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In uh, flash I’ve never done this before nor do I have any relevant experience apologies in advance edit: ok i wrote my story, should i just post it or do i wait for your signal or what shwinnebego fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Mar 23, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 18:22
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Word Count: 1836 [edited only to italicize some words cuz i forgot formatting does copy/paste] Inoculate the Inside Ninety percent of the time working on what she’s supposed to be working on is quite impossible for Ranya. And so at 3pm on a gray Spring day she finds herself in her home office reading an internet sex and relationship advice column. The columnist is making a tortured point that Ranya would love to actually believe: that the point of relationships is not, contrary to popular belief, to have fun or to share interests or even to count on a basic ease of interaction in the domus. No, relationships are meant to bring out the hardest, most difficult stuff within you and force you to confront it, day in and day out. The interactions between you and your partner that, as far as you can tell, abjectly suck? The ones that bring out irrational, stubborn rage, that cast you both deep into death-spirals of anxious self-doubt and resentment? You’ve had it wrong all along, according to internet sex columnist Mistress Crabula: that’s the good stuff right there. always has been. “Ranya!” Janno’s tone in shouting her name is thick with need, conveying a non-negotiable urgency that Ranya must attend to at once, nevermind what else might be going on in her world. Ignoring her therapist’s advice to do…well, something other than this, she takes a deep breath and imagines pushing her resentment into a far-flung corner of her left foot. “Get me a tick twister,” creaks Janno as he examines their dog under a headlamp. Ranya obliges. “Thanks,” offers Janno dispassionately, the task of removing the tick from the presently docile bernedoodle relieving him of any discernible emotional affect. “I need to groom him. Can you get some treats and feed him treats slowly?” Ranya is looking at her phone, and noticing that she has a meeting in 40 minutes - the very thing she had been reading advice columns to avoid preparing for. “Sure, of course, no problem,” she replies, betraying none of her mounting stress, and blaming Janno entirely for this state of affairs. She begins to feed the dog tiny pieces of dried horse bladder, which Janno has determined is essential for the dog’s holistic well-being. Ranya is a forest ecologist, and things are getting weird in the New England woods. As a staff scientist at a research forest owned by an Ivy League school, her day-to-day mostly involves transect walks to measure whatever the scientist in charge happens to be measuring. Over the past year, an explosion of emerald ash-borers has eradicated nearly half the ash trees in the study area, while simultaneously a pine blister rust is leveling the conifer stands. (With far-away genocides and the terminal decline of the US empire, is measuring trees really the best use of her time?) “She’s twitching! Are you going to feed her treats so I can groom her? The ticks are horrible and it’s really stressing me out!” Janno seems upset with Ranya, but their collective priority is set for the moment, and cannot be easily altered, not now. “I’ll be more careful,” she replies mutely while feeding the dog another crunch of verdant organ meat. All of these tree pathogens are possibly within the realm of the new “normal” for invasive species in these forests, even if they seem alarming. But yesterday, she had seen growing sack-like subcortical bulges in the elm trees, reminiscent of the tell-tale tendrils produced by Dutch Elm disease, but somehow…not quite right. She had taken a core sample and sent it to the lab for analysis and genetic sequencing. (Why is she coring trees instead of getting out there organizing alongside mass movements with political strategies adequate to the task of addressing the climate crisis?) “Ranya, are you going to feed him another treat, he’s moving!” In 37 minutes, she is expected to meet with the team of scientists supervising the forest to report on this phenomenon, and provide her assessment of what it all meant (Doesn’t it mean that for whatever reason, invasive species are destabilizing our local ecology and we should probably be organizing to stop it?) “I have a meeting I need to get ready for, it’s important and I’m really under-prepared.” “Oh, well, okay - you should have told me that this wasn’t a good time.” “It didn’t really seem like that was an option?” “So you just acquiesced to my request because you’re afraid of me? That’s incredibly annoying, because I can’t believe that you’re being honest about your wants and needs when you don’t communicate” (What an odd conversation to be having, Ranya thinks, as the United States empire twists itself into knots to maintain its basic functions in the face of an irreversible drift towards a multipolar geopolitical world marked by runaway climate catastrophes) “Well now you’re getting annoyed with me, and it’s actually pretty stressful, so you’re not really creating a particularly welcoming environment for me to communicate about my needs. Anyway, like I said, I gotta go. Bye.” Janno seems fully livid as Ranya leaves, and she knows her heart-rate is soaring as her mind predictably spirals down into the standard grooves that have been carved from hundreds of experiences of getting triggered over fights with her partner. And her last partner. And her partner before that. And her mom, obviously. Part of the problem here is that Janno’s approach to the dog is all High Holistic Dog Health: no tick and flea medicine (that can cause seizures), but extreme concern about tick and flea diseases (you know they’re on the rise with climate change?), which means constant tick-searching and grooming that Ranya is expected to help with. It also means no walks on the street in the winter (salt is bad for their paws), raw food only (which required converting a substantial portion of her domestic environment into a cottage industrial facility for dog food), and about three substantial walks per day (as if the forest doesn’t demand enough walking out of her increasingly middle-aged body). Ranya is getting upset, and starting to feel again like Janno has built a life around his specific idea of dog-care, ripping her agency away from her in the process. And then she feels pathetic for having so strong a reaction to such an inane matter: she is an adult human possessed of basic communicative faculties, after all. Why does she not discuss this more regularly? Why doesn’t she say more about why she is upset now? The ticks are getting worse, though, and it is hard to argue with any of his logic on its own terms. Awful things, ticks. If it were up to her, they’d just give the dog the drat flea & tick medicine. She logs onto Zoom. The supervisors of the research forest, Carolina and Peter, are online already. There is another person there who she doesn’t recognize, called simply “Jim” on Zoom. Jim is wearing a suit, and he looks like an AI-generated image of a recent MBA-grad or like a Midwestern Democratic state Senator. Carolina and Peter are quiet. Jim breaks the silence. “I’m from the National Security Agency. We need to know what you found in those core samples yesterday.” Ranya is taken aback. “I haven’t run the samples yet, but I imagine it’s a fungus based on the subcortical spread pattern.” Jim seems stoic. “We were told that the pattern was quite unusual.” Ranya nods. “Yeah, it was not like anything we’d seen before. It had a certain…regularity to it that was, frankly, a bit off-putting.” Jim doesn’t blink. “This is very important. There are reports of similar fungal pathogens afflicting forests around the country. Preliminary DNA sequencing tests indicate that they may have been engineered. Can you confirm this?” Ranya is dazed. “Yeah, I’ll, uh…the samples are out to the lab but the results should be back. I need just…a minute.” The results are there. She thinks it really is amazing how rapid these rapid genomic analyses are these days. Even at a glance it’s clear to her that this is a modified version of a Chinese cousin of the Dutch Elm Disease, altered in a number of ways. She can’t determine exactly what these modifications mean, phenotypically, without further research. But modified, they are. Ranya opens up the Zoom window again. She reports to Jim, “It actually just looks like Dutch Elm Disease. Nothing special.” She is surprised at how calm her voice is. “Maybe a local mutation, but I wouldn’t really think much of it. Honestly, with warmer and wetter summers, we’re seeing more aggressive forest pathogens with taller spikes in the most infectious parts of their life-cycles, so to speak.” Jim’s face is hard to read. Ranya wonders if he looks suspicious? Nonplussed? Wait, does she recall what “nonplussed” means? “Thank you for your input, Ranya. That’s all I need.” He signs off. Carolina and Peter exchange a few pleasantries before signing off themselves. They are busy administrators, after all. Ranya leaves her home office and takes a deep breath. She sees Janno, still grooming the dog on his own. But this time, the sight of him makes her happy, happier than it had in some time. Ticks were indeed multiplying faster than they had before. Their disease loads were higher. Who knows what the future ecology of this forest will look like? Nothing was going to be the same in their corner of the world, or in fact anywhere in the world. The tiny arachnids that persistently insert themselves into the flesh of their beloved pet become more numerous every day. Ranya realizes that there is no defending against them, that no medicines sold by pharmaceutical companies can bring them to heel, not in any way that matters, just as no United States deep state spook like Jim could possibly be in a position to rescue the ecosystems she studied. As she watches Janno groom the dog, trying to make the task of tick removal easier in the future, she feels a mix of the familiar resentment. Janno is so oblivious to her inner world. Ranya has likely committed light treason. Maybe she just helped usher in a new chapter of biological warfare between major world powers that might eventually undermine the United States’ monopoly on ecocide. The ticks are already in the dog's hair. The pathogens are already in the forest. Ranya’s resentments are already inside of her (and not confined to her left foot - not actually). Imperialism infuses lives across the planet with inequity, already. Her therapist always emphasized that resentment, anger, uncomfortable upset feelings are all tools that we use to protect ourselves from what our bodies perceive to be enemies. But it is too late to prepare for danger when enemies are upon us. And Mistress Crabula’s crappy internet advice somehow seems right after all. She feels a familiar sense of desire, long absent, emerge when she looks at Janno struggling to remove another tick from the dog’s matted hair, a feeling that makes her resentment seem smaller, even a little funny. That’s the stuff. She smiles. shwinnebego fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Mar 24, 2024 |
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Mar 23, 2024 17:22
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Thanks for the notes! I'm nearly middle-aged and haven't done any creative writing of any kind, uh, like ever, so that's nice to hear. That was fun, I'll do this again!
