NOTE: This work is not meant to push a certain 'political agenda'. The author, Farting_Cat, simply wishes to showcase the main character's morale compass and personal conflict by using an allegory that pertains to current real world events. Serena's attitude, behaviour, and action(s) pertaining to this topic are simply a reflection of her fictional personhood. She is not meant to be the most reliable narrator.
Farting__Cat is not Serena. She is not a reflection of the author's thoughts and beliefs. The Farting Cat simply likes to write realistic characters and pull from the real world for inspiration. To add, readers can disagree with Farting_Cat's narrative choices, as everyone is entitled to their own opinions.
Lastly, the author would like to clarify that the slight emphasis on 'facts' in some parts of this narrative is to make the book feel lived-in and realistic—not guilt-trip anybody or force-feed 'agenda.' If you do not believe in any of the information laid out, then that is your opinion. Once again, Serena is not meant to be the most reliable narrator.
By the end of the day, it's a fictional webnovel. Don't take it too seriously - Farting_Cat
————
It was 2026. She sat at her small desk, a blank notebook open before her. The months began to pass in frozen, disconnected snapshots. The pages filled with precise handwriting, the dosages noted. The world outside her window and inside her head continued its slow decay. Serena sat at the center of it, a still point in the turning chaos. She was swallowing her pills and waiting, numb and unresisting, for the next inevitable break. Serena moved through it all like a sleepwalker, the line between her nocturnal and waking captivity having blurred into a single continuum.
It was on a walk home from the bus, that she saw them. A river of people clogging the intersection. This time, not with the impatience of New York traffic, but with the order of a protest. Their chants were a rhythmic wave against the canyon of buildings. She couldn't make out much of the words, only an emotion—a collective determination that felt denser than the air around it.
She tried to skirt the edges, but the crowd was a living organism. A young woman with tired eyes pressed a folded pamphlet into Serena's hand, before being swept back into the current of bodies. She clutched the paper, a hot flush of shame creeping up her neck. The news was a noise she had long since tuned out. It was another needle poking at a composure that was already in tatters. Serena was ignorant. Lazy. Selfish.
Back in the grave-like silence of her apartment, she unfolded the pamphlet. It held facts, dates, and pictures. Images of children, their bodies whittled down to sticks and swollen bellies. Satellite images of streets reduced to rubble—entire family lines erased with the casual efficiency of a bulldozer. Accusations of apartheid. Warcrimes. Genocide. The West's complicity.
A cold knot tightened in her stomach. She had known about Palestine's history since high school, and had heard of the escalating situation in recent years. She spent the night falling down a digital rabbit hole, her laptop glowing in the dark room. She cross-referenced the pamphlet's claims. International human rights reports, journalist accounts, and the raw, unedited footage from the ground. It was all true.
The scale of it was geologic. A mountain of suffering so vast that it highlighted her own pain as the insignificant grain of sand it was. And yet, that grain was all she had cared for the past few years. Her inaction was not just self-preservation. Her focus on the tiny, bloody theater of her own wrist was a form of complicity. She was a curator of the dead, meticulously preserving the artifacts of past extinctions—while actively ignoring a livestreamed genocide.
A sob tore from her throat, then another. This time, they were loud, body-wracking. She cried for the victims. For the sheer brutality of it all. She cried because of her own weakness, for the years spent building a barricade around her own mind while the world burned down. She was helpless and pathetic, a tiny creature scuttling in the shadows of an atrocity. She was weak.
But from the depths of that helplessness, a fragile desperate resolve began to reform. It was a sapling pushing through the cracked concrete of her mind. She had to do something. The mere thought of joining a crowd, being jostled and touched, sent a familiar jolt of anxiety through her. But the images of Palestinians were a stronger current. She would go. She would stand. It was the barest minimum, but it was more than she had done in recent years.
———
Days later, on another walk home, the city offered a different horror. A crowd had gathered in a voracious circle. The air crackled with a base excitement. Serena felt herself drawn into the gravitational pull of the spectacle.
In the center, two men were in a tangled knot of violence. One, a Black man in a jacket, moved with the cornered energy of a rabbit . The other, a police officer, was all systemized force—his face a purple rage. It was not a fight, there was no equal standing here. It was a predation. Serena stood, enthralled and repulsed, her academic mind automatically supplying the context: the long, bloody history of racial oppression, the institutionalized power of the state, the statistics that were about to become a headline.
Then, with a sickening crackle-hiss, the officer tased the man. His body went rigid, an unwilling puppet with its strings cut, and collapsed to the pavement. A collective gasp, part shock, part anger, rippled through the crowd. Serena stood frozen. The intellectual analysis was there—the injustice, the brutality. But something else, something more primal, had cut through her dissociation. It was the raw, unmediated force of the violence itself. The hate on the officer's face had been pure, uncomplicated by ideology in that moment. It was a violence that required no complex understanding, only the willingness to inflict it. No mind games, no dissociative barriers, no silent suffering. Just force meeting flesh. A horrible, stupid, direct translation of hate into action.
And she did nothing about it.
———
Local independent news that evening confirmed what she already knew. The policeman, with a history of complaints, had instigated the confrontation. She thought of her college days, a few years ago. She had been active then, filled with a fury at the world's injustices. But eventually, the evil of the world had felt too vast and pervasive. It had seeped into the cocoon she was trying to spin around herself—finding a perfect mirror in the fragmented country of her own mind. It had broken her, and she had let it. She couldn't go on by the age of 26, panic attacks plaguing her at every turn.
"... Virgil."
She looked at her hands, resting limply in her lap. They were the hands that used to paint beautiful lies and write horrific truths, the hands that now locked themselves away every night. The faces of the starved children, crying civilians, and the twitching person would not leave her. People who didn't have the privilege of ignorance. She was weak. But the bare minimum was to bear witness. To add her one, silent, trembling body to the count of the dissenters. Standing in the crowd as a fragile breakable testament to the fact that someone else was still looking, refusing to consent. It was a small thing. But in the economy of her soul, it would sap out the last of her energy.