Zach MacDonald's Blog, page 2

B-A-N-A-N-A-S

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
The world has been discovered by an alien planet. They require bananas for peace. You are a lowly banana farmer with a vision for peace.

Response:
Of course it would happen the year after the world’s Cavendish banana crops were wiped out. For decades biologists had warned of the risk of having Earth’s premier banana sharing a near-identical genome, making them susceptible to mass annihilation if they were struck by the correct disease. As a species, there are admittedly a lot of dire warnings we don’t heed, but really, no one could have imagined that a freak coronavirus mutation would lead to it infecting bananas (of course, it was quickly dubbed the Chiquitavirus, and its disease CHIVID-25). The result was certain death of the afflicted Cavendish banana tree. And it hit all Cavendish banana trees.

That wasn’t enough to satisfy this fickle universe, though, because then the ships appeared in our solar system. They had sent their message in advance, so it reached us just as their craft were detected near Jupiter. They’d been picking up our broadcasts for decades, you see, and worked out our languages. They were apparent fans of a certain mid 2000s Gwen Stefani hit, however, so their message was sent in English. It was published throughout the world’s media as follows:

>This shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S!
>For real though, we want this shit. Bananas. All of them. You’ll provide us with bananas or you’ll be exterminated. Bananas = peace. C u soon.

Half the world went into shock. The other half was immediately divided by those calling for Earth’s militaries to mount a joint offensive by any means necessary, while still others were convinced it was an elaborate hoax by the infamous hacker 4-Chan.

When the craft did arrive a few days later, their first act was a show of force, in which they vaporized 80% of the Siberian forests in a matter of minutes, having determined that there were no bananas being cultivated there. Earth’s military option was quickly dropped.

Then the world turned to me and my small hobby garden in Thailand where I grow five types of relatively rare–and therefore largely disease resistant–bananas. I’ve made a total of perhaps 30,000 baht profit off my minor sales of these bananas in a decade of this post-retirement project–around $1000 USD. Suddenly I had world leaders assembled at my doorstep, conveying to me that the fate of humanity may very well lay in my hands, and would I use my expertise to lead a massive agricultural operation to produce enough of my beloved rare bananas to please the newly-arrived overlords?

I thought about it for a while. I ate a banana. I considered my family and the human race and our entire collective history and the future we might write together. I visited the temple down the road and sat in silent meditation before the Buddha statue. I came home, picked another banana, ate it, and then returned to the tent city of leaders and influential scientists springing up in the neighboring field, and told them, “K. I’ll do it.”

The global expression of elation cannot be understated. I was offered every monetary and labor resource imaginable. In the space of a week, the entire Khorat Plateau was turned into a banana plantation, excepting the homes and infrastructure there, of course, and with the farmers who had once toiled on that land paid exceedingly handsome sums for their property. It provided a wonderful abundance of jobs, and bigwig corporate figures from Bangkok even quit their cushy office gigs to come join the effort under my direction, knowing full well that a failure to produce enough bananas to satisfy would leave them without employment anyway–without bodies, for that matter.

The day finally came when the delivery was to be made to the mothership. For our ease, the overlords flew it to within a couple kilometers of the edge of the plantation. A portal the size of a mountain opened in its center, and a blue-white tractor beam of immense proportions lit a swath of our green earth brighter than daylight. It was determined, through official communication channels with the overlords, that I should be drawn onboard with the first batch of bananas to present the harvest.

So I went, drawn into the sky alongside 80 shipping containers full of beautiful orange, reddish, yellow and purple bananas. When gravity reclaimed its hold on me I found myself and the containers on the floor of massive circular hall, bright lights piercing from the walls of all sides. Toward me, followed by its entourage, crawled the interplanetary Ambassador on its dextrous crab-like appendages, its four enormous yellow eyes studying me with what I hoped was friendliness.

“I have long studied your language, waiting for this day,” it told me in graceful Thai, mandibles vibrating in an excellent mimicry of human vocal cords.

“It’s an honor, more or less,” I responded. “My pleasure to deliver this batch of the goods.”

My eyes had adjusted to the bright light and I could now see that there were many thousands of his kind gathered in nooks along the walls, watching in anticipation, yellow eyeballs bulging in their keratinous sockets.

The Ambassador looked into the yawning mouth of the first crate, and carefully selected the finest banana it could see, grasping it in the twining feelers at the end of a claw and lifting it into the air before his audience.

A rumbling murmur that I took for awe shook the air.

The Ambassador peeled the banana with his feelers, and I admired with what skill and speed it got job done. Finally, it brought the fruit into the cavernous dark maw between its mandibles and took a bite.

I swear, the thing didn’t have eyebrows, but I saw it wince. The ship held its breath. Outside, I knew, all of humanity held its breath as well.

“This . . .” said the Ambassador, and trailed off in seeming confusion. “Damn . . . ” It looked around at the others. “Stefani wasn’t kidding. This is shit.”

The post B-A-N-A-N-A-S appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Free Will

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
A benevolent alien offers to heal the Earth in exchange for 1 million humans. You offered yourself but were the only one rejected for unspecified reasons.

Response:
It didn’t tell us what one million of us were needed for, only specifying that we had to be volunteers. It would know if we really were, it assured the planet, its voice speaking simultaneously inside every human head, in the mother tongue of each person–for it had learned all of our languages. Some believed it was speaking no human tongue at all, but instead some cosmic lingua franca arisen from the root of the universe, common to all life, its quantum vibrations picked up and interpreted as our first and most familiar language by the individual antennae of our brains.

Free will, it explained, was for all intents and purposes real. No one future of the universe was written, though every possible future was, in a sense, stretched before us in a virtually infinite multiverse which the physical brains that had so far evolved on Earth would not be able to process on a fundamental level.

And that was okay, the alien told us, because with the great healing of the planet we would be given the option of time–if only we would work together to survive–to let our brains adapt through the cumulative mutations of thousands of generations, until they reached the shape and neuronal capacity to key into the understanding of that greater macrocosmos that was reality, which existed in all places and all times, waiting to be discovered.