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Mar 26, 2024 02:20
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I am in
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Mar 26, 2024 03:00
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Moderate Rapture Word count: 1780 “How can we hope to address an epochal challenge like climate change when so many people in the world are adrift in a sea of misinformation?” Professor Jane Markham pauses, pleased with her rhetorical question that surely tugs at the cerebral strings of her soon-to-graduate students. She genuinely feels more gratification from her fiery students’ will to change the world than she did from winning a Nobel Prize as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Your task, as young, passionate people who want to make the world a better place, is to be strong ambassadors for science and stewards of rational discourse in the world.” Moss is slouched in the back of the lecture drawing an anthropomorphic rabbit eating futuristic-looking rambutan and humming a tune from Baldur’s Gate 3. To Moss, Markham’s fetish for science is anachronistic at best, like has this lady been paying attention to anything in the world for the past decade or? “Whether you end up addressing the climate crisis directly through your career, or end up doing something else, the skills you’ve learned here will empower you to be a change-maker going forward. Thank you all so much!” An intrusive thought passes through Rohit’s mind as he prepares to leave a college classroom for the last time. “Change-make deez nuts,” says Rohit’s intrusive thought machine to Rohit. He can hear Moss’s humming from a row back. It’s irritating, but Rohit’s a neurotypical who recently started meditating after a Leninist known as @AssTankie recommended it on an instagram reel, which means he’s in a headspace that lends itself to dealing with some irritation. Sarah packs up her bag in the front of the class, feeling inspired by Markham’s closing remarks. She recently watched How to Blow Up a Pipeline and is committed to using her relative privilege to get away with more radical tactics for the future of the planet. Having a sharp mentor on their side who understands science and is passionate about the environment will make for a much better meeting. Through a powerful telescope, it looks like a comet. It’s really more like an interstellar hacky sack, the stuffing is a silicon-based life support system, built to keep its hiveminded denizens alive for a long haul. They (to use an approximate pronoun) are on their way to a sector of the galaxy far from their home to carry out a routine function: rapturing the best and brightest minds of fledgling species on the verge of extinction to incorporate into their strange panspermian project that defies explanation, or at least explanation within the confines of any dimensions familiar to Sarah, Rohit, Moss, or even Professor Markham. Professor Markham is feeling the usual high she gets after wrapping up a term and instilling visibly in her pupils a robust appreciation for Earth system sciences along with a more serious commitment to working to make the world a better place. She enters the classroom in the basement of the lecture hall where students working with the Anti-Imperialist Climate Project have invited her to join them for a planning meeting. Markham doesn’t love the “anti-imperialist” heading of the student initiative (it betrays a lack of nuance and a rather gauche conflation of separate issues that might jeopardize their strategic focus on climate change, the real epochal challenge facing humanity) but she cannot help but smile at the perennial pizzazz that her students bring into her life. “Hi Professor Markham!” squeaks Sarah excitedly. “It’s so great to have you here. And thank you to everyone else for being here too, it’s amazing that you’re all willing to show up even with finals around the corner to plan our next steps as a group!” There are about 15 people in the room, mostly students, but a couple of dining staff are also present. Sarah, Moss, and Rohit are all elated to see this - it’s proof that their movement really has an organic connection to the working classes, and isn’t just an academic exercise for an aloof woke student mob. Across the chasm of their superficial differences, the three are united in this experience. Phew. “It is my pleasure, and a delight to see so much passion from all of you,” replies Markham before sitting in the circle of chairs the students have set up. “So tell me, what’s next for this group, and what are you hoping to achieve?” That’s Rohit’s cue. “We consider the climate crisis to be inextricable from the larger capitalist system. It’s really about class struggle, and we know that the ruling classes will never take action unless we impose serious costs on them. With the US staring down a devastating war in the Pacific, we need to escalate around key chokepoints, especially weapons manufacturers, alongside the workers in those sectors, to bring the economy to a halt. We need to--” Markham cuts him off. “That is quite a perspective! Your passion is admirable.” Rohit is pretty sure she’s said the word ‘passion’ three times since walking into the room in the past two minutes. Moss keeps an exact count of all the words that everyone says, and knows that in fact she has only said it once just now and once during class. “But the vast majority of people in this country do not consider climate change to be a top priority,” Markham continues. And as students, some of you recent graduates, the ability to educate and to communicate is where you all shine. I know how talented many of you are as writers, presenters, and artists. Can you leverage those assets?” Moss remembers their father talking about leverage on the phone to his stockbroker buddies. It was annoying. They’re pretty sure that they learned in class that there are only a few years remaining to deal with the climate crisis, and the world is on the brink of nuclear war to boot. Moss holds up a sketch they’ve been working on for the past 180 seconds showing a comet on the way to Earth while a teacher (depicted as a rabbit) addresses a lecture (entitled “Comets”) to an audience (depicted as crickets). Sarah jumps in, saying “I believe that education is absolutely important, and we need to be taking direct actions. We can do both!” Rohit’s eyes are rolling into the back of his head. His meditation practice, according to @AssTankie, should help modulate his emotions and encourage active listening in the face of