[Issue 2025.72]

‘Minotaur’, Jaime Gill

Art © 2025 Toeken

---

We talk for comfort in this dark and frightening place, though we can’t understand each other. The few words we have in common are scraps of English learnt from cartoons. Hello. Me. You. Sorry. Food. Monster. Run.

I know she’s called Serey, she’s Cambodian and she’s eleven, three years younger than me. She counted that out with her fingers. She doesn’t speak my language, Burmese.

I first saw her face on the outside, in the huge Thai construction camp where our families live. The day after she went missing, her older brother walked over from one of the Cambodian sub-camps to our Burmese sub-camp, holding a photo of her. That was eight days ago, I think. She’s been in the labyrinth long enough to turn her round face bony and her soft eyes hard. She looks like a stray cat, one made fearful and savage by her time in the wild. That’s how I think of her now. Cat Girl.

I know nothing else about her and lack the words to learn more. The only Khmer I learnt was from some Cambodian boys from the camp when we tried to catch fish in the canal, and they’re of no use here. Tehk—water. There’s none in the labyrinth other than occasional dismal trickles down walls which we lick until our tongues are dry. Trey—fish. There’s no food here at all. Even the idea of a fish makes my stomach squirm with yearning pain.

I might not understand the words Cat Girl says, but I still like to hear her talk. It was worse when there were no words.

---

When I was first trapped in the labyrinth, frantic panic pummeled my head and heart, squeezing out any space for thinking. I was alone and trapped and I didn’t know why, but there couldn’t be a good reason.

I hammered at the metal door that had slammed behind me, screaming help, come back! When nobody answered, and after I’d shouted my throat sore, I started running. I was looking for another way out, but it only led me to another corridor that looked the same. I kept running, too desperate to think clearly. It took too long to realise that every turn took me to an identical corridor and even longer to realise they were leading me nowhere. I was in a labyrinth. A vast, frightening labyrinth.

I slumped to the floor, wrestling my breath under control. I realised with a sick feeling that all that running was the stupidest thing I could have done. I’d lost all sense of which direction I’d come from, couldn’t even guess how far away I was from that first door. I didn’t know how deep inside the labyrinth I was. How trapped.

That’s how the best traps work. They use your fear against you. A fish that thrashes in a net is only going to tangle itself more surely.

I sat and tried to think think think.

Ma used to tell a story about when I was a baby. Half our house caved in during a heavy monsoon. I was trapped in my cot, alone and screaming for the hour it took to rescue me. I howled so much they thought I must have been crushed and was dying, but when they found me I was unharmed. It was just fear. I’d never been able to remember that night but I felt it then in the labyrinth: that terror, that helplessness, that aloneness. It came rushing out of somewhere deep inside me like bats from a cave.

But this time nobody could hear my screams. Nobody was coming to help.

I crushed my fists into my eyes, still trying to make my brain work, to pull clear thoughts out of the muddy torrent of my mind. I was fourteen, now, not a baby, and fear wasn’t my friend this time. It wasn’t bringing anyone to help me. I had to help myself and my terror was getting in the way.

Another childhood memory came, one I really did remember. When I was little, Pa took me to Yangon in the days when everyone really thought good things were finally going to happen, when the army was promising democracy. We watched a snake charmer at a market. He overturned a basket to reveal a hissing, striking cobra, and then sang to it gently until it swayed, retreated, and coiled back placidly to sleep. Pa told me later it was a cheat, that the snakes were drugged and probably defanged, and I felt like some magic had been stolen from the world. Later, I’d think the army were the exact opposite of the snake. They pretended to be sleepy and toothless, then bit hard when we weren’t looking.

But now I needed to become the snake charmer. I had to defang my panic and push it down.

Somehow, I did. I crushed it down deep into my belly and even though I still knew it was there, I could think without it lashing in my brain.

Calmer, I tried to work out the labyrinth. Every corridor I’d run down was nearly identical. A head higher and wider than my father was tall, which meant two metres. A single blue light was encased in each concrete ceiling, and the corridors were long enough that each end was dim and shadowy. That meant maybe twenty metres. At each end there was an exit, or sometimes two. Sometimes they led left, sometimes right, and—occasionally—both. The blue light froze the whole labyrinth in the last dying moments of the day, that ghostly time just before the night comes, when colour is leeched from the world.