I volunteered for the exchange with my whole heart.

Perhaps, I thought, this angel from interstellar space was in fact an ancient demon out of archaic human lore. Perhaps we were sacrifices, to be made to suffer for some unimaginable form of hellish eternity, or annihilated to satisfy the whim of another organism evolved from predators–those hunters and consumers of other lifeforms–in a universe constrained by rigid laws of evolution. Perhaps this angel was too much like us.

As though our visitor had tailored its request based on some vision of all those possible futures, exactly one million, just as it had asked for, volunteered with this same act of free will, the same commitment of spirit, to be exchanged for the healing of our blasted and dying home world. They came from every corner of the earth. The media was proud to trumpet that they represented us all, almost teary-eyed in their sentiment. The exchange had been made collectively by all humanity.

Yet I was rejected. The others, all 999, 999 of them, were taken to the stars. The alien, our so-called space angel, assured us that the healing would begin imminently–that even though one soul had been rejected, it was its wholehearted offer that mattered. In other words, I supposed, it was my thought that counted.

The night after the departure of the angel and our offering, I awoke to a voice. It was inside my head. The angel. It had returned.

It is time for the healing to begin, it said softly. Tonight you will drive to the lab. Use your Level E access key at the concealed side entrance. The main gate is locked. There are Zone-1-certified staff working tonight on Level A. Simply tell security that you are there to supervise.

I did as the space angel asked me. The drive took under 15 minutes, with no traffic at such an hour. The guards on duty scrutinized me with their expressions as I told them my story, but their voices carefully betrayed little suspicion. No lowly guard in the entire facility is above a Level E pass holder, and they know it.

Despite the warm night, the elevator felt deathly cold as it descended toward the subterranean Level E. As I was lowered deeper into the earth, the space angel continued to speak to me, almost congenially.

It was important to secure members of your species. Even after expiry of their living bodies, their genetic signatures will be preserved. One day, perhaps they can live again, on a more controlled and stable world. They can flourish, you see. What you might call the Garden of Eden in your literature. A bright new garden, with no dangers, no snakes, no predators to compete against. Their brains will be able to rest in their current state. Eternal calm. Eternal happiness.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I told it aloud.

Of course you don’t. But that’s okay. You are pure of spirit. That’s why I knew you were the Healer.

I scanned into the lab on Level E. I followed the space angel’s instructions. I retrieved the airtight steel capsules from their liquid nitrogen bath.

Earth will heal, whispered the space angel as I rode the elevator back up to ground level. Its voice floated disembodied through the corridors of my grey matter. Earth will be fine. You engineered this virus to thrive only in your own species.

I fitted my key–one of only three in existence–into the steel capsule, opening it with a hiss. I removed three vials with gloved hands, each of them loaded with the isolated specimens, floating like the angel’s voice in their cool saline liquid.

Such a warlike, predator species. I, too, evolved from hunters. I do not condemn you. But this galaxy is not suitable for too many apex predators, just as no closed ecosystem is–and likewise, I’m sure you understand, there can be only one apex intelligence.

I stared at the vials in my hand. I had so wholeheartedly been willing to heal the earth. I had been chosen by an angel out of space.

The subway station is two blocks away. You know the trains start at 5am. Monday morning. They will be packed to capacity. You will open the vials and drip them throughout the train. You will make sure that some drops land on the clothing of passengers, in relative proximity to their faces. You will also ensure that you contract the virus.

“I won’t do this,” I said.

You will.

“It’s my choice! I have fr–“

Free will. Yes, you do. You have the choice of all possible worlds. And I have seen all those worlds, my Healer. In all those worlds, you start the pandemic in precisely this way. Ten day incubation period, certain death within 48 hours of the first symptoms showing themselves. Humanity will fall. The world will heal, until another predator species rises.

“You lie.”

I have no need to lie.

I am already at the station. Then I am underground. Then I am on the platform.

The vials are in my pocket.

It lies, I think–yet the space angel hears me and denies it in the same instant.

I will walk away. I will call its bluff. I’ll return to the lab and re-secure these vials. I will turn myself into the authorities and tell them what I almost did.

The train arrives.

I will do it. I will walk away.

You won’t, Healer.

I have free will, I tell myself pleadingly.

Of course you do, Healer.

The door opens.

The post Free Will appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

r/WritingPrompts Response: “Free Will”

Prompt:
A benevolent alien offers to heal the Earth in exchange for 1 million humans. You offered yourself but were the only one rejected for unspecified reasons.

Response:
It didn’t tell us what one million of us were needed for, only specifying that we had to be volunteers. It would know if we really were, it assured the planet, its voice speaking simultaneously inside every human head, in the mother tongue of each person–for it had learned all of our languages. Some believed it was speaking no human tongue at all, but instead some cosmic lingua franca arisen from the root of the universe, common to all life, its quantum vibrations picked up and interpreted as our first and most familiar language by the individual antennae of our brains.

Free will, it explained, was for all intents and purposes real. No one future of the universe was written, though every possible future was, in a sense, stretched before us in a virtually infinite multiverse which the physical brains that had so far evolved on Earth would not be able to process on a fundamental level.

And that was okay, the alien told us, because with the great healing of the planet we would be given the option of time–if only we would work together to survive–to let our brains adapt through the cumulative mutations of thousands of generations, until they reached the shape and neuronal capacity to key into the understanding of that greater macrocosmos that was reality, which existed in all places and all times, waiting to be discovered.

I volunteered for the exchange with my whole heart.

Perhaps, I thought, this angel from interstellar space was in fact an ancient demon out of archaic human lore. Perhaps we were sacrifices, to be made to suffer for some unimaginable form of hellish eternity, or annihilated to satisfy the whim of another organism evolved from predators–those hunters and consumers of other lifeforms–in a universe constrained by rigid laws of evolution. Perhaps this angel was too much like us.