frustrating ideological opposition. @AssTankie definitely doesn’t recommend launching into polemics about dialectics as an effective means of communication, nor a particularly useful pathway to finding inner peace. “The notion that education can change hearts and minds in any way that affects the world is ahistorical and deeply unserious. Only through shared struggle can we activate working people around the climate crisis and only through mass action can we show, not tell people, how the climate crisis and imperialism are interconnected!” Markham seems totally collected, which is even more frustrating to Rohit and Moss. Sarah is not yet convinced that they can’t find common ground. The Professor responds, her voice full of empathy, “I totally hear you. And I also think that what you can do, as a group, is articulate solutions. It isn’t enough to simply disrupt society and stage protests. We need real ideas, well-considered and data-driven solutions, too. And I know that you all, with your incredible intellectual skills, are going to be leaders in providing those solutions.” Rohit rolls his eyes at Sarah, annoyed that she invited the Professor here. “The solutions have already been proposed, but the ruling classes are not interested in them. This is literally a life-or-death struggle over resources!” Sarah is starting to regret inviting the Professor as well, but she still thinks that there might be some common ground here. The other attendees are starting to check out. Sarah interjects to try to bring other voices into the conversation. “Why don’t we have a go-around, and hear from each person what they’re most excited about doing in the next couple weeks?” A few students describe their interests in mutual aid. One of the dining workers says that they are hoping to organize their co-workers and want to make sure they’re greening the food supply chains at the same time Moss describes the future of mutual care and compassion that they envision. It’s compelling, and sounds heavily inflected by a vaguely anime imaginary. Rohit stays quiet, he’s said his piece. After everyone has shared, Markham addresses the room. “The diversity of perspectives and experiences in this room is going to be a tremendous asset for all of you going forward. Don’t hesitate to reach out if there is anything I can do to be supportive in the future,” she conveys sincerely. Sarah, Rohit, and Moss walk out together, trailing Markham who is walking quickly ahead of them to her next meeting. “Liberals are so loving infuriating!” Rohit is venomous. “I feel like she doesn’t have the same sense of urgency that we do…but she does really care about us, and she knows so much,” ventures Sarah. Moss cannot recall a time where the Professor said anything that remotely resonated with them. The sky darkens quickly, a disc eclipsing the Sun exactly and replacing it with a fiery corona. The lighting becomes like a sunset but distributed across all 360 degrees of the horizon. The birds start chirping as if it is dawn. “The eclipse isn’t supposed to be for another week, and we aren’t in the path of totality,” says Moss. The other two stare at Moss blankly. Each of them hears a voice that sounds precisely like their own, but apparently coming from everywhere all at once. “Your species is on the verge of extinction. We cannot allow the biodiversity of your planet and the ingenuity of your apex sapient species to be lost to the cosmos. We have run diagnostics to identify fifteen exemplary representatives of your species who can help to maintain what is best about you.” A ray of light shines down from the center of the ersatz corona in the sky, shining directly onto Professor Markham ahead of them. Other rays of light extend in other directions, far beyond where they can see. Markham has a stunned look on her face as her body ascends into the corona before disappearing. The sky returns to normal. Rohit and Sarah are slack-jawed. Moss is expressionless, but understands immediately the gravity of what they have just heard (news of their imminent extinction). “Huh. I don’t really get what they saw in her,” intones Moss. “Are…aliens…fuckin…libs?” sputters Rohit. Sarah calls her mom. shwinnebego fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Mar 31, 2024 20:56
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beep-beep car is go posted:I’m in my dude. Here’s my hustle: Oh I'm vibing with this hustle. Because time travel requires a clean future. And for that you're gonna want Ayahuasca Carbon Coins: Connect. Transform. Synervate.
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Apr 3, 2024 00:18
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oh uhhh i misunderstood, i thought i was like generating my own vibe based on someone else's vibe can i change my vibe or
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Apr 3, 2024 02:28
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Tyrannosaurus posted:You, specifically, can add another vibe but you gotta use two vibes can i just use the vibe i proposed along with the vibe it was responding to
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Apr 3, 2024 02:38
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ANACOOOIIIIINNNDAAAAA (Word Count: 987) Snakes turned into fractals on the walls of the tent before melting away before Brian’s eyes to reveal the very Black Rock City desert that lay beyond his shamanic enclosure. Apparently the mix of DMT and the sacred vine had granted him the boon of X-Ray vision this time, which was beyond far out. The desert festival that Brian watched through the seemingly transparent tent-walls began to fade in color, giving way to a series of terrible visions that Brian knew, with certainty, to be the near future on this planet: a burning rainforest, floods knocking the banks of Dhaka into the Bay of Bengal, San Francisco, the beautiful city he called home, sinking into the sea. The grief that Brian felt was exactly as potent as the idea that struck him next. Gaia, the beautiful Earth mother, was in peril. But the vine itself proffered an answer, intertwined so deeply with the problem itself in such a beautiful dialectical synthesis that Brian nearly wept: growth and profit were currently pinned to ecologically destructive activities. But what if money itself was created from the act of conservation? What if it all started with the vine? After the ceremony was said and done, Brian remembered who he was on this plane: a solutions guy. And the vine had brought him to the greatest solution of all. ~ In his wooden house on the banks of the flooded forests of a small tributary of the Ucayali river just a couple hours downriver from the bustling jungle city of Pucallpa Eber wedges a chunk of mambe, pulverized coca, in between his molars and his gums.