He/she was the only one not vanquished

I am aware that it's a little strangely phrased... ^_^

Be warned, this is very very bleak. It's inspired by the recent events in Gaza.

The world was red. No, it was gone. So was he.

He stumbled over the ruins of his village, walking blindly wherever his feet would take him. He was surprised he could walk at all.

Smoke from nearby fires eddied and swirled around him, he couldn't see, could barely breath for coughing. His throat was raw and scratchy, like a demon of discomfort had crawled within and nestled there, rubbing against him with hide of sandpaper.

He was reddened with dust and blood; his own or his families he could not tell. It mingled on his skin, as if he had been covered in clay that had since dried and cracked in the sun. The sun. He looked up and searched the heavens, but all he could see was dust and smoke. The sun seemed the only thing that had been constant in his life, and now he couldn't see it. It had deserted him: Gone. He felt betrayed.

He walked, he walked, he walked until he fell, and he could not tell whether he lay face up or face down. There seemed a quiet peace, a sensation of floating, that came from not knowing in which direction lay the ground and which the sky. He forgot, for a moment, his pain, and drifted as though a child rocked in his cradle. A child, his child. He remembered the birth of his son, the day he took his first step, his first day of school. He was broken from his memories and snatched back to the present wen he realized that the school would no longer be there. It was gone. So was his son.

His body convulsed, racked with dry, coughing sobs. No tears would come, his chest ached, he felt that he was being crushed by the weight of the dead. His pain seemed to stretch eternally, and he though, "My world is gone." And so was he.

A blush of pink

My story for next week. I'm quite happy with the first sentence. I think I did a good first sentence. ^_^ But the topic was hard. Susan, why do you always give hard topics?

Christopher was too sick to go to school that day, and while his throat may have been stinging and raw, and his nose clogged, and his ears filled with chirping crickets and that horrible itching sensation that you have to click your tongue to try to get rid of, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of triumph over parents, teachers and school in general. What’s more, more had gotten sick on a Monday, which meant, he knew, that he could remain “sick” until Friday, even though he may in fact have gotten better several days earlier. On Thursday he would proclaim that he felt a little better, and then Friday he still wouldn’t go to school, because his mother would insist on at least one days recovery. On Saturday, lo and behold, he would be ready to go to Pete’s house, or maybe Shamus’s, depending on the availability of either. He could already envisage the games they would play, and Pete had said on Sunday that his dad was buying him a new toy after work, so he’d be able to play with that, as well. He had it all planned out.

He lay in bed, snuggled up beneath his Harry Potter duna, with his plastic pop-top bottle of water on his bedside table, which he emptied out the window every half-hour or so. After all, when you’re sick you should act as sick as possible in order to milk it for as much as you can, and if that means sacrificing your throat so that you can talk in a raspy, whispered croak, then so be it. Anyway, there was no way he could drink as much water as his mother was trying to pour down his throat- he often wondered why she didn’t give him something he’d actually drink, like lemonade- and this way he would remain in her good books by seeming to drink everything she gave him, and also her flowers were flourishing even in this hot weather- what with water restrictions she could hardly water them very often- so that kept her in quite a good mood, as well. He just hoped that she wouldn’t notice that it was only the flowers outside his window, but then, she might not be so mad. She’d probably think he was doing her a favor.

Christopher stared up at the ceiling, and shifted in his bed. There was, of course, one disadvantage to being sick, aside from the obvious unpleasantness of it all, and that was the boredom. He’d already watched his favourite movie, and done a puzzle, and now all that was left was staring, either out the window to the garden and his swingset, or up at the pale blue ceiling, patchy from moisture and cracked diagonally from the bottom right corner. He’d learnt his left and right from the ceiling, which, while it meant he’d learned them quickly, had caused him some embarrassment on his first day of school, when his teacher had asked him which side was the right side, and he had unthinkingly answered:  “The one with the crack in.” 

A soft blush crept up his face at the memory. It wasn’t just the teachers trying to teach him stuff he didn’t care about that made him dislike school, but the other kids. The slightest mistake, the smallest slip in your composure, could set you up for being called names the rest of the year. He’d been a prime candidate from day one, after his mother had cried and hugged him on the first time she’d taken him to class. He couldn’t possibly explain to her the torment she’d managed to set him up for, she wouldn’t understand. And as for his dad, he’d dismiss it as a “part of becoming a man”, a phrase he never ceased to use regarding Christopher. He always spoke regarding Christopher, if he spoke about him at all, never to him. Or if he did speak to him, it was either an order (“Christopher, go away, I’m busy”), or a half-hearted question (“How was school?”).

