The skies become exceedingly cloudy and you look straight up at it, wondering where all those dirty gray-looking puffs appeared from. You feel as though you had just awoken from a forgotten dream, like you were just born, with no preceding memory.

The winds blow strong, and yet you are surprised by the fact that your feet can stay put onto the ground.

A smothering feeling, it doesn't seem to disappear, as if a 25 ft. pile of pillows were stacked on you and your mattress from underneath was bent upwards in the middle like a triangle.

And everything around you is black and white, as you notice a musty smell that lingers despite of the dryness of the air. You look around yourself at the desert-like place, but you don't see or feel anything like dust blowing at your exposed facial and limbs' skin.

Everything feels as though there was no preceding history, nothing to be told in fairytales or myths, no stories of war and triumph, that everything had suddenly started out from the abyss, a feeling and atmosphere that suddenly existed. Just plain smothering emptiness that persisted in spite of its unstable appearance.

Your name is Anthony.

You hear voices, whimpers actually, to be exact. You look behind yourself at a line of little boys, in a long concession. A feeling of curiosity surges through you, though dread and an uneasy agitation prevails in your chest.

Some voice, too close to sound separate from your mind, whispers to you to keep your clothing snugly tight to you skin, to not let an inch of your privacy be shown or to be suggested. A question rises to your mind on what that could mean, but you decide to follow the advice, for it feels overwhelmingly correct and necessary.

You just know that you must trust it.

A sudden tense sensation, worse than before, creeps up your spine and finally rests in your abdomen and a loud scream from the beginning of the long line sounds to your ears, terrifying you, bewildering your instinctual sensations. You feel the need to walk away. No, you know this feeling, something you had felt before, and yet you cannot describe it.

Your shaking feet briskly start to move away, while your mind is overcome by the thoughts intended to sort out what is happening around you.

Your head looking back at the line, you continue to move, when you find yourself bumping into someone.

Looking forward, you are shocked to find a large officer wearing a green suit standing in front of you, looking down upon you with those unusually bloodshot eyes. They express utter cruelness as they silently and, without blinking, refuse to remove your image from their iris.

Those eyes are hard to break through and you wonder what he is thinking. His actions are relaxed and yet hesitant and you find it hard to decide whether his eyes suggest cruelty or suffering or perhaps an absence of consciousness.

Suddenly, he reaches down to feel you up where you know it should be wrong.

Uncomfortable, you try to pull his hand away, but, for some reason, your strength doesn't exist and you feel like you are trying to move a large boulder, nothing more than soft touching to its perspective.

Screams echo again from behind you and you try to look back when the officer grabs your chin and forces you to face him. Your heart tells you to run.

The officer keeps hold of you and looks at you straight in the eye. He has a slashed scar along his eyelid. "You have it," he says.

You look up at him, feeling your eyes widening, and you again ponder on his actions. And staring at him in both horror and curiosity, you wonder if he is examining your sex to make sure you were a boy. And yet, you wonder if he were blind, since a person should be able to tell that you are, most certainly, a boy from your features. Your hair is cut short and your clothing could be no more masculine than it is.

The voice whispers to you once again, "society has gone mad."

You see the man continue to stare at you, "your brown eyes piss me off." And you know he can see you perfectly well.

The officer forcefully pushes you to the end of the line, behind a shaking boy who huddles into his wind breaker, covering his eyes and ears.

You raise you head to look beyond the squirming heads to see the beginning of the line. Then the sight comes to you and makes you understand perfectly. A wooden sign hangs from a large erect black slate that acts as some sort of a wall.

The sign reads in bold letters, "CASTRATION LINE"

That wall is by itself. Nothing exists behind, at least to the length of your vision. The desert continues on. No trees. The ground is dry, gray, and cracked.

A boy with wide-brimmed glasses runs from the front of the line with his hands between his legs. He is probably no more than nine years in age. He has tears running down from his cheeks, skipping frantically in circles and screaming before tripping, falling, and then starting back up to run off from the fear and pain that would probably befall upon him again, though now impossible and irreversible, if he went back.

You feel dizzy and sick in you stomach and a thought races through your mind to call for help. But, your voice is nonexistent at the moment and the only thing that can escape from your mouth is swishing air. You then wonder why only you could not scream. What was it with you that they wanted?

Thoughts zoom past your mental capacity and your eyes feel as though they are rolling back into your head. Your mind looks into the past, looking for the possibilities of what may have led to this or if you had a part in what appeared before you just a millionth of a second ago.

But, you only see emptiness of actions, no events, no life-term memories. You only feel painful absence, nothing preceding pain, nothing to remember, nothing to run away to.

A familiar feeling rushes through you as you feel like you're falling: similar to Disney's Alice in Wonderland, falling through the hole, following the rabbit.

Images circle around you. A broken clock working its way through a wall of flesh, you inside of the red softness. An inch further into the canal of torn meat created with each uneven tick of the second hand. No scream, or anything is heard, just the clock approaching, digging, forcing the release of red liquid that squirts like ketchup over the dark wood.

You feel intrigued, but you turn your head away to look at a woman sitting in blackness, who is obviously a mother, though you don't know why you know. You see her crying with her bleeding eyes rolling in circles in her hands, each sob of hers pushing them around.

Colors: purple, brown, and yellow circle around your face and you suddenly feel someone grabbing your arm.

The images are pushed away from the light entering through your eyelids, a dark light, indeed. You are back into reality, still the 27th in line for the castration. You still feel a grip on your wrist and so you look to your side. You see a boy, no older than 6, holding onto your wrist, shaking. Suddenly, he disappears, leaving behind a trail of tears and blood.

You wonder to yourself whether there is anesthesia. But, looking at the front, you see nothing other than an old woman with a pair of scissors and a boy being held tightly by another officer while she knelt down to bellow the boy's waist.

You plug your suffering ears just to drown out the muffled screams, cries and sobs, while the old woman takes her time, making sure to perform as slowly as possible, as though being cautious or perhaps, to your imagination's horror, to magnify the pain. A pail sits beside her seat.

You look behind yourself but no one is there. You are the last in line, as was before.

No one is watching you and so you run for your dear life. Run on and on. The woman looks up at you with a scowl, but then quickly returns to her duties with a smile of cruel amusement.

A guard chases after you, and, unconsciously, you turn around and knock him down with just a blow of your breath. You feel unsurprised by your action, but you feel an invincible feeling that didn't exist within you a moment before. You can't explain how, but your legs begin to move again, away from the rest. The boys, looking at you, sob with pleas after discovering your sudden strength. Their eyes longing for your hands to reach out to them, as if even one touch would bring hope. You want to help them, but your legs move. They reach their hands out and so do you, but your legs move away. Far away from everything. Tears fall from your eyes and a filthy fog of a whiter gray overcomes your vision.

And thus, your dream ends. Thank you for your visit, and come again some other time.