily reliving the horrific trauma of her past. Yet she felt as if she wouldn’t survive another day. Ji-Yeon slowly forced a kernel of corn into her mouth, trying to give her malnourished body some minuscule form of nutrition. And yet she couldn’t do it, couldn’t handle any more of the mouldy corn the prison provided, couldn’t handle the difficulty of using her bony arms, her weak jaw, and chewing with her exhausted mouth.
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Ji-Yeon sat on the cold prison floor, her body shaking. Perhaps, if she slept for a while she would feel better. When she awoke she didn’t know if it was hours later or minutes, all she knew was that she felt a million times worse. Her head was spinning, her stomach nauseated, she didn’t have the energy to even blink.
It grew harder to breathe, as if she had suddenly been forced under water. Her thin shaking body had abruptly begun to go numb. She couldn’t think, couldn’t hear, she could barely even see, her eyesight clouded with white fog. She didn’t know who she was, or even where she was. Ji-Yeon’s chest suddenly gave way to a painful stab, causing her to crumple down to the freezing hard concrete. Her breathing now coming in excruciating spikes that felt like a knife entering her chest, her heartbeat gradually slowing down. What was left of her vision disappeared, leaving her in jet black darkness. The painful aches in her chest doubled to the point where she could not endure another breath, her heartbeat terminating.