As though our visitor had tailored its request based on some vision of all those possible futures, exactly one million, just as it had asked for, volunteered with this same act of free will, the same commitment of spirit, to be exchanged for the healing of our blasted and dying home world. They came from every corner of the earth. The media was proud to trumpet that they represented us all, almost teary-eyed in their sentiment. The exchange had been made collectively by all humanity.

Yet I was rejected. The others, all 999, 999 of them, were taken to the stars. The alien, our so-called space angel, assured us that the healing would begin imminently–that even though one soul had been rejected, it was its wholehearted offer that mattered. In other words, I supposed, it was my thought that counted.

The night after the departure of the angel and our offering, I awoke to a voice. It was inside my head. The angel. It had returned.

It is time for the healing to begin, it said softly. Tonight you will drive to the lab. Use your Level E access key at the concealed side entrance. The main gate is locked. There are Zone-1-certified staff working tonight on Level A. Simply tell security that you are there to supervise.

I did as the space angel asked me. The drive took under 15 minutes, with no traffic at such an hour. The guards on duty scrutinized me with their expressions as I told them my story, but their voices carefully betrayed little suspicion. No lowly guard in the entire facility is above a Level E pass holder, and they know it.

Despite the warm night, the elevator felt deathly cold as it descended toward the subterranean Level E. As I was lowered deeper into the earth, the space angel continued to speak to me, almost congenially.

It was important to secure members of your species. Even after expiry of their living bodies, their genetic signatures will be preserved. One day, perhaps they can live again, on a more controlled and stable world. They can flourish, you see. What you might call the Garden of Eden in your literature. A bright new garden, with no dangers, no snakes, no predators to compete against. Their brains will be able to rest in their current state. Eternal calm. Eternal happiness.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I told it aloud.

Of course you don’t. But that’s okay. You are pure of spirit. That’s why I knew you were the Healer.

I scanned into the lab on Level E. I followed the space angel’s instructions. I retrieved the airtight steel capsules from their liquid nitrogen bath.

Earth will heal, whispered the space angel as I rode the elevator back up to ground level. Its voice floated disembodied through the corridors of my grey matter. Earth will be fine. You engineered this virus to thrive only in your own species.

I fitted my key–one of only three in existence–into the steel capsule, opening it with a hiss. I removed three vials with gloved hands, each of them loaded with the isolated specimens, floating like the angel’s voice in their cool saline liquid.

Such a warlike, predator species. I, too, evolved from hunters. I do not condemn you. But this galaxy is not suitable for too many apex predators, just as no closed ecosystem is–and likewise, I’m sure you understand, there can be only one apex intelligence.

I stared at the vials in my hand. I had so wholeheartedly been willing to heal the earth. I had been chosen by an angel out of space.

The subway station is two blocks away. You know the trains start at 5am. Monday morning. They will be packed to capacity. You will open the vials and drip them throughout the train. You will make sure that some drops land on the clothing of passengers, in relative proximity to their faces. You will also ensure that you contract the virus.

“I won’t do this,” I said.

You will.

“It’s my choice! I have fr–“

Free will. Yes, you do. You have the choice of all possible worlds. And I have seen all those worlds, my Healer. In all those worlds, you start the pandemic in precisely this way. Ten day incubation period, certain death within 48 hours of the first symptoms showing themselves. Humanity will fall. The world will heal, until another predator species rises.

“You lie.”

I have no need to lie.

I am already at the station. Then I am underground. Then I am on the platform.

The vials are in my pocket.

It lies, I think–yet the space angel hears me and denies it in the same instant.

I will walk away. I will call its bluff. I’ll return to the lab and re-secure these vials. I will turn myself into the authorities and tell them what I almost did.

The train arrives.

I will do it. I will walk away.

You won’t, Healer.

I have free will, I tell myself pleadingly.

Of course you do, Healer.

The door opens.

(u/PrimitivePrism)

The post r/WritingPrompts Response: “Free Will” appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Author Interview #2: Lindsey Moore

I was an immediate fan of your story “Retrograde” upon reading it in Fatal Flaw last year. It is, in my view, an extraordinary work of short fiction—and its nomination for the Pushcart Prize last November suggests I’m far from alone in that opinion!

As an aside for readers (who I highly encourage to read the story), it’s about a world in which all women and girls have years ago been killed by a mysterious sickness, leaving only men behind on Earth. It picks up with an old, gravely injured man trudging through the Canadian tundra, encouraged onward by the voice and image of a specifically “female” AI program that appears to him through special contact lenses.

The ideas explored as the plot unfolds from there, all rendered in your mesmerizing prose, are haunting, profound, and made me pause for thought again and again. With all that said, how did you come up with this story and its themes? Were there any particular inspirations?

I struggled for a long time thinking about how to answer this! Isn’t it so daunting to gaze intently at the inner caverns of your mind sometimes? It is for me anyway–it’s kind of chaotic in there to be honest. My writing mind is in no way linear and infrequently deliberate. When I have an idea it tends to be a sort of fully formed “atmosphere” if that makes sense, like an emotional snapshot, rather than a cut and dry plot or story. If I had to guess, I think at the time I was developing this story, I was spending a lot of time listening to Kpop (Korean pop music) and diving into the virtual world of their many and seemingly endless streams of media. And I think I just kind of got caught up on the way these women (and men too! Though I mostly spent time watching the girl groups) are oftentimes valued through a very specific and completely merciless set of qualities. Every aspect of their lives controlled and curated. And it just got to me, I think.

I couldn’t stop imagining the fans, the ownership they frequently expressed over these women, how they exerted their expectations over them, and over the sort of assemblage of them not as full persons but as part of their groups. The phrase “pieces of women” kept occurring to me over and over and I couldn’t let it go.

Lindsey Moore

The real seed of the story, though, was always this idea of an old man in a winter hellscape, either dying or close to it, finding this surface-level and ultimately fruitless comfort in a beautiful AI companion, who from the beginning was always named Nectar. It fleshed out from there. Not sure how to explain the process, but I tend to just sit inside an idea for a long time before putting anything in writing. Not necessarily plotting it out, but just imagining different scenarios and the ways in which certain feelings might be explored or expressed.