Not that Christopher particularly cared, of course. It just might be nice if his dad would do something with him some time. Or at least talk to him properly. But really, he didn’t care, and it was stupid to even think about it.

Christopher pulled his duna over the top of his head, and, lying in the cavernous warm darkness, he began to cry.

Green

Okay, so this was a ten minute exercise. And all it has to do with green is the first sentence.  ^_^ I don't know how I managed to get from "green" to what I ended up doing.  But then again, the topic for that day was "wool", and a few members ended up in this huge contraversial conversation that came off from it. So I don't know, I guess it was just a weird day. ^_~

He glanced out his window at the greenery of his garden. It was a look of longing. How much more he’d prefer to be out there, rather than cooped up in here, trying to write an essay on humanity in inhuman conditions.

He sighed, and turned to his computer.

“June 1st 2007” He typed, “Stuffed if I can write essay.”

He shook himself, and deleted the rebellious sentence. Come on, he thought, just a sentence, a word, anything to jump off from.

“What is humanity?” He typed. At least it was a start.

“The simple answer is this: We, as the human race, are.

But are we?”

And error popped up on screen. 

Microsoft Word has encountered an error and has to close. Would you like to send a bug report?

He clicked the “No” button, and watched as the application closed. 

“Stupid thing. Why’d you have to stuff up on me?” he muttered under his breath, and paused, a strange expression on his face.

Picking up pen and paper, he proceeded to rewrite what he had typed, and begin again.

“As our technology has progressed, we have integrated it into our lives. Society in the first world demands that everyone has access to the Internet, everyone has a mobile phone, everyone has a car. It is virtually inconceivable that anyone should go without.”

“We are the only race on the planet that has behaved so strangely. Apes will use sticks as tools, but they do not rely solely upon those sticks. Nor is it necessary to have a stick with them at any given time, as with mobile phones.”

“Technology has everything to do with how we perceive ourselves today. The progression of the human race is not really based on the progression of humans individually or as a whole, but on the progression of technology. In fact, in these times, humanity without technology really isn’t considered to be humanity at all.”

“Given this observation, can you strip a someone of all their technology and beliefs, and still call them human? Or has that technology, and those beliefs, become the humanity?”

“This is not such a ridiculous idea as it may seem. Not our habits of projecting our thoughts and feelings onto things that could not possibly consider them, and humanizing machines. A car is tired, a computer stubborn, our boats, and now, to a lesser extent perhaps, our cars, are referred to as “she”.”

“Perhaps this all seems harmless and irrelevant, but language is as much, perhaps even more, a part of humanity as technology, and thus it affects the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Think of how many feminists have change the spelling of the word ‘woman’, substituting the ‘a’ for a ‘y’.”

He paused, and chewed the end on his pen. Where was he going with this? What was he trying to say?

In order to avert the temporary writer’s block, he kept writing without bothering to think about it.

“So perhaps, for all our talk of artificial intelligence and robots that can think for themselves, we have already created artificial life- albeit on a different level- by projecting life onto our current technology?”

He smiled to himself, remembering how, only recently, a friend of his had told her ancient washing to “stop whining and get on with it”, and then shake her head and say “I swear that thing has a mind of it’s own.”

“It has been said,” He continued, “that when a loved one dies they live on in our hearts. Maybe our technology lives in our minds?"

He put down his pen and shivered. Not a nice prospect.

bananas

Okay, so this is very light, and fun to write. You can't expect something dark and morose with "Bananas" as a topic. Or if you think you can, good luck writing it!

Maria had not talked to her flat-mate for three months, and she did not plan on doing so for a long time yet.

It began when he went into her studio without her permission, and ate one of her models, and from then onwards their friendship, such as it had ever been, had escalated into an outright war. If she had wanted to she could have seen it from his point of view: After all, you walk into a room, feel hungry, see a bowl of fruit... But, as is often the case when you are annoyed with someone, seeing it from his perspective was not something she wanted to do.

The bananas had been her favorite part. She had applied wash after wash of paint, building up the colours in a painstakingly slow fashion, towards a goal she was sure would have been so vibrant, so perfect, that it would have done that which she had been striving for years to achieve, that is, in her own words, to “put the ‘Life’ back into Still-Life.” She had the perfect title for the piece, too:

“Tropical fantasy held in a wooden bowl.”

None of that boring “bowl of fruit on a table” nonsense. That belonged to the age of the old masters. No, she was a new artist! New ways of going about the same idea! Modern art in an old form!

