The Old Blog in the Desert

Everything vanished into the machinery of genocide, reduced to smoke and numbers. That’s what the archives said.

That’s what the professors said. But for Anton Keller, who catalogued the dead at the Ministry of Historical Continuity, it was all paperwork and cigarettes.

The human stain, gone before he showed up to sort the ashes. He sat in his small, gray cubicle, third floor, Room 312-B, surrounded by folders that smelled of mildew.

He never opened the windows; the air outside carried too many ghosts. The ceiling lights hummed, the radiator heater coughed, and somewhere down the hall, a clerk was crying quietly, but nobody said anything.

Anton had once been a poet, before the city decided poetry was a form of dissent. Now he worked with numbers.

His days were inventories, shipments of bones, lists of confiscated shoes, and meticulous death tallies. The Ministry wanted precision; precision was allegiance.

He’d learned to drink coffee like poison. Quickly, before it cooled, before he could taste it.

He had no friends. Friends asked questions.

He just had his desk, his ashtray, and the slow mechanical rhythm of forgetting.

The machinery ran without oil now. Everything squeaked and stalled.

Anton found it beautiful, in a detached sort of way, how even atrocity could become dull, and the monstrous reduced to bureaucratic fatigue. He supposed that was the real trick: making horror manageable by turning it into files.

One night, while sorting a new batch of files, he found a folder marked “Experimental Unit 47.” Inside was a name he recognized, Lea Rothmann.

They’d met years ago, before the city changed, before the walls went up. She’d been a painter, reckless and alive. He remembered her laugh, how it shattered the gray air.

The folder was thin. Too thin.

Just one sheet of paper, a number, and a date. No cause of death. No location. The machinery had eaten her, and this was all that remained: a line of digits and an unfiled memory.

Anton lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl upward. For a moment, he thought he saw her face in it, eyes half-closed, as if she were tired of waiting. Then it was gone.

He should have shredded the file. That’s what the protocol said, but he slipped it into his coat pocket instead.

He didn’t know why. Perhaps guilt, or that he wanted proof that Lea had once existed outside the system.

The next morning, the city was colder. His breath fogged as he walked to work.

People stood in lines for ration cards, silent and gray. He imagined them all as future folders, future smoke.

The thought didn’t disturb him anymore. It only made him tired.

At the Ministry, the supervisor called him in. Said there’d been a discrepancy, one file missing: Unit 47.

The supervisor smiled without warmth. “These things are sensitive, Keller. Misplacing them looks disloyal.”

Anton said nothing. He just nodded and left.

That night, he burned the folder in his apartment’s sink. It took longer than he expected; the paper curled, blackened, and resisted.

The flame danced weakly, as if afraid. When done, Anton poured the ashes into his coffee cup and stirred them in, then drank slowly, grimacing at the bitterness.

Outside, the sirens wailed, routine inspections, curfews, the usual noise of the city choking on itself. Anton sat by the window, smoking, watching the smoke rise into the night.

He imagined it joining the others, drifting over the rooftops, merging with the gray sky that had long since forgotten the sun. In the end, he thought, the machinery doesn’t destroy things.

It absorbs them, takes love, memory, guilt, and smooths them into dust. The trick is not to care.

He exhaled, and the smoke hung in the air like an afterthought, then even that was gone.