I pushed myself to my feet and began walking, not running.

Now I’d calmed myself a little, the thing I hated most about the labyrinth was the silence. It was sticky hot and the air smelt stale inside, but the noiselessness was the worst thing, squeezing in on me like the air before a storm. After the non-stop noise of the construction camp, the boom and clatter of building by day and the hubbub of families at night with their screaming babies, it was like waking up and finding myself struck deaf. I could hear my shallow breath, the echoing splats of my flip flops.

And then the silence was broken and that was worse.

Distant noises echoed down the corridors, often doubling like one noise was the ghost of another. It was impossible to know if the noises I heard were just on the other side of the wall or many corridors away, bouncing distorted off ceilings and corners.

Sometimes I heard light feet running, a percussive noise like monsoon rain, followed by the thunder of something much heavier in pursuit. Thump, thump, thump. Three times I heard screams, and once something bellowed and the vast angry sound of it reverberating down the walls made me sit and hold my head in my hands.

Monster. Belu. Minotaur. These three words looped around my brain, a Buddhist chant turned sinister.

Before I found Cat Girl, the only clear word I heard inside the labyrinth was a single cry in thick-accented English, on what might have been my first night. “Help!” By the time the word reached my ears, it was faint and distorted, an echo from far away. It wasn’t a scream. I’d never have run towards a scream, because that would have meant running towards the monster.

This sounded like someone lost. Someone like me.

“Where are you?” I called back. No reply.

I ran down corridors in the direction I thought the voice had come from. Soon I’d turned so many corners and run down so many empty passages that I stumbled to a halt, sweating and breathless, with no idea if I was nearer or further away.

I never heard that voice again. It wasn’t Cat Girl. She doesn’t know the word help. I had to teach her it.

I yelled help many times myself, in all the languages I knew. English. Burmese. Shan. Thai. Tamil. Mandarin. Nobody answered in any tongue. I wondered if loneliness was worse than being trapped, but even thinking this made the snake in my belly lash. Ha, it hissed.

I found Cat Girl a few hours ago. Maybe my second day or my second night. I don’t know.

If she hadn’t been sleeping when I found her, she’d have run from me. She tried, when her eyes snapped open to find me standing above her. She moved with the speed of a startled animal and when I grabbed her arm to stop her, she bit me. It hurt horribly, her teeth jagged sharp, but I held on because I had a terrible doomed feeling that if I didn’t, I’d never see another human again.

I couldn’t be alone anymore. I’d always been around people, never even slept in a room without my parents or my sister snoring beside me.

I held on.

It took a long time to calm Cat Girl and make her understand I didn’t want to hurt her. At last, we began to walk together, talking in our own languages, trying to find our way out. I tried to work out what she knew, but most of our attempts at communication failed. Only once did her miming make perfect sense. She held her arms in front of her and roared.

“Monster,” I said, and she nodded, wide-eyed.

---

She’s faltering now, her steps beginning to drag. We’ve been walking many hours and nothing is changing. We’re no less trapped than when we started. More trapped, snake hisses.

We’re both so tired.

I say, “sleep” but she doesn’t understand. I tilt my head, two hands as a pillow, then mime me watching the corridors. She nods. She probably hasn’t slept much since she was trapped here, and then only the half-sleep of the terrified.

She curls up and her scrawny body goes limp in seconds. She really is a cat. Looking down at her bony legs, I don’t know how she’s still alive after all these days. How long can humans live without food? These are things I should know. There are many things I should know.

I should know more about where we are. I would know if I’d listened more to Pa when we first moved into the construction camp.

Pa had been a teacher back in Myanmar, but here in Thailand the only job he could find was building work. I’d seen Pa shouted at one day by a foreman who looked so dumb in his anger, so lacking in control, that I remembered the dog on our old street who’d caught rabies and had to be killed with a shovel. I’d asked Pa how he could stand being spoken to like that, and he said it was the price of survival. He didn’t say he had no choice and that the people who hired him knew it. He couldn’t take us back home, where war still raged. He was trapped, we were trapped. He didn’t say any of that, but I knew it.