But now Pedro had eaten one of her precious bananas, and all her ambitions and desires had plunged down the drain. How could fate have been so heartless? She felt as if the fire of her artistic passions had been douse, and now all that remained were pitiful wisps of steam.

She would never speak to him again. Of that much, she was certain.

She sighed, and glanced over yet again at her beautiful, ruined painting. The voluptuous purple grapes, the dimple skinned oranges, the spiny golden pineapples, and. She could hardly bear to look, the pale, crescent-moon shapes of her never to be completed bananas. Why, Pedro may as well have bombed the Eiffel Tower, or trampled Van Goph’s Sunflowers, for all the desecration he had committed. 

There was a tentative knock on the studio door.

“Maria?” came That Man’s voice through the wood, “Can I come in?”

She did not deign to reply. He was below her, and thus did not deserve the faintest grunt of acknowledgement. 

The door creaked slowly open. Maria rounded on him. How she would berate him! Flood him with such a tide of anger and hatred that he would be left a quivering, emotional mess on the floor!

He grinned sheepishly, and held out a box wrapped in gift paper. How dare he try to placate her so obviously!

She snatched it away from him, and tore the paper off in such a way that showed she cared nothing for its contents. She would throw whatever it was in his face.

She opened the box, and paused, hand quivering. Inside lay a long, perfect banana, and a tube of yellow paint.

Maria looked up at Pedro, and down at the box, then at Pedro again. She took up the piece of fruit, and turned towards the bowl she had used as her model. She arranged the banana carefully within, and stood back to look at it. Perfection.

Pedro was watching her in the was you might look at a bomb after having cut a wire, unsure as to whether you’d defused it or simply shortened the time until explosion. He looked so comical that she began to laugh. He joined in, cautiously at first, and then they both lapsed into hysteria, tears- of laughter or sadness? - Running down their faces.

And so ended the Great Banana War, in tears and laughter. Wouldn’t it be nice if our bomb wars ended the same way?

 

A town, somewhere

O_O I adored this topic. Absolutely adored it. And I sure had fun writing it.

I was sitting at a table by myself, as close to the fire as I could get without sitting inside the hearth, when a gust of cold air announced the stranger. He pulled the oak door open with a dramatic gesture, and stood for a moment, silhouetted against the gray sky and snow covered ground. 

His arrival alone caused a considerable stir, as it was a small pub, on the outskirts of town, and rarely saw any more than four or five people at a time, each of which knew one another.

Once he seemed to decide that his pause had been long enough, he stepped inside and slammed the door shut. His appearance was that of a hitchhiker. Upon his back he carried a dark green and blue pack, of the kind that professional hikers wear, which he slung down by the stool he had chosen for himself at the bar. His hair was shoulder-length, and dread locked, brown matted tangles that swung around his head as he moved. His clothes were crumpled, his boots scuffed. In fact, the only part of him that didn’t look the worse for wear were his eyes. They glinted in the light from the fire, darting from side to side as he took in his surroundings.

Such a man, I decided, could not possibly fail to be interesting. And so, being the inquisitive person that I am, I strode over to him and offered to buy him a drink.

He glanced at me for a moment, as if trying to figure out what manner of person I was, before giving me a quick smile and replying that yes, he’d like that, and his name was Kimberly. Jackson- Jack- Kimberly.

I, in turn, gave my name, before ordering our respective beverages from the barkeeper. Drink in hand, I questioned him as to where he was from, and he waved a hand in a vague direction.

“Oh, just a town, somewhere.” He said, “But that was a long time ago.” 

He took a sip of his drink, and continued. 

“Better to say that I’ve come from New York, and Hong Kong, and London, and Paris. I come from Iceland, and Africa, and India. I come from all the four corners of the world, and everything in between them.”

I thought on this, before inquiring whether he traveled a lot.

He laughed. “How could I travel if motion is impossible? How could I have been to any of those places is every time I looked up from the road I had halved the distance between myself and my destination? No,” He gave me another of his quick smiles, “I traveled between.”

I wondered if I had perhaps chosen a lunatic as a drinking companion. I tried to think of something to say, but he started to speak again.

“I mean, really.” He took another sip, “Where do any of us come from? Do we come from where we were born? From where we live? Is where we come from where we have our house? If so, then where do the homeless come from? I said I come from a town somewhere, but I might as well have said that I come from outside, or from the road, or even from the chair on which I sit now!”

He gave the stool a pat.