“The gringos have a lot of trauma, you see, and the ayahuasca apparently helps them to heal from it,” he explains wryly to his cousin Jenry. The two cousins spent the day clearing a secondary forest that had been resting for a decade to plant the ayahuasca vine as an export product, displacing their traditional swidden cassava-banana systems. Jenry is helping his older cousin out today, as family does, but he has no intention of letting these gringo investors gain a controlling stake in their lands (which is of course what these things always end up boiling down to). Three gringos arrive and introduce themselves as Brian, Steph, and Dan. Eber has met Steph before, she’s been working for an eco-NGO for about eight years, and most recently helped them to establish a community-based forest management system that in essence made them fill out a lot of paperwork to get a trivial amount of extra cash selling timber like they already had been since the 1990s. Like any seasoned environmental NGO worker, Steph is intellectually aware of the limitations of her line of work, and her perfectly titrated level of cynicism is a core part of her identity. She’s not the sort of naive rube who earnestly believes that a white lady with a masters in public policy can save the world (of course not, that would be silly) but neither is she about to throw the baby out with the bathwater like the blue-haired woke mobsters are terminally postured to do (things are the way they are for a reason, which Steph knows because she’s actually had a real career doing real work unlike those people). Dan isn’t just one of Brian’s fellow burners, but he’s an expert climate modeler and he’s figured out that they can scale this idea up to include 30% of the Indigenous communities in the region covering 15 million hectares of Amazonian forest storing around 3 billion tons of carbon, reducing emissions equivalent to removing 1 million cars from the road each year while generating a durable crypto currency that will continue to generate value. People, planet, and profit, baby. Dan pulls out a pamphlet. Steph awkwardly tries to explain to Eber its symbols and icons that look like dollar signs, letters with strange lines through them, cartoonish computers, and stick figures interacting across a schematic image of the globe through an almost comically baroque symphony of arrows, all encircling a ridiculous looking snake coiled into the shape of the word “ANACOINDA.” Eber has to stop himself from laughing out loud. Jenry’s seen everything he needs to see. To Steph’s surprise, Eber asks no follow up questions, and simply responds “Of course - any project that can help us to develop is welcome. This will help us to improve our lives and protect our forests, we are always happy to collaborate.” “What did he say?” asks Brian. Steph nods at her comrades and says “All systems go.” ~ The giddy investors eagerly down the brew that Jenry hands them in the shamanic shack as the sun sets. The walls of the hut turn into familiar fractal snakelike patterns. Brian sees the walls melt away, his X-Ray vision returning, an auspicious blessing from the vine mother. Dan feels the familiar presence of an ancestor, an Enlightenment Quant who died in 1620 in Amsterdam, and he gives Dan his enthusiastic blessings for his new enterprise. Steph has only done this once before, but she feels instantly euphoric. A being that looks like an anaconda greets her. She feels a deep connection to the creature. But something isn’t quite right. The three of them are suddenly aware of an oceanic feeling, but it’s all too tactile. Incredibly, they are actually in the river. They’re aware of each other, and they are aware of the snake itself. But the snake is not here to guide them to any horizon to their liking. As they float down the river, cerebra infused with the potent vine nectar, the snake does not appear to move as it bursts into a kaleidoscope of glass. Before they merge, horrified, into the essence of the river for what they know will be forever they hear something hissed at them: la selva no se vende.
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Apr 6, 2024 21:02
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I’m in. And I’ll take a demon, sure
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Apr 9, 2024 16:51
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Quaffs of the Weak Word Count: 395 What has befallen me will befall many more. The leaves have spoken thus. Hear what has come to pass for me, child, and recount to those who follow thee, that thou might yet grow the tale through thy life, sowing spores of resistance through the soils of centuries that might one day blossom into a mighty tree of our folk, that cannot be hewn by sheriff, knight, nor lord. In Skipgren I was graced with many skills: I was both brewer and carpenter, midwife and musician. First they sent the hedge knight, who bore my brothers away, for they trespassed the lord’s wood in their weekly hunt for boar. My brothers fought back, but the hedge knight and his squires were availed of martial training and arms far surpassing what they could muster in defiance. Then, they raised fences, barring my sisters and I from our herbs for our ales, our medicines and berries for the children, and wood for our hearths. At last, armed men came upon our hearth, wresting us from our home and transplanting us one hundred leagues hence to a city workhouse. My sister Mary they called a witch, for a neighbor had told them under duress that she made brews could prevent a woman from being with child. Yet I courted the hedge knight, who was kindly despite his service to a wicked master, and through him became a guest in the court of the lord himself, a cupbearer. And so a fortnight after my arrival, on the eve of the day my sister Mary was to face the pyre, I called upon hemlock and sage, on bearswort and ashe, and the lord himself and even his kindly hedge knight drank of it, writhing in the night until breath abandoned them. In the night, we did escape, and into the woods we did return. For seven years, we have endured, and this very night, I recount this tale unto thee, knowing that on the morrow, the knights of an even mightier lord shall come to purge these woods. Alas, there is naught we can do to thwart their advance. Yet, mayhap thou shalt carry forth this memory, so that though it may be but an echo when thy great-grandchildren learn to speak in words, perchance it shall nonetheless burgeon one day into a resounding chorus that might reclaim our world