Occasionally, there will be a chunk of writing that asserts itself completely formed, and I swear that is the best feeling in the world! The bit about the old man imagining the women as having risen into the atmosphere and “vibrated themselves into so many multitudes” was one of those. Also the woman he remembers, the memory of her collar bone and her face of “pale feline slopes.” Those were my favorite parts to write, no question!

When (and how, if that’s applicable) did you get into writing fiction? Is it something you’ve done in one form or another for as long as you can remember, or did you develop a passion for it more gradually?

Writing has always been an immense part of my life. From probably around six years old and on I was always writing stories. Rarely finishing them! But always writing them, convinced that the next story was better, that my ideas were constantly outpacing my abilities, and that if I could just keep improving my technique and skill then I might finally be in a position to write that big novel I’ve always dreamed about. Someday soon, maybe I’ll be there!

On the topic of that big novel you’re dreaming about, is there a premise or any hints you can share about your plans for such a work, or is that staying strictly private for now?

For sure! It’s hard to describe fully without laying out a long and introspective plot that would exhaust any potential charm right out of it haha, but what I can say for sure is that I have always been very moved by and enamored with relationships like that of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn from True Grit or Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us, or even at times that of Lyra and Lord Asriel from The Golden Compass.

The degree to which we are or are not beholden to those who idolize us or love us, as well as the other way around, the degree to which a love born of admiration and a child’s naive worship can be both real and enlightening or else harmful and self-deceiving. There is something so appealing to me about a grizzly older narcissist with nothing to live for finding some kind of resurgence of purpose from the stubborn affection of a kid. So that kind of thing is in a large part the thrust of the novel.

I’m also truly, deeply in love with anything southern gothic so it will be set largely in Louisiana and then migrate across Texas. I won’t go into much more than that except to also say that every word of it has been massively and irreversibly steeped in Gustavo Santaolalla’s score for the The Last of Us (2013). I like can’t even be a person without that music, I swear.

What are some of your favorite novels or stories, and are there any authors in particular you draw inspiration from? Also, what are you reading currently?

So many authors, so many stories! How to choose without endlessly yelling into eternity about the limitless abundance of talent there is out there?? It feels like these micro nuclear bombs are going off constantly every time I read a new author who is top of their craft; little explosions of inspiration. But probably the novel I have read the most and has arguably had the most discernible impact on my writing is The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. What he does with language and perspective, and his grasp of nostalgia and the way he wields it like the most perfect weapon, is unreal. Every time I read it I am bowled over again by the skill of this story, the way it is envisioned and executed with such confidence and satisfaction. The experience of that novel, for me, is an absolute knock-out from beginning to end.

Other massive influences though are such a long list, but I’ll list some of them because they are so amazing and I relish any opportunity to shout about them:

Denis Johnson (Train Dreams, The Largess of the Sea Maiden, Fiskadoro)Karen Russell (St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Vampires in the Lemon Groves)Marilynne Robinson (MARILYNNE ROBINSON, my god what a killer, she’s a freakin legend and her mind is as infinite and precise and unfathomable as the cosmos): Housekeeping ties very closely with The Virgin Suicides for one of my most beloved reading experiences of my lifeWells Tower (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is easily my most recommended collection of stories of all time, cannot recommend it enough, to anyone, ever–it eludes my capacity to describe the many and varied ways in which I desperately love it)Elizabeth McCracken who is an unrivaled MASTER of all things literary (Thunderstruck)Ottessa Moshfegh, the most glorious weirdo (Homesick for Another World, Eileen, McGlue)Sam Pink (The Ice Cream Man & Other Stories)George Saunders OF COURSE (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Lincoln in the Bardo, Pastoralia)

Also, for non-fiction:
Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights, Slouching Towards Bethlehem)Leslie Jamison (The Recovering, Make it Scream, Make it Burn)Maggie Nelson (Bluets, The Argonauts).

Ok, I’ll stop now but could seriously go on forever, and I promise I didn’t lose sight of the question. I genuinely mean to say that all of these authors and their works have had a huge impact on me and the way I hope–one day–to be able to write! Right now I’m reading an ARC for this novel called A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan (set to be published June 13th, 2021) and am enjoying it very much!

Do you have any more published pieces available? Where can we read more of your work?

I have a piece called “Hummingbird” in Parhelion, an online Literary Magazine: https://parhelionliterary.com/lindsey-moore/. And one story in a podcast called “Howl” (the episode is titled Open Oak Plantation): https://itun.es/us/oLPCab.c?i=1000373324177

Lastly, here’s your wild-card question: What is something you would very much like to see happen in your lifetime?  

A huge landmark in space travel/space observation/contact of any kind–anything like that would be everything I could hope for. The understanding of dark matter or a feasible means of faster-than-light space travel. I don’t mean colonies on Mars, but I’d love to see us better exploring the moons of Jupiter or maybe–one day–making it to a distant world in another solar system where who knows what might be waiting.

Lindsey Moore was raised in the miasmic, urban swampland of the greater Houston area. She earned her Masters at the University of Oxford in Creative Writing and currently resides in Austin, Texas where she works for the independent book store, Book People.

The post Author Interview #2: Lindsey Moore appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Myanmar: Three (Non-Fictional) Stories

The Eatery and the Slingshot
The Painter in the Temple
The Girl with the Thanaka Swirls

On February 1st of this year, a coup was carried out by Myanmar’s military (the Tatmadaw). The resulting protests, the violent and even lethal retaliation against those unarmed civilians by the military, and now Myanmar’s nationwide civil disobedience movement, have all moved me to write something about my interactions with Burmese people while traveling there. Why I’m compelled to do this is to explore those moments again for myself, and to give a glimpse, however minuscule, upon a people who are caught up at this very moment in a furious tsunami of history, many willing to give up everything they have–for some, even their lives–to live free from the autocratic governance of an illegitimate military regime. The majority of people in the world, of course, will have never been to Myanmar, so I want to put a handful of faces, in my own fashion, to those distant nationals embroiled in a deadly conflict with their government.

