The Factory at Night

I inherited a factory, but I never really knew what to do with it.

Too big, too quiet.

A place I didn’t want anyone to enter, yet too empty for me to carry alone.

So I invited a DJ I knew and decided to throw a party.

It was my idea. My invitation.

I just needed a reason to open those huge metal doors.

More people showed up than I expected—

my friends, his friends, their friends…

The kind of crowd that appears from nowhere and somehow acts harmless.

They laughed, laid out food, helped clean up,

started sweeping the factory floor like they lived there.

Then they’d suddenly turn around holding some rusty part and go,

“Hey, can I take this home?”

That casual boundary-breaking.

No malice, just stupidity.

Story of my life.

From the start, I kept teasing the DJ.

Touching his shoulder, whispering in his ear, brushing against him on purpose.

He looked bothered in that pathetic, half-smiling way—

Like, “I’m kinda working right now…”

And yet, he couldn’t stop watching me.

The party was peaking when the atmosphere shifted.

There’s a moment when the air freezes,

when everyone is still laughing but no one is actually laughing anymore.

In the corner, my friend’s half-gangster little brother muttered,

“I found a perfect place to hide a body.”

Then I noticed them—

his crew, already downstairs, dismantling a corpse.

Quiet sounds of knives.

Thick, wet air.

That metallic-meat smell you can’t mistake.

A headache bloomed behind my eyes.

Great. Exactly the kind of annoyance I didn’t need.

The DJ tugged lightly on my sleeve.

“…Wanna get out of here?”

I invited him, yet he was the one inviting me to escape.

That imbalance—delicious.

Then a lone cop showed up.

A stupid face with the smell of authority all over him.

If he saw anything, the paperwork alone would kill us.

We hid behind some stacked crates.

All I could think was:

(They’re totally getting caught. Annoying. Not my problem.)

It felt like the world was destroying itself

while leaving only the two of us untouched.

Two bicycles were parked on the asphalt.

He glanced at me.

“Wanna ride?”

I didn’t bother answering.

I got on.

The deeper we rode into the property,

the less it resembled reality.

The factory grounds stretched far beyond anything possible,

until suddenly it turned into an abandoned indoor theme park—

like an empty mall in Macau or Ikspiari,

with a fake sky painted on the ceiling

and bits of light flickering like dying stars.

We kept going.

A tall fence appeared at the edge of the world.

Chest-height.

Jumpable, maybe.

“You know how to climb that, right?”

he said, in a voice too confident to belong to the guy I’d been teasing all night.

Strangely, I did.

I kicked off the ground—my body felt weightless—

and I cleared the fence like it was nothing.

On the other side, the air shifted.

Humid.

Like walking into a cloud of microscopic mist from some hidden machine.

A faint scent of water.

Warm, soft light—

not daylight, not artificial.

Something in-between.

Like a greenhouse at night.

We stopped.

Breathing.

Staring at each other.

(You know what we’re doing next, right?)

The thought hit us at the exact same time.

I grabbed his shirt and pulled him into a kiss—

hard, messy, hungry.

The humidity wrapped around us,

and we slipped straight into sex

as if gravity had finally made sense.

We ran from everything,

yet somehow that was the only place that felt right.

That’s when I woke up.

For a dream, it was disturbingly precise.

Cinematic, almost fun.

Except for the corpse part—

that was genuinely terrifying.

——— ©️DSH / 2025