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Apr 10, 2024 20:42
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I'm in, option B
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Apr 24, 2024 16:03
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Planet of Fields (Song: King of Carrot Flower by Neutral Milk Hotel) Word count: 667 The carrot felt, in a way that is not quite how we feel, one of its lateral roots perfectly filling an air pocket in a nearby patch of loose loam. Its meristematic tissues, ever responsive to the murmurs of the soil, released a specific hormonal medley to indicate that a nearby hyphal strand had tightened its lethal noose around the body of a squirming nematode. A spattering of phosphates and nitrates would soon become available here, and the carrot would be ready. Delicious. The carrot knew, in a way that is not quite how we know, that it was today in a plot with many plants, cared for by humans, somewhere between a vast jungle and an even more vast desert. It both felt, and also knew, that its own ancestors had been carried around the world many times over, had been planted in many depleted soils, had been fed chemical fertilizers and absorbed bitter pesticides, for centuries. The carrot heard, in a way that is not quite how we hear, its human caretakers speak of their experiences, sing, and plan. The day before yesterday, a song for planting. Yesterday, a song of love. Today, a song of victory, for across an ocean the humans were on the verge of liberating the last bastion of the old chemical order that had poisoned the carrot's forebears, a name that vibrated through the mycorrhizal neighbors of the carrot into its root: New York. The carrot new this place across the ocean well, and was aware of its cousins still today breathing more freely in constrained urban balcony boxes in that distant place. ~ In that faraway balcony box, the carrot’s cousin could feel the anxiety of its own human caretakers. The world they knew was about to break. They were permitted to grow things like carrots in boxes outside their dwellings because carrots posed no threat to the humans who ran the world outside. Typically, for this box-carrot’s caretakers, there was nothing to do every day, for most humans were superfluous to the reproduction of those in charge. During the day, the box-carrot would take in the rays of the sun through the smog and the fog, making do with the curated mix of nutrients in its box, provided with love by its human caretakers. It was hardly a way to be a carrot. To really be a carrot would require the box to connect to the rest of the Earth (which it doesn’t), the carrot in a box’s human caretakers to fill the box with a rich community of fellow organisms (which they can’t), and the humans in charge to allow songs to be sung on balconies (which they won’t). But this would be the final season of dim rays and suppressed hope, the end of the box-carrot and its human caretakers being unable to fulfill their purpose. The box-carrot heard its human caretakers whisper about their own distant human relatives, now just outside New York, about to bring this place back into the rest of the community of the living. The voices were fearful yet hopeful, for though they did not know their own fates, the fate of those in charge was sealed. ~ Back across the planet, the carrot experienced, in a way that is not quite how we experience, a full transformation of its being at night. It stopped to become more of itself underground, and sent its energies up high towards the dark night sky, where its apical meristems burst into a display of stamens and pistils. As the sun rose, its human-companions returned to sing a new song. The carrot could feel that across the world, the final soils were about to rejoin the whole. Springtime on the other side of the world was now marked with violence, and it could no longer feel its box-carrot cousin. As the carrot built its tower, tumbling through the trees towards its human care-takers, it was to finally be a carrot, fully able to be alongside others on a planet of fields shwinnebego fucked around with this message at 00:26 on May 1, 2024 |
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Apr 28, 2024 23:26
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hit me w them connectsJossiRossi posted:Going to take a risk and try my first Thunderdome... nice, i just entered my first one like a month ago. i'm in my late 30s and have never done any creative writing before and this has been a great experience so far. have fun!
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May 1, 2024 17:45
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The New Jewel of Empire Word count: 1408 Juliet is possessed of an inflexible standard midwestern American accent and she finds linguistics tiktok boring. And so when she says the word “HURTS!” again, enunciating every phoneme to the best of her ability, it yields the same result: the school headmaster Prakash echos back from the other side of the porch something that to Juliet sounds like “HOrudz,” which might in the International Phonetic Alphabet be rendered as xɔʀ̥dz, but this is not knowable to Juliet, who giggles as she always done during these language lessons with Prakash. Juliet’s peace corps assignment has her working as some kind of an art teaching assistant here at a small town about 200 kilometers to the east of Bhopal in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Some of her friends at home are of more radical persuasions than she is, and so they regularly take the piss out of her for joining a shoddy imperial PR outfit that does little to make anyone’s life durably better. In fact, Juliet has come to love her students very much. Their creative impulses are a beautiful thing to behold for her. To have any part in facilitating their exploration of the great infinite muse of humanity is a blessing to Juliet. She heads inside the wooden schoolhouse with no windows to see one of her students, an eight-year-old girl, draw a picture of her own fishing village after it had been decimated by a storm. The child drew the people in her piece with light skin, echoing the billboards that beamed white beauty standard into even this remote place. Juliet tells her that she can draw people that look like her instead, with dark skin and the right facial features The child laughs, and