Pa tried to make me feel better by telling me it wasn’t just any old building he was working on. All these construction companies had been brought together to create what would one day be the largest shopping and entertainment mall in Southeast Asia. It was the brainchild of a multibillionaire from Korea or China or Thailand or America or maybe Europe, nobody was sure, just that it must be a rich country. The Thai call the billionaire men like that chao-sua.

Numbers and facts poured out of Pa’s mouth: the hundreds of thousands of square metres the site covered, the three cinemas, four supermarkets, bowling alley, skating rink, and hundreds of shops the mall would one day contain. People would come from all over Asia to see it, and he’d have had a hand in it. That was something to be proud of.

I didn’t think so, not really, but I wish I’d listened properly. Not because any of it had been true. I was now sure there was never going to be a single shop. That was why there were so many different construction companies and they all recruited people from different countries. The workers couldn’t talk to each other about what they were working on even if they wanted to. Every construction company managed their own tiny piece of the puzzle, none realising that what they were really building wasn’t a mall. It was a labyrinth.

Why? I don’t know and I’m afraid to. I’m afraid to guess. But if I’d listened to Pa more, maybe I’d better understand the size of the labyrinth at least. Maybe that would help me come up with a plan.

I need a plan—something to hold onto, some scrap of hope. Without one, I don’t think I can hold the snake back long. I think he’ll slide up through my stomach and into my mind and I won’t ever think clearly again.

A distant cry bounces down the corridor from far away. I’m sure Cat Girl will wake, but she only shifts in her sleep. I don’t call back this time. I’ve grown too afraid of the monster.

When the echoes have faded, I sit and drum my fingers on my knees, trying to keep my mind busy, trying not to think about my hunger. I try to work out again how long I’ve really been here, but this endless twilight means there are no days or nights, so time has become unmoored from anything real. I must have been here more than two days though. When we were smuggled out of Myanmar, there were whole days we didn’t eat. That was bad, but this hunger is much worse, like it’s grown teeth and is eating me from the inside. Hunger and the snake, coiled together in my belly, biting and hissing.

But this thinking, it takes me to bad places.

I was so stupid. When kids started disappearing from the camp—kids from Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Laos, poorer parts of Thailand—I’d believed the gossip that they’d run away to the city, trying to make money whatever way they could. The adults didn’t say what this meant but kids know. When you live dirt-poor you hear about most of the ways life can go wrong.

Why hadn’t I been more worried when I heard about the missing kids? Maybe because they were all strangers from foreign lands or those distant parts of Myanmar where Burmese isn’t even their first language. Maybe because my family eats up all the worry I have. Ma hardly talks any more, my little sister gets sick all the time, and Pa works such long hours he comes home a month older every night.

I can’t even remember how many kids went missing. I do remember the first boy, the older one who’d vanished just over a month ago. From Myanmar, like me, but from Kachin state in the far north, where they have their own language and their own lives. His grandmother came to our worker’s hut, showing his picture on her cheap, cracked phone to my Ma. I peeked over her shoulder and saw a tough-looking boy with an angry white scar on his neck. Everyone from Myanmar knows what shrapnel wounds look like. The scar made me think he was tough enough to look after himself. He was probably running with a gang somewhere in Bangkok already.

There were more rumours of missing children, but the construction camps were chaotic and full of gossip, much of it mangled between all the different languages. I didn’t keep count. I did remember Cat Girl but that was because she was the first one who looked really young. Much younger than me. The photo showed her hair in pigtails, with a sweet smile I find impossible to imagine on her face now.

As if she hears my thoughts, Cat Girl makes a startled movement in her sleep, and says a word I don’t understand. “I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not sure what for.

I should have paid attention. I should have been more afraid. If I had, I wouldn’t have listened to that stranger who asked me to help him find a bag he’d left inside the construction site. I wouldn’t have taken the three thousand baht he gave me to help him look, even knowing it was more than Pa made in a week. I wouldn’t have followed him into the dark, his flashlight leading the way until it vanished and so did he and a door slammed shut behind me.

So stupid. I was a smart kid once, second smartest in my class. But I’ve felt stupid since we got to Thailand, like I left my brains in Myanmar. Maybe it’s not going to school any more. Or maybe it’s just the way people talk to me here, like I’m an idiot or an animal.