Most will probably have an inkling of the atrocities committed by the Tatmadaw against the Rohingya in Rakhine state, and the leaders of those armed forces are showing their true colors once again. At the time of my trip to Myanmar, in late December 2017, the first phase of the Rohingya genocide was close to its end. I traveled from Yangon to Bagan and back, my way taking me nowhere near the affected areas.

I met no unsavory characters in my sojourn there. I did meet people who were friendly, welcoming and helpful, people who were honest in their dealings with me, people who were accommodating, and people who were all those things. I remember having my traveler’s guard up against getting ripped off when I came into the arrivals hall after my nighttime touchdown, yet when I later got familiar with the standard taxi fares for various distances, I realized that the driver who took me into the city had given me a perfectly fair deal–a relief after my years of late night arrivals in Bangkok and the subsequent price-gouging attempts one has to navigate through.

In my one-bedroom apartment in Bangkok, there are three items from Myanmar on the shelves: a slingshot, a hand painted tapestry, and a lacquered cup. There’s an encounter attached to each of them, and they’ve all stuck with me.

The Eatery and the Slingshot

I was making my way down the street after nightfall, stomach growling after a busy day of exploring. Having gone up and down that street previously, I’d noticed a number of restaurants that specialized in catering to foreign tourists, serving standard favorites like pizza, spaghetti and burgers. I wanted something authentically Burmese, though–to eat what and where the locals were eating.

I soon spotted just such a place. It was down a short dip from the main road, marked by a simple sign in Burmese script and a couple tables set up in the small lot in front of it, nestled between other buildings. An outdoor eatery. A mom n’ pop type place, common in this part of the world. There were no current patrons in sight, but I went down and approached the glassed display case that contained trays of the available cooked foods. There was a family there, who seemed surprised to find a foreigner there asking about dinner. It probably showed on my face that I didn’t really know what I was looking at in the trays, so a middle-aged man ushered me to a table. He possessed the tiniest bit of English, but conveyed that they would bring me a meal.

I took a seat at the table, and the man, who I’ll call the father, went to tell the others to prepare the food. Thirsty, my eyes went to a large advertisement for Myanmar beer displayed in view of the street nearby. As the father returned to my table, I asked him if I could get a beer. He looked unsure for a second, and then gave me the affirmative with a nod–but instead of returning to his restaurant, he headed up to the street and walked out of sight. A few minutes later he returned–I don’t know whether from a store, a neighboring restaurant, or even his friend’s place–with a cold beer in hand. He brought me a mug to drink it from, and I took a refreshing swig.

They brought me out what I thought of as a smorgasboard: rice, soup, a chili sauce for some kick, and about eight other small dishes. It was a delicious meal, and contained some flavors that were new to me. While I ate, a young girl, who I’ll call the daughter, came out to play in the lot, stealing bemused glances in my direction. The father approached at some point, a bit hesitantly–his politeness, perhaps, leading him to be concerned about disturbing me while I ate–and struck up a conversation as best he was able, asking me where I was from and some other such questions. He clarified that the girl nearby was his daughter and the others I’d seen were his family. We chatted for a while as I finished eating, quite stuffed, and emptied my beer. He had his daughter to come over and speak a few words with me, as it was clear she possessed more English than her shyness allowed her to betray.

The father disappeared to somewhere and returned with a home-made slingshot: a wooden handle, rubber tubing fastened to it with dozens of elastics, and a leather pad. He seemed delighted to show it to me. He selected a couple roundish rocks from the lot at our feet, and fired them off at the gentle slope leading up to the street. Then he held the slingshot out to me, motioning for me to try. I choose a rock, aimed in the direction he had, pulled back and let it fly. I must have aimed too high and pulled back a bit too far though, because to my sudden horror the rock went ricocheting up the slope and missed the bumper of a parked car by a hair’s breadth before coming to rest somewhere on the opposite side of the street. “Holy shit!” I cried, as I watched my misfire barely escape denting the car.

The daughter, either recognizing this expression from some kind of English-language media, or simply seeing the O my mouth had formed, doubled over laughing, with her dad chuckling along. Finally, accepting that I hadn’t caused any damage, I laughed too.

Later, when I asked the price, I was shocked when it amounted to only about $2.50. They could have easily charged me four times that or more and I’d have been none the wiser. I bid them goodnight.

The night after next was my last in that town, so I decided to return to the same restaurant. Once more I was brought a variety of dishes, and after a while the father sat down to chat with me. I told him that I’d be leaving in the morning, and said it had been nice meeting them. As I finished eating and paid, he told me to wait a moment, went indoors and returned with the slingshot. I remember his face clearly: a bit of that shyness returning, perhaps some pride, and, more than anything, friendly warmth, as he put the slingshot in my hands, expressing that it was a gift. Though I’ll never know for sure, I think he wanted me to have it as a memento of the laugh we’d had together, and those short evenings we’d had chatting. I think that, somewhere down the road, he wanted me to remember him, and his daughter, and that time I wound up as the sole patron at their humble little restaurant.

And I do.

Here’s something I’ve learned in my travels throughout the years: It’s the people who have the least who are often the most ready to give.

The Painter in the Temple

The temple might have been a thousand years old. Uncountable people had no doubt passed through it over the course of its long history, but on that day, as I puttered past it, it appeared to stand empty, its entrance yawning. Though impressive, it was a more diminutive structure than some of its visible neighbors, and there was a steady flow of people toward a grand castle-like edifice that gleamed on the near horizon.

Something about this smaller temple caused me to stop, however, wanting to see inside. I passed through its arched entrance into the interior. The bottom floor consisted of a single room, of which I don’t remember much about, except for the painter and her works.

