"Conviction"

My latest feature-length story, a cold thing about repressive governments, religion at the bleeding edge of life, prison camps, fatherhood, and the existence of freedom, just finished serialization on my fiction blog. So go look at it. No, I don't really care if you're here for comics. For now this stuff is more important.

Starts like this:

"The prisoner’s wife was dead. She gave a tremor half a decade ago while birthing the prisoner’s son and she was gone, lingering vapor of her last white breath on the cold air, no color in her face to begin with. They boxed her then, and put in the frozen ground of the Dziawl penal colony. The prisoner had dug the grave himself, shovel blade turned sideways like an ax to chip away the ice the top two feet of earth had frozen into. It had been Christmas then, and it was coming up on Christmas now. For the wife there had been no funeral, only burial. Her coffin was piled with so much dirt that when its brittle roof caved in from the weight halfway through, filling her coffin with it, the little crashes went inaudible, unnoticed." Read more...