But I do know something about labyrinths. Phwar-Phwar, my Grampa, told me about them. He’d been old enough to be taught by the British, back when they were still wrecking our country, before they left it behind like an old broken toy. An English teacher told Phwar-Phwar the Greek myths and when I was little he told them to me at bedtime. Some bored me and some seemed silly, but there were others which terrified me. Medusa and her hissing hair. The blind cyclops, roaring. But, above all, the minotaur.

The minotaur felt more real to me than the other myths, more Burmese somehow. Maybe it was the ball of red thread Theseus took into the maze with him, so he could find his way out. Many Burmese tie red threads around our wrists as a blessing from Buddha—another way to try to not get lost in life. Or maybe it was because the minotaur, that half-bull beast, sounded like our own monster—the Belu, the shape-shifter, the human-eater.

It stuck in the back of my mind. Now it’s at the front.

Is the monster sleeping now? Does it sleep?

I shake my head and try to think only about the labyrinth. If only I had red thread, some way to find my way back and to stop me from going where I’ve already been. Are we near the heart of the maze now, or nearer its edges? Perhaps we’re just looping around one tiny section, helplessly, like dumb moths trying to find their way through a closed window.

I close my eyes and picture a blue labyrinth, though the one I imagine is probably a child’s miniature compared to the one we are really in. I will my brain to be sharp again, like it used to be. I picture me and Cat Girl as a little red dot and push that dot down corridors. I see how taking too many lefts or rights in a row could get you stuck in a loop. What we need to do is alternate between left and right. I picture the red dot zigzagging left, right, left, right. Eventually, a zigzag should lead us to one of the walls that encloses the labyrinth. Maybe to a door, or just somewhere we can scream and might be heard.

When Cat Girl wakes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll zigzag. Having a plan is soothing. Having Cat Girl with me is soothing.

The snake sleeps and I must too because I’m woken by a terrible noise—so close it seems to shake the walls. Cat Girl has grabbed onto me, cringes against me.

It’s the sound of the minotaur, angrier, hungrier and closer than ever. I stare at the pocket of darkness at the corridor’s end, expecting the beast to emerge, snorting, horned, and wild-eyed. But the shadows stay still. Whose heart do I feel? Mine? Hers? Both? The beat is so fast.

Another roar, but further away. The danger has passed. We part from each other, embarrassed but still shaking.

I could feel our bones on each other. She is so thin and I am getting thinner.

We have to get out. It’s not just our bodies I fear for. It’s our minds.

I remember my plan. I try to explain it, trace it in the dust on the wall, but Cat Girl gets confused and finally I just take her arm and tug her with me. We take the next right and then the next left and then there is no right, only a left, so we take that, and then another right, and then two lefts again. She keeps looking for something as we walk, head darting around, but she either can’t explain or doesn’t want to.

My brain is too tired to hold the picture of the labyrinth that seemed so clear before I fell asleep. I’m scared my plan might be failing and the panic snake hisses happily in my stomach. But there’s no other choice. It’s our only plan.

After many hours, something new.

We turn right onto a new corridor and see something small, crushed and mangled, surrounded by a dark stain. Walking slowly closer, I realise the stain is old blood that’s seeped from scraps of fur, chewed bones, and a tiny crushed rat’s skull.

Cat Girl breaks from my grip and drops to all fours. She starts chewing at the fur and bones, the crunching slurping noises making me gag. She glances up once, and there is no horror or shame in her eyes, only pleasure and relief.

She’s done this before. That’s how she’s still alive. These scraps may be leftovers from her last meal, or abandoned by one of the other children we’ve heard in the labyrinth. Of course, there are rats in the labyrinth. Where there are people there are always rats, they find their way into everything. And rats can be food.

Is this the price of survival?

I won’t pay.

When Cat Girl has finished chewing and sucking, I tug her again in the direction of escape, even though my faith in my plan is sputtering, like a dying candle. She talks but I don’t find it comforting anymore. There’s something in the torrent of words that makes me uneasy. If I could understand them, would they make sense, or would they sound like madness? I’m glad it’s too dark to see her teeth.

I keep thinking about rat meat. My stomach hurts and I don’t know if it’s repulsion or hunger.

No.

I won’t.

The labyrinth has broken her, but it won’t break me.

I’ve tried not to think about why that chao-sua would want this place built, afraid the answer might crush all my hope, but watching Cat Girl eat made me realise I can’t hide from this. I have to try to understand.

I don’t think the labyrinth is for killing children. Or, at least, that can’t be the main reason. It must have cost billions. For 50,000 baht, a chao-sua could have lured all of us children to some warehouse and killed us there. He could have strangled us, chopped us up, done whatever he wanted with our bodies. He could have brought his friends, could have filmed it all. Who would stop a chao-sua? For worthless nothing-kids like us?

So the point of the labyrinth can’t be us. It must be the minotaur. In the story Phwar-Phwar told me, the minotaur was the son of a King, I think, whose wife gave birth to a half-bull, half-human baby. The King created the labyrinth to imprison his monster-child. Each year seven children were sent into the labyrinth to feed it.

Who is the chao-sua’s minotaur?

A scream shreds the air, close enough to shatter my thoughts.

Cat Girl and I start running without a word exchanged and are immediately faced with a choice of left or right. Cat Girl tries to tug me right, away from the scream, but I tug back and drag her left. We must stick to the plan. It might be working, it might. We don’t know for sure how close the minotaur is and we can’t wander aimlessly again. I can’t be lost again. I need the plan.

We run through twilit gloom, our steps echoing over our ragged breath. Left. Right. Another forced right. Left.

And then another scream which sounds like it came from the same mouth as before. Close, echoing, and then—very suddenly—stopped.

Walls everywhere. Gloom everywhere.

Run. Run. Run.

A rat scurries past, fleeing our oncoming footsteps. Cat Girl stoops to snatch it but I yank her onwards.

We have to get out. That’s all that matters.

We lurch right and see something black and shiny slicked across the blue-lit floor. I’m running too fast to stop in time, and my foot hits the black and I slip. I tumble through air until my head slams into concrete. A darkness roars inside my head like the sound of a monsoon breaking and then I am gone, I escape…

---

There’s sunshine on the back of my neck, and a breeze kissing the heat away. I blink at the sudden light and breathe deeply, fill my lungs with the sweetness of outside air.

I’m on top of a hill in Myanmar, standing above a plain washed bright and clean by the sun. There are villages below, blooming like rusty red flowers from the green rice fields that surround them. One is the village I was born in. Motorbikes drive on dirt tracks between the villages, passing straw-hatted farmers stooped over their work.

There is no war down there. Hunger, yes, but no fear of death, hot-breathed and close.

I could run in any direction I chose and nobody would stop me. I could scream to the skies that I am a King and nobody would tell me I am not.

Then the ground quakes beneath my feet and the sky’s soft blue darkens and…

---

Cat Girl is shaking me. How long was I unconscious? Perhaps minutes or seconds. What does time mean in here?

She has her hand clamped hard over my mouth. It tastes of sweat, dirt, and raw meat.

She fixes her eyes on mine and doesn’t need words, her whole being screams quiet.

I look behind her and see what spilled the blood I slipped on. It was a child once. Its head lies discarded a few metres away from what’s left of the body, but I can only see the back. I’m glad I can’t see the face—that nightmare of blood-matted hair is terrible enough. Everything else that was once the child has been ripped apart, leaving only bones and scraps of clothes and things that aren’t clothes that I don’t want to recognise.

That’s when I hear the heavy, approaching steps. The minotaur. There’s no echo, the beast is too close. I can hear its deep, bestial breathing, just out of sight.

The minotaur turns the corner into our corridor, a dark hulk in the gloom. It pauses, breath heaving, then steps slowly forward.

I see it.

I recognise it.

I recognise him.

It’s the recognition that paralyses me as much as the fear.

The minotaur is the first of the children to disappear from the camp, the older one from Kachin. His face is disfigured by smeared dirt and old blood, but I recognise the white shrapnel scar denting his neck.

I moan a hopeless “mingalaba.” Hello, in Burmese. How pathetic the word sounds. As if any word could mean anything right now.