“For that matter, where do you come from? I’ll tell you where you come from.”

He grinned, and in those eyes I imagined I saw sparks of insanity.

“You come from that table over there.” He gestured at the table I had been sitting at before.

“Don’t you see? That is where you were before, that is where you come from! You don’t come from America, or England, you come,” he downed the rest of his drink and pointed yet again at the table, “from over there.”

He gave me another quick smile, stood, and slung his pack onto his shoulders. Thanking me for the drink, he walked over to the door, pulled it open, stepped outside and waited a moment so that we could all see his silhouette. Then he slammed it shut, and walked off into the snow.

His exit was every bit as dramatic as his entrance.

It couldn't possibly happen, could it?

Well, once again it's been a while.  However, I am finally updating again... So that's a good thing. 

The topic was, as is always the case, very hard to write... Until I actually wrote about it. ^_^ I guess I'm one for procrastinating.

The prospect of Uncle’s death had been a ghostly presence at the back of their minds for the past year. It lingered, transparent, never specifically thought about but still most definitely there. It was only in the months leading up to his illness that it had started to become more substantial, and they began to realise it’s inevitability. They started noticing references to death everywhere, in newspapers, on television, even in the graffiti that coated the brick walls and concrete that they passed in the street. Though still they never broached the subject, not until the very end, when Uncle was hospitalized, and even then not really speaking of it, but rather circling around it, the meaning of their words being found not in what they said, but what they didn’t say. Even as he lay on his deathbed, it had a vague, it-couldn’t-possibly-happen feel to it,

The times when it became hard reality differed for each of them.

For the eldest, squinting through the rain as the coffin was lowered into the ground, and pondering the cliché of rain at a funeral, it was when his wife sighed, and said “Well, that’s it then”, and he thought with some surprise, “Yes, I suppose it is”, that he truly understood that the uncle was dead, and his mind turned immediately to thoughts of inheritance, money and property.

For the middle child, it was in bed the night after the funeral, staring up at the ceiling and thinking of the times she had spent with the Uncle, all those unpleasant family dinners and his snide, richer-than-thou mannerisms, and she whispered “Oh, thank God that’s over.”

For the youngest, sitting with his wife, wondering when to broach the subject of divorce, and her asking him about inheritance, and he hating her and hating her and hating her for thinking only of the money when she should be mourning, it was when he realised that he wasn’t mourning either, and how much he had hated the Uncle in life, and feeling glad that he wouldn’t have to enjoy his company any more, and hating and hating and hating himself for feeling glad about death.

Through each of their realizations of the Uncle’s death, they found themselves confronted with yet another ghostly presence, another niggling it-couldn’t-possibly-happen feeling in the back of their minds. They were confronted with the reality of their own deaths, and once again, they could not possibly comprehend it as being real until it was actually upon them. 

In Flight

My topic, chosen because I couldn't think of anything else and that's the name of a piece of music I composed. Unlike the usual fiction, I've done a ramble.

The ambition to fly has been inherent in the human race for as long as we have been able to dream. Mythology is full of it, whether it be little people that have wings or romanticizing those creatures that naturally do, as in the saying “As free as a bird.” Our obsession with flight is such that we have even projected it onto other animals, such as the winged horse, Pegasus. 

The dream of flying seems to contradict our vertigo and fear of falling, and yet the longing grows.

Given that we have fulfilled our dream, with airplanes and hot air balloons, it is rather strange that so many people who dream of white feathered wings and clear blue skies, have a profound hatred of flight in the conventional sense: airplanes. Perhaps it is not the vehicle in itself, but the tedious wait in the departure lounge beforehand. Or maybe it is the fact that so much weight is being propelled off the ground that it seems liable to crash, as they so often do. A Boeing 747 weighs around 400 tons at take off, including cargo and passengers. Such a prospect is enough to scare anyone.

 Either way, it is rather a pity that our romanticizing of flight has manifested itself in such a dreary form of technology. 

Notice also the amount of figures of speech that have to do with flight. Feelings soar, you feel uplifted, to soar on wings of love. 

Could it be that our love of flying comes from a longing to be closer to Heaven, our eventual goal? The need to be closer to the Divine? It seems logical that it should be so, given that religions of all kinds see divinity in the stars, and religions make up a considerable part of our past and present. 

But why does it take up so much of our life? Why does it dominate so? I don’t think there is anyone on this earth who has not wished they could fly. Perhaps it is human nature to long for the unattainable, and destroy that which they’ve got in order to try to achieve it.