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Here’s an old joke: fisherman sits in his boat, hooks a fish. As he reels it up and up, his friends sit in the boat with him and laugh. “Water’s fine today,” he says. The fish hears this as it’s hauled from the water and dumped inside the boat. The air here is wrong, and it chokes; its tiny lungs fill with fluid. As it drowns in the dry, it hears strange booming sounds, and it thinks what’s water? Here’s another joke: fish goes down too deep, and suddenly the whole word is dark, and crushing. The fish here are barely even fish. It’s eaten by something with too many teeth. Point is, there’s a very narrow band of existence a fish can survive in. Point is, words like time and space seem to mean very little until you come to a place where they don’t matter any more. What’s water? Ahaha, it’s a good joke. They call this place a lot of things: the Barren, Purgatory, Central Station. None of them fit, but they’ll have to do. Light does not exist here, nor time. It’s endlessly empty, except it ain’t. If you’re a fish, it’s both boat and abyss. The things that live there don’t conform to anything you’ve ever seen, nor could ever hope to understand: they don’t verb in the way we verb. On the other side, we call them gods; in the Barren, they just are. It’s hard to describe them in words made for teeth and tongues -- for a different Is, but we must try. this opener is tight as hell, great tone, clearly sketching out some kind of badass metaphorical whatnot, sweet drawling language. Down in the darkness, something moved. It cast its shadow on the surface. A colossal eye snapped open. Synapses fired, and a sleeping titan woke. It saw, on the other side, where things were small: a shifting of gears, and a music so quiet it fought to be heard. It looked from world to world, and it saw: tall buildings of steel and glass, empty and burnt. It cast its eyes from one to the next, and saw: choking clouds of toxic ash, and emptiness. It saw world after world abandoned, until at last it came to a place with life. It stood, and the world around it danced away - fled in great swathes of colour and fire. It saw: the rumble before an avalanche; a hiss of carbon monoxide and a blocked tailpipe. It saw: a single spark moving with purpose - the overture to an inferno. It saw: movement in the darkness, so cataclysmic it would rend Is from Is. It saw: something that would echo through the worlds, into the dreams of the mortals until they woke screaming about a war in heaven. There was silence, then a shadow, then --from afar, from everywhere, from nowhere at all-- a new music rising from the deep. and this is ok, though a bit HIGH FANTASTY WRITERING but it's tonally disjunct from what came before and not in a good way. I want more of the first half, not too fussed whether I get more of the second. sebmojo fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Nov 21, 2016 |
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Nov 21, 2016 00:44
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 13:28 |
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here's a piece i did, trying for 'the opposite of a story' i think Time is a building on fire, burning in reverse 1. Home is an arbitrary collection of angles, studded with incongruous items of memory. Home is a handful of chips scattered on the shiny sunburnt bubbles in the porch paint, laid on in long, even strokes by Sally Matherson in her summer frock twenty years ago. Home is a bloody bone-handled knife in a paint spattered outside sink. 2. Mr Cabel, who works in retail, is at home. 3. It’s a Wednesday on the sandy street that runs along Lyall bay. The air is full of seagulls with heads like armour-piercing bullets. The sand makes corkscrews in the blustering air and slithers in rivulets down the sun-battered dunes. 4. Sally Matherson is dead, of course, a traffic accident happened when she was about to have tea. She died some years later of unrelated causes. 5. The accident was no accident. 6. Meanwhile it was still Wednesday. A man, Anthony Margrave who had drunk three cans of beer was in the passenger seat of his car (Mazda, 2011) singing along to a tune he didn’t know. His brother Phillipe, who he hated, was driving. They were driving to the airport. 7. Nothing happened, or nothing happened out of the ordinary, or nothing happened out of the ordinary right then. Their car crashed but it wasn’t important. Or at least not to Sally Matherson. 8. Mr Cabel, who works in retail, is washing the tea cups, rubbing the brown ring away with his thumb. 9. Anthony Margrave is still young, arms around the shoulder of his brother, who he loves, in a pub in Ponsonby yelling DON’T YOU GO OUT IN THE RAAAAAAAAIN. It’s still Wednesday. 10. The sea is pawing at the beach. Come in here, it says like a sleepy drunk wanting sex. Come on. Come on. 11.It rained last Wednesday, thick sheets of rain draping across the city. Sally Matherson was caught out in it walking home with the fish and chips in their hot paper wrapper. She took shelter in a garage and watched the rain come down across the street. She held on to the memory until she died. 12. Mr Cabel, retail, etc, is opening a grate on the side of his house. He doesn’t have a screwdriver so he uses a bone-handled butter knife to turn the screws. Under the house it smells thick and secretive to him as he sucks the cut on his thumb. 13. Anthony Margrave got caught stealing three chocolate bars and a box of orange and mango Just Juice from the corner dairy when he was seven. Phillippe was on lookout but ran away when he saw the shopkeeper lady coming down the aisle, surprised at the horror of discovery that engulfed him, like a dirty shirt being plunged into hot soapy water. 14. The waves on the beach start a long way out to sea even though they don’t know it. A detergent bottle, a piece of driftwood or a floating body is already lying on the beach even though it hasn’t got there yet. 15. Mr Cabel (retail) sat on a bench last Wednesday on the way home from work and looked out at the bay. The sun was setting behind the hill and the clouds were moving fast, so at first he thought it was a trick of the light or a dog swimming in the ocean. 16. Phillipe sees Sally Matherson running across the road and his guilty legs pump the brakes hard, the wheels on his Mazda skid on the sand piled up on the road around Lyall Bay, and the car slides into a parked Toyota station wagon with a hissing gentle crunch. ‘Jesus,’ says Anthony Margrave. ‘You stupid fuckhead,’ he says. 17. Mr Cabel works in retail, selling furniture, and his house is full of damaged furniture he has taken from his work over the years, subject to an understanding with his employer. His coat is on a chaise longue that has a rip in the fabric. 18. Sally Matherson died of unrelated causes, three years later. She shrieked and stepped back when it started to rain and Mr Cabel (who she did not know) put up his umbrella to keep himself dry, startling her. She was standing on the edge of the rail platform at the time. 19. Thoroughly wrapping a body in plastic using black rubbish sacks, bought in packs of 20 from the Warehouse takes seven sacks to achieve complete coverage. 20. Sally Matherson opens the door to her home with shaky hands and trips on the doorstep. She drops the fish and chips on the porch which is painted bright green. The wet paper tears, and chips spray out on the ground. 21. There is no 21. sebmojo fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Nov 21, 2016 |
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Nov 21, 2016 00:50
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Thanks zeb, IZeBourgeoisie posted:you helpfully posted the story twice, seemingly verbatim ...well poo poo. Fixed.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:28
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Story is decent enough (character acts to achieve something, some nice details, solid if cliche twist at end) but it's riddled with errors and typos and the kid doesn't at all sound like a six year old. Plus it cheated the prompt by having an adult character: not that that's super important, but still.
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Jan 10, 2017 08:44
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Hello friends, this is the place to put your fiction.
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May 23, 2017 08:47
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Doctor Malaver posted:Hello! I'm considering writing something in the style of Dan Brown. There are several problems with that but the first is that I want to write in English and I'm ESL. So here's a short writing exercise... Please let me know whether my language is good enough to be salvaged by a native speaking editor (in case I ever reach the point that I'll need one).
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Aug 13, 2017 23:37
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 13:28 |
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Doctor Malaver posted:Thanks! its a joke, sorry: I mean it's not great, but it's close enough to 'ok' (I.e. acceptably good) that it would be able to see it if it were a place.
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Aug 14, 2017 00:58
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