The boy snarls back languagelessly. His teeth are black with blood. The boy is gone, the boy is beast.

For a whole month all he’s had to eat is rats and madness and us, the other children. I think the labyrinth broke him a long time ago.

There’s a flicker of confusion in his eyes as he comes closer, perhaps surprised to see that we are two. He cocks his head to one side, as though making a decision. But it’s not the cool assessment of a human, it’s the wary cunning of an animal.

I am the bigger one, the threat, and he rushes at me, roaring.

He throws himself on me as I’m scrambling to my feet and slams me back down on the concrete hard enough to smash all breath from my body.

His eyes and teeth fill my vision, black and savage. I can smell the metal tang of fresh blood from his mouth and under that something fouler. His hands are on my neck and he’s crushing it. Something in my throat starts giving way. The pain is worse than anything I’ve felt. I can’t breathe, my throat is on fire from the inside.

I’m dimly aware that Cat Girl is running away and that’s good, that’s good. Remember the plan.

I kick and my feet connect but his eyes don’t even flash awareness, let alone pain. Is there still a boy inside him? I can’t see him.

I try to pry his fingers from my throat as my vision begins to blur. My fingers are nothing to him, weaker than straw. He is bigger than me and he has fed and he is strong.

There is no glee or pleasure in his face as he watches me die. I wish it was sadness I saw but it isn’t—it’s blankness. This isn’t evil, this is necessity. Only one of us can survive. His animal soul tells him it must be him. My animal soul says it must be me. But our souls don’t matter. Only strength matters, and he has more of it.

Black stars swim and the corridor fades from twilight into night.

I’m pulled from the shores of the deepest sleep by a sickening crack.

Light oozes back into my eyes as the minotaur’s grip eases. Blood trickles from his wild hair and down his face to his nose. A fat drop of it lands in my gasping mouth, I spit, gag and twist away.

His body slumps heavily onto mine, crushing me. Cat Girl stands behind him, holding aloft the leg bone she used to smash his skull. The leg bone that once belonged to that dead child. She brings it down on his head one more time, two more times, three more times, screaming curses in a language I can’t speak, and even through his heavy body I feel the shuddering impact of her blows.

I summon what strength I have left and roll him off me, getting shakily to my feet.

The minotaur’s eyes look up at me, very sad and very dead. He’s a boy again. Just a boy.

And then I remember his name. I didn’t even know I’d heard it, but there it was in my memory, hiding. I say it now, softly. “I’m sorry, Brang Seng.”

Cat Girl stoops towards him, leans closer, opens her mouth and…

“No!” An English word everyone in the world knows. I grab her arm and she hisses words I don’t understand, but surrenders. Do I imagine relief in her eyes?

I look down at the dead body and try not to see the meat.

“We go,” I say in English, and point to the end of the corridor.

We will stick to our plan.

As we pass the other dead child, I see that its ragged shirt was once a cheap counterfeit Manchester United top. It is fraying, falling apart into its constituent red thread.

I grab the thread’s end and as we walk it unspools behind us.

If we can’t find our way out, we’ll have to come back. One of us will, anyway.

A kind of numbness has crept into my brain now the boy is dead, a numbness that lets me think. This was never a place for trapping a minotaur, after all. It was a place for making one. Maybe more than one, but I can’t think about that now, any more than I can think about why.

We turn left onto a new corridor. As we pass under the blue lightbulb I think dully that there could be a camera hidden inside. I saw something like that on a TV show once. Maybe that chao-sua who built this place is watching us right now. Maybe his friends too. I could smash the bulb to find out.

But it doesn’t matter. How would knowing help? I could never understand the mind of the rich man who made this place even if I could speak his language. A nothing-boy like me can no more understand the mind of a chao-sua than a mouse can understand the mind of a dragon.

Smashing the bulb would cost me energy and I have so little left.

The only thing that can help, the only thing that matters, is getting out. Zigzag.

We have to beat the labyrinth. We have to escape. We will. The red thread will lead us, just like it led Theseus. Forward, not backward. Not back to a corridor of dead children. Forward. Out.

The snake in my stomach hisses and hisses like laughter. Ha. Ha. Ha.

© 2025 Jaime Gill

[Issue 2025.72]

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