Laid upon the ancient stone floor of the room was an array of painted tapestries. An elderly woman was seated there alongside them. The paintings were colorful, intricate, some featuring Buddhist elements, and others whose inspirations were unfamiliar to me. The tapestries were of various sizes. There were prices next to them, written on scraps of paper, ranging from perhaps $5-$10 dollars USD. As I admired the art, I asked the woman if she was the painter, and though she’d been quiet since I’d entered the temple, she confirmed that she was.

It was hard to discern exactly what I felt, as she wasn’t the first, and wouldn’t be the last, disadvantaged person I’d come across in Myanmar selling their handiwork for what seemed far too little a sum–but how unintuitive, I thought, that this skilled artist was hidden away in a lonely temple, illuminated only by the daylight filtering through the openings, waiting for the odd passerby to step inside rather than pass on by, bound for more renowned landmarks.

Knowing I’d have to roll the tapestry up to transport it, I chose one of the smaller ones I liked, so that it would fit inside the backpack I was traveling with at the time. It’s still rolled up, at its place on my shelf, but I unfurl it sometimes to look at it. Someday, somewhere, it will be properly displayed on a wall.

What the painter in the temple helped me see is that artistry can be found in the most unexpected places, and it’s all too easy in this world for it never to be noticed at all.

The Girl with the Thanaka Swirls

My bus arrived in Bagan at 5am, close to the Archeological Zone, though the ancient city was swallowed up in pre-dawn darkness, residing beyond my sight on its vast, unseen plain.

I made it to my hostel shortly after, and in the process of checking in, the owner informed me that the sun would rise at 6:00, so there was still time, if I took one of the scooters and hurried, to view it from atop a temple. She told me the name of a temple and produced a map, pointing it out quickly, but having arrived in the dark and seen nothing of the area, I found myself disoriented. Nonetheless, I bet myself that I could figure it out, and there was no time to waste. I left my bag near the reception desk, hoped onto a scooter in the lot, and sped off into the night with the map folded in one hand.

I didn’t get my bearings as quickly as I’d hoped, and to make matters worse, the air was cold. I had only a thin running jacket to put on over my t-shirt, having been in warm environs when I departed Yangon the evening before. Stopping to zip the jacket up, I determined that I must be on one of the main roads running parallel to the Archeological Zone and its thousands of temples–but in that direction was only a solid wall of night.

It was as I continued down the road that the faintest light lit the far horizon, and in it I saw my first glimpse of a temple out there on the plain. But where was the temple, presumably a large and well-known one, that the hostel owner had mentioned? I couldn’t even remember its name precisely, nor did I have any idea where along the road, as illustrated on the map, I was. I slowed down, figuring I might catch a glimpse of other sunrise-seekers on their way to the best spot, though the stretch of road was mainly empty.

Then someone called out, “Hey!”. I turned and caught a glimpse of a local girl straddling a motorbike on a dirt path that lead off the road, waving to me. “Where are you going?” she asked as I braked.

“I heard about a big temple that I should watch the sunrise from. Maybe somewhere this way,” I added, pointing down the road, aware of the steadily brightening glow above the mountains on the horizon.

“I know the one,” said the girl. “There will be too many people there. 400 people!”. (Probably an exaggeration, I thought). “Follow me,” she continued, “I’ll take you to a secret temple. Not so many people.”

Why not? I thought. Sunrise was imminent, and I wasn’t about to miss getting to a height where I could watch it cresting above the mountains, sending those first red-golden rays across the storied plain. So she went ahead of me down the road on her bike and I followed on my scooter. Soon she turned off the pavement onto another dirt road, and as I did so behind her, descending in and out of a rough dip, I saw a small stone temple loom out of the mist to my right–for the valley in the morning is wreathed in blankets of mist, slowly illuminated by the lightening of the atmosphere that precludes the appearance of the sun itself. We continued on past this temple, deeper into the antique city, and then turned into the dusty lot in front of yet another temple, this one two stories tall. Along the balconies of its upper floor I could see a handful of others who had reached it first.

We scurried into the dark of the bottom floor of the temple, then up a stone staircase, emerging into the breathless open-air gloom of the second floor. Within only a minute, the red sun appeared above the distant mountains, and the majesty of Bagan became apparent in the form of its countless temples dotted far and wide across the land, silhouetted in those first rays.

After taking in the sunrise, and the iconic volley of hot air balloons that loft well-heeled tourists across the sky at that hour, I and the small number of other foreigners there were approached by the Burmese girls present–including the one that had led me to the temple–about buying some of the items they had with them. I saw them get brushed off before people descended the stairs, single-file, to the base of the structure. I was the last one to leave, and my impromptu guide asked me one more time if I would simply look at what she’d brought. I considered that I wouldn’t have even caught the sunrise without her help that morning, and accepted.

With a cheerful look, she took off her backpack and drew out a series of bowls and cups of various sizes, all exquisitely hand-painted in various patterns and colors, no two alike. Speaking in impressively proficient English–that of those whose lives often necessitate they be able to communicate with tourists–she explained that the wares were all created by her family, describing the multi-layer lacquering and painting process involved in their creation. They were beautiful pieces, I thought, and purchased two cups, one which I later gave away as a gift, and the other which sits on my kitchen shelf to this day. The girl was visibly proud of making a sale, wrapping my purchases in paper before giving them to me to put in my pack.

This story, though, isn’t so much about that girl as it is another, another teen, who spied the transaction for the cups from just beyond the temple entrance.

It’s no secret that in travel to tourist sites, especially in underdeveloped countries, that a foreign traveler gets approached a lot to purchase items or services, in some places incessantly. It becomes necessary, as your experience grows, to harden your heart to this. You simply cannot buy from everyone. In places with many sellers, the act of making a purchase can make you a target for entreaties by others, over those who make little eye contact and consistently ignore them.

I’d now made myself a seller’s target, I determined, resolving to refuse any others who approached me. I reasoned that I’d already bought something, while the rest of the tourists had zoomed off on their scooters with the rising sun at their backs, having purchased nothing. It wouldn’t do for me to solely buy from everyone just because I had done so once.

