Around the time when the day grew dark, and beams of orange light strafed down through the crowns of the oaks, exhausted with wondering where my sister might be, my thoughts turned instead to them. To the person who had killed me, and the one who had killed her. Where were they, right now? Even if they hadn’t died they would still have souls, so

Plain-clothes policemen were a permanent feature of campus life, and students who fell foul of them were forcibly enlisted in the army and sent to the DMZ.

We were bodies, dead bodies, and in that sense there was nothing to choose between us. All the same, there was something infinitely noble about how his body still bore the traces of hands that had touched it, a tangible record of having been cared for, been valued, that made me envious and sad.

She was dead; she had died even before I had. With neither tongue nor voice to carry it, my scream leaked out from me in a mess of blood and watery discharge. My soul-self had no eyes; where was the blood coming from, what nerve endings were sparking this pain? I stared at my unchanging face.

Who killed me, who killed my sister, and why. The more of myself I devoted to these questions, the firmer this new strength within me became. The ceaseless flow of blood, blood that flowed from a place without eyes or cheeks, darkened, thickened, into a viscous treacle ooze.

I want to see their faces, to hover above their sleeping eyelids like a guttering flame, to slip inside their dreams, spend the nights flaring in through their forehead, their eyelids. Until their nightmares are filled with my eyes, my eyes as the blood drains out. Until they hear my voice asking, demanding, why.

More than half of the sentences in the ten-page introduction have been scored through. In the thirty or so pages following, this percentage rises so that the vast majority of sentences have a line through them. From around the fiftieth page onwards, perhaps because drawing a line had become too labour-intensive, entire pages have been blacked out,

Just then, three young men ran out from the next alleyway along. When they shoved their hands under the armpits of the fallen and hauled them up, a burst of rapid-fire gunshot exploded from the direction of the soldiers in the centre of the square. The young men crumpled like puppets whose strings had been cut.

It must have been about midnight when I felt it touch me; that breath-soft slip of incorporeal something, that faceless shadow, lacking even language, now, to give it body. I waited for a while in doubt and ignorance, of who it was, of how to communicate with it. No one had ever taught me how to address a person’s soul.