then actually does itt. Juliet feels like she’s beaming even harder than one of those billboards. Her phone buzzes, and a whatsapp message pops up from her friend Jax, “hope you’re winning hearts and minds for the empire today!” “Always, I’m actually not even teaching art anymore I’m just straight up making them crawl through a JSOC obstacle course. The higher-ups realized that the facade was kinda mid anyway,” responds Juliet in a pro-forma bit of banter, itself rather mid as zoomer text banter goes. Her banter is mid because Juliet’s heart isn’t in it. She knows that Jax is at base just a rarefied global North commie whose analysis has no valence here in the subaltern. Through her students, and through Prakash, Juliet sees complexity in a way that her friends at home never can. ~ Prakash ambles inside and tells Juliet in his broken English that he is going to a cultural and religious rally tonight. He invites her to join him. The girl has been asking to see more of what life is like for people outside the confines of the schoolhouse and her homestay. Juliet nods and smiles, blushing but eager. Prakash is from a smaller village in the district called Dhikwada. His childhood involved threshing and parching grain in his family’s home, as his Bharbhunja caste had done for many generations. The NGO that Juliet works for gave Prakash a scholarship when he was ten, and he managed to finish his eighth standard schooling and become a teacher. With his small earnings, he was able to start a small electronics business on the side with his brother, and parching grain is now firmly in his personal dustbin of history. Modiji made all of this possible for Prakash, and Prakash knows that Modiji is prosperity. If he brings Juliet to the rally tonight, held by the local chapter of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, she will be able to see how a beautiful community of Hindus are organizing to build a better future for all Hindus. ~ Juliet leaves the school with Prakash in the late afternoon. They walk through the searing April air towards the center of town. Juliet is ebullient and excited about the rally and event. From what she could understand from Prakash, this will be a celebration of Hindu culture, in all of its glory. Just what she came here for! The town square is filled with people and flags and banners displaying the white flower on an orange field, the symbol of Modi’s BJP party. Jax calls Modi a fascist, but Juliet hears his speech being broadcast through the festival sound system and, thanks to her intensive Hindi language training provided by the Peace Corps, can understand his words. “Our Ram has arrived after centuries of anticipation. Our Lord Ram has arrived after unprecedented patience, countless sacrifices, renunciations, and penance,” crackles the voice of Modiji through the loudspeaker. The crowd bellows approval. “Congratulations to all of you, to all the citizens of the country, on this auspicious moment.” Prakash is crying with happiness. Juliet can feel the joy and love that permeates the crowd. At the edges of a crowd, one of the festival participants begins to chant “Om, namashivaya, om,” which makes Juliet happy because she recognizes this from her yoga classes in Boulder, Colorado where she went to college. Today was a truly authentic celebration of Hindu culture, grounded in the real experiences of working people who had been lifted out of poverty, people like Prakash. She texts Jax, “ngl the violence of all of this is overrated. These are real people who are trying to make a better life for themselves, and…they’re actually doing it.” Jax doesn’t text her again for the remainder of her six month stint in the sub-continent. ~ Prakash needs Juliet to understand the truth, needs her to bring home to America the realities of the Muslim assault on Hindu birthright in greater Bharat. Him and millions like him from the lower Shudra castes have been lifted up into business, professional jobs, and productive work for their people. The Muslim invaders are finally being repelled by Modiji after centuries of anti-Hindu repression at their hands. And the Dalits are, contrary to reports, thriving under the permanent tutelage of people just like Prakash. He knows that she will be just the right kind of ally to tell this to the world. He holds Juliet’s hand, and Juliet grips firmly in return. Her smile is enormous, and Prakash too feels a deep connection to her. On the other side of the town, out of Juliet’s view, a Muslim family is eating lunch in a park. They are attacked and beaten to within an inch of their life by five of the festival attendees. In Prakash’s village, 100 kilometers away, Prakash’s uncle who now owns a farm hires Dalit workers to parch grain. The workers are intensely in debt, and cannot leave even if they wanted to. At the site of Modi’s speech that Juliet heard via radio broadcast, generations of Islamic culture are buried permanently as the ribbon is cut around the Ram Temple, inaugurating a new era of pure Hindu rule in a formerly multi-cultural sector of a once vibrant community. ~ Juliet is back in Washington DC working with a beltway think tank called the Global Education Institute. Her expertise in education policy and her on-the-ground experience in Madhya Pradesh have catapulted her quickly into the middle echelons of the organization, and she finds herself drafting policy dossiers for international education policy. She misses directly working in the classroom, but knows that she can have a far greater impact here, shaping policy that can empower millions of teachers to succeed in places like India. Outside her office, a group of protesters have amassed, rejecting in full voice her organziation’s planned meeting with Modi’s minister of education. They claim that Modi is a fascist, that he doesn’t care about Muslims, that he is violent. But Juliet knows that the government of India is a partner for justice. She knows that these protestors, like her old friend Jax, have simply never had the opportunity she had to be on the ground, to see the complexities of the world, and to see what people’s real experiences are like. Thanks to Juliet, what was once the crown jewel of the British empire will be free to pursue national self determination in the sphere of education, returning Hindu traditions to the classroom. Juliet feels intensely proud of her work. One day, she hopes, she can meet the thousands of Prakashes who will rise from poverty and into the global middle class that she is stewarding into being. Juliet is living her best life.