There is a kind of whitish-yellowish paste, ubiquitous in Myanmar, called thanaka, made from the ground bark of certain trees native to the country. It’s most often used by women and girls, and less commonly men and boys, who apply it to their faces in thin layers as a form of makeup, as protection from the sun, and for the cooling sensation the natural compounds in the paste provide. The girl who waited outside the temple wore thanaka on her cheeks in elegant twin spirals, with a solid line of it painted down the bridge of her nose. In my short time in the country, I hadn’t yet seen the paste so artfully or carefully applied.

The girl called for me to look at the t-shirts she’d brought, already holding the first one up in display, which bore some design related to Bagan. I told her no thank you, intent on returning to my scooter, but she was persistent, holding on to her smile as she bid me to at least look at the shirts. Even as she spoke she was holding up additional ones and drawing closer.

“Not right now. Maybe later.”

“Later?” she countered fluently, knowing she’d caught me out. “But I won’t see you later. Please just look now. Only five dollars.”

“No thanks,” I said as amicably as possible.

“But you bought something from her.” She motioned toward the one who’d sold me the cups, who was watching this exchange with some bemusement.

“Right, I did that, but now I’m going.”

“Please, just one shirt.”

“I don’t need a t-shirt,” I said flatly.

This was where the girl’s demeanor changed. Her smile faded, not to be replaced by resentment, but with a mixture of sadness, frustration and pleading.

“I know nobody needs a t-shirt,” she said, voice rising. “But for me five dollars is a lot.” Her eyes, above the spirals of thanaka, astride the white line down the bridge of her nose, bore into mine, searching.

I was holding out now, I felt, to prove something to myself–that not even this persistence would be able to make me the one tourist there that morning who bought a t-shirt. How many times in the past had I ignored such calls and requests? Why shouldn’t I this time too? Others would come later, and she could make her sales then.

Even as these thoughts ran through my head, the girl stood only a couple feet away, and it occurred to me that she looked almost like tears might escape her eyes.

I realized we weren’t playing a game of banter between a seller and potential customer anymore. It wasn’t about the shirts. She was now pleading with me simply as a human to another human, making her case with only a few words that five U.S. dollars held a very different level of value for the both of us. Then I understood where that frustration I sensed in her truly came from.

She couldn’t have been more than 18. When I was her age I was pumping gas and working a cash register part-time. I didn’t have to travel in the night’s chill again and again to a city of ruins, to approach foreign strangers and peddle t-shirts in a second tongue, to force smile after smile to impassive visitors who I knew wished for me to leave them alone. Even in that pre-dawn dark in which I’d arrived in Bagan, she’d already been awake somewhere, carefully painting those swirls of thanaka upon her cheeks.

I comprehended these things, both then and after, but still in that moment I said ‘no thanks’ a final time. She followed, even to stand by my scooter as I turned it on, and until I pulled away.

It’s been more than three years, but every once in a while, when I’m spending the equivalent of five USD on some frivolous purchase–a drink at Starbucks, a cocktail, lottery tickets with an infinitesimal chance of being something other than worthless–I see that girl’s face again in my mind’s eye, as clear as though it were yesterday, her own eyes pleading and frustrated and sad. That’s why I remember the precise way she patterned her face: I see it all the time.

Here’s what the girl with the thanaka swirls made me realize: sometimes there’s a benefit to sticking to your guns, sometimes there’s no point, and sometimes you’ll regret you did it at all. I regret that I didn’t part with five dollars for one of those t-shirts, or even that I didn’t buy two. When I arrived back in Bangkok, I found I had more than ten times that much in Myanmar kyat left in my wallet, unused and now unusable.

The cup, which also serves to remind me of what I didn’t buy.

These were some of the people I met in Myanmar, Land of the Golden Pagodas, and what meeting them helped me understand. They were all members, however humble, of a populace now embroiled in a battle for the future.

As I write these words, on March 22nd, 2021, at least 250 people have reportedly been killed by the junta during the protests.

The post Myanmar: Three (Non-Fictional) Stories appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Ceph

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
After years of building a reputation as the greatest pirate alive, your second in command figures out what you really are.

Response:
I launch myself from starboard and slide toward port. It’s a bit of a rough journey for my underside, and I remind myself to remind the crew that thoroughly greasing the boards must be at the very least a bi-weekly operation. Rendered pig lard has always been the default, but I remember the pleasure when we docked in Greece and took aboard barrels of olive oil, thereby oiling the boards rather than greasing. It was like sliding on a fragrant cloud until that liquid of the gods ran out. In Siam we acquired a limited quantity of coconut oil, however, and that was even better.

The crew continues to slip on their clumsy dual legs and oilskin boots, but alas, I’ve been captain of this ship since they were babes in arms, and they are grateful to even be permitted to join these journeys of plunder and adventure.

“Rogue wave!” shouts young Billy from the crow’s nest. “Brace yourselves!”

I wrap an arm around the nearest rigging I can reach as I slide up against the port-side wall, another around the mounted canon next to me, and another around the fine varnished rail that I couldn’t even yet reach when I was hauled up on board and made a seaman by my benevolent and open-minded predecessor. Our ship rises with the great wave, the old girl handling it as smoothly as she has all the others. The Lilith-Green has survived a thousand storms, a kraken, and an attack from several of my colossal yet dumb and unwieldy distant cousins.

As we tilt downward on the opposite side of the wave, I let go of what I’m holding and give myself a gentle push away from port on a diagonal, sliding toward the open doorway of my quarters. There’s been no rain for days and I’m feeling a bit dry. Around me are some of the crew who have lost grip on their handholds, sliding clumsily down the deck now, but they are used to it and have learned to cope. A small price to pay for the gold and riches they gain under my employ.

Inside my quarters I slip out of my clothes and into my seawater bath–my tub the bottom half a large sawed-off barrel that even now is spilling its precious water as the ship bucks in the ocean’s tumult.

