The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

In prison, they kept us right at the edge of starvation. You could still do work, but you couldn’t think. Your mind would try to retrieve a word or thought, but it wouldn’t be there. There’s no sense of time when you’re hungry. You just labor and then it’s dark, no memory.

Ga thought about reminding the Dear Leader that they lived in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them.