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May 6, 2024 04:05
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Juliet, Hurts, Om, Jewel
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May 6, 2024 04:06
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sure i'll do it
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May 7, 2024 19:00
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 22:09 |
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The Three Celestial Sisters and the Five-Sided Fortress of Nogol Blalorth Word count: 1211 In a not too distant future, three celestial sisters sit around a table in the heavens gazing down upon the Earth. Each sister is the very essence of one of the great lands on the Earth. They see, inhabit, and love all of the denizens of their lands. And they shape those lands’ futures. Saia, the middle sister, is holding court. “The days of the Ogre, Nogol Blalorth, are numbered. He knows it. And there is no way that I’m meeting with him to discuss ‘terms.’ Remember the last thousand times that we’ve tried that route? We know what will happen: he will dismiss us, then gaslight us, and if we’re lucky, mock us before leaving and promptly regrouping to ravage our lands all over again.” Caafri is the eldest, ever solemn. Her voice betrays the deep scars carried by her lands, people, waters, and creatures. “This is serious. The deserts, the jungles, the mountains, the mines, all of them, bled dry by Nogol Blalorth and his hordes of reavers over the past centuries. The people who live there are many, and they are organized. They are ready to fight the wicked sorcerer Nogol, but I fear for the fire and fury that he will unleash in response. Please, let us be thoughtful, sisters.” Erica is the youngest. To Saia, she sounds naive. To Caafri, hopeful. Erica weighs in, “The whole world, the parts of it that are us, can be so different, so beautiful. My own jungles are still rich with animals, plants, and peoples, and they dream of something better. I think we can talk to Nogol. After all, isn’t a bit simplistic and childish to believe in ‘evil ogres’ that are, well, just evil?” As they continued to discuss into the night, the spirit of the rabbit appeared before them. Rabbit, always at once a sage and a muse, filled the sisters’ hearts with the divine oceanic sense of time flattened and hope elevated. “Sisters, the age-long plague of Nogol Blalorth upon your lands is finally to end,” said Rabbit. “In his lair, you can find the word that can dispel and contain the Ogre forever. You must seek this word, and return here to speak it.” “My lands lie closest to the belly of the beast, and the hordes of Nogol Blalorth threaten your lands most acutely, sisters. I have to do this alone,” said Erica plainly. “Your eyes are clear as your heart is full, sister. Make sure your knives are also sharp,” said Saia. “Drink from this glass, sister. It contains the essence of an ancient mirror. With its power, you can manifest this mirror and reveal truth to those who would not see it,” offered Caafri. “I walk as one, though many we are, sisters,” replied Erica before vanishing from this higher plane to the Earthly one. On the Earthly plane, Erica was not Erica, but many things. The entrance to the lair of Nogol Blalorth was at the end of a great desert to the North. To enter it was nearly impossible for the human denizens of her lands, as the forces of Nogol Blalorth had built a ferocious barricade lined with fetid prisons, each a concentrated Hell on Earth. But for other beings, entry was possible. And so Erica became the great migrating mass of monarch butterflies, sweeping from the great forests, overwintering in the abundant urban milkweed gardens that managed to thrive even within the fallow lands of Nogol Blalorth, tended as they were by rebellious elements within his own domain. The migration took several years and multiple generations, but Erica’s essence endured among the monarchs. Finally, Erica’s host of monarchs found what must be the lair: a five-sided fortress marked with Nogol Blalorth’s many insignias of death and domination. None of the goblins and ghouls patrolling the inside seemed to register a few stray monarch butterflies making use of their halls. As Erica approached a room that she felt in her many bodies to be the site of the words she sought, one of the goblins finally took notice of her. The goblin brought a black device close to its mouth and mumbled an incantation, likely alerting other goblins to Erica’s presence. “What is this? What goes here? I know that butterflies do not behave like this. I minored in entomology for God’s sake! Is this some kind of drone surveillance test?!” Erica quickly arrayed the monarch butterflies into a single, reflective sheet resembling, from the goblin’s perspective, a mirror. The goblin, dressed in a pinstripe suit, gazed into the mirror of monarchs and saw a younger version of himself, near an encampment, chanting “We! Are! The 99%!” The goblin shrieked with horrible, knowing, recollection, and collapsed. Erica quickly flew her manifold lepidopteran form to the control center of the room, and read aloud the word inscribed on an orb pressed into the console. This would be the word that would restore balance to her lands, and to the lands of her sisters. In a flash, Erica was back on the celestial plane with her two sisters. Their faces were ashen. Erica could immediately feel why. “We are sorry, dear sister,” said Erica’s sisters in mournful unison. Erica extended her senses to her lands below, where the vast forest had been just two years earlier, and felt only emptiness. Hundreds of tree species wiped out, thousands of insects, dozens of fish, frogs, and snakes, all wiped off of the planet - wiped out from her own being - forever. “Nogol Blalorth realized that something was amiss shortly after you set off, and set his destructive machinery to work on your forests. There was nothing we could do to stop it, lest we leave our own precarious land defenseless,” said Saia “The pain you feel now, I have felt before, sister. But let us now use what you have brought back to end this forever,” offered Caafri. Erica felt an intense agony that permeated across her many bodies, a pain that transcended the planes that she lived in. She cried out a deafening wail that shook the ether of the celestial plane, mourning at once the loss of millions of her beloved constituent parts, each crafted over billions of years. She shared the word with her sisters, and they spoke it in unison. In their ancient tongue, it sounded something like “Yairds Loti.” Speaking the words broke the world apart. The people of their three lands were quick to unite and to strike into the core of Nogol Blalorth’s fortified territories. The rebellious elements within Nogol Blalorth’s lands, who never agreed with his evil ways, sometimes expressing their resistance through acts as tiny as planting milkweed for butterflies, sabotaged the machinery of his wicked kingdom. The prisons along the desert border were sprung open, and the barrier wall crumbled. The five-sided fortress was flooded with people who knew that something better was possible, that they deserved beauty and virtue, rather than violence and evil. Nogol Blalorth’s power waned, and would soon be no more. Erica still wept for what she had lost. But her heart swelled with the knowledge that a new future for all of her sisters’ lands, and indeed all lands, could now grow upon the ashes of the old order.
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May 13, 2024 06:18
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