After a moment of enjoyable submersion, I sense a presence in the doorway, and feel my chromatophores instantly tighten into an oaken brown, blending with the surrounding wood of my bucket. How embarrassing…

I peek my head above the rim and see my chief mate standing just inside my small apartment, hat in his hand. I’ve sailed four of the seven seas with Lucas Thimblesnatch; our partnership runs deeper than the Bartlett Trough.

“Captain Armsworth…”

“Please, you know you can call me Ceph.”

“Right, sir–er, Ceph.”

“What is it Luke? It’s my rehydration period, you know.”

“Your…?”

“My bath time.”

“Yes, yes. Sorry, sir. Well the thing is, the crew isn’t so pleased with the greasy deck these days. Very grateful they are to you, sir, for everything, but they’ve got some wonderings in their heads about it all.”

“Such as…?”

“Well, how we grease the deck because you seem to find it easier to slide along it then walk, per se. And to add to that, your…your form.”

“My morphology, Luke?”

“Your…yes, your…”

I knew Lucas was basically illiterate, of course, and hadn’t had the benefit of proper schooling. All that he’d learned, he’d learned by ear and eye in his little coastal village, and out here with me on the high seas.

“Just say it, Luke,” I implore him gently through the specialized vibration of my gullet and manipulations of the flesh around my beak. “What do you want to ask me?”

“Sir…Ceph…are you…”

Even in the dim light I could see him blushing.

“Just say it,” I whisper, my three hearts pounding.

“Are you…a cuttlefish?”

He can’t be serious. He can’t be! I want to laugh, but my sudden indignation prevents me. What idiocy is this?

“You fool,” I say, squinting at him as I flop out of the tub with a wet thump. “You must be joking!”

“I…I–“

“Open your eyes, Lucas. I’m a goddamn octopus.”

The post Ceph appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

r/WritingPrompts response: “Ceph”

Prompt:
After years of building a reputation as the greatest pirate alive, your second in command figures out what you really are.

Response:
I launch myself from starboard and slide toward port. It’s a bit of a rough journey for my underside, and I remind myself to remind the crew that thoroughly greasing the boards must be at the very least a bi-weekly operation. Rendered pig lard has always been the default, but I remember the pleasure when we docked in Greece and took aboard barrels of olive oil, thereby oiling the boards rather than greasing. It was like sliding on a fragrant cloud until that liquid of the gods ran out. In Siam we acquired a limited quantity of coconut oil, however, and that was even better.

The crew continues to slip on their clumsy dual legs and oilskin boots, but alas, I’ve been captain of this ship since they were babes in arms, and they are grateful to even be permitted to join these journeys of plunder and adventure.

“Rogue wave!” shouts young Billy from the crow’s nest. “Brace yourselves!”

I wrap an arm around the nearest rigging I can reach as I slide up against the port-side wall, another around the mounted canon next to me, and another around the fine varnished rail that I couldn’t even yet reach when I was hauled up on board and made a seaman by my benevolent and open-minded predecessor. Our ship rises with the great wave, the old girl handling it as smoothly as she has all the others. The Lilith-Green has survived a thousand storms, a kraken, and an attack from several of my colossal yet dumb and unwieldy distant cousins.

As we tilt downward on the opposite side of the wave, I let go of what I’m holding and give myself a gentle push away from port on a diagonal, sliding toward the open doorway of my quarters. There’s been no rain for days and I’m feeling a bit dry. Around me are some of the crew who have lost grip on their handholds, sliding clumsily down the deck now, but they are used to it and have learned to cope. A small price to pay for the gold and riches they gain under my employ.

Inside my quarters I slip out of my clothes and into my seawater bath–my tub the bottom half a large sawed-off barrel that even now is spilling its precious water as the ship bucks in the ocean’s tumult.

After a moment of enjoyable submersion, I sense a presence in the doorway, and feel my chromatophores instantly tighten into an oaken brown, blending with the surrounding wood of my bucket. How embarrassing…

I peek my head above the rim and see my chief mate standing just inside my small apartment, hat in his hand. I’ve sailed four of the seven seas with Lucas Thimblesnatch; our partnership runs deeper than the Bartlett Trough.

“Captain Armsworth…”

“Please, you know you can call me Ceph.”

“Right, sir–er, Ceph.”

“What is it Luke? It’s my rehydration period, you know.”

“Your…?”

“My bath time.”

“Yes, yes. Sorry, sir. Well the thing is, the crew isn’t so pleased with the greasy deck these days. Very grateful they are to you, sir, for everything, but they’ve got some wonderings in their heads about it all.”

“Such as…?”

“Well, how we grease the deck because you seem to find it easier to slide along it then walk, per se. And to add to that, your…your form.”

“My morphology, Luke?”

“Your…yes, your…”

I knew Lucas was basically illiterate, of course, and hadn’t had the benefit of proper schooling. All that he’d learned, he’d learned by ear and eye in his little coastal village, and out here with me on the high seas.

“Just say it, Luke,” I implore him gently through the specialized vibration of my gullet and manipulations of the flesh around my beak. “What do you want to ask me?”

“Sir…Ceph…are you…”

Even in the dim light I could see him blushing.

“Just say it,” I whisper, my three hearts pounding.

“Are you…a cuttlefish?”

He can’t be serious. He can’t be! I want to laugh, but my sudden indignation prevents me. What idiocy is this?

“You fool,” I say, squinting at him as I flop out of the tub with a wet thump. “You must be joking!”

“I…I–“

“Open your eyes, Lucas. I’m a goddamn octopus.”

(u/PrimitivePrism)

Photo by Masaaki Komori

The post r/WritingPrompts response: “Ceph” appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Scourge

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
The air we breathe is actually an extremely hallucinogenic substance that affects all of your senses. One day, you stumble upon a strange-looking gas mask sitting on a bench in a park, when you put it on you slowly start to see and feel the world the way it truly is.

Response:
Buckshot Jerry flailed his arms madly as he skipped about, swatting the air with open palms.

“Yah! Yahhh!”

He practically lived in the Maple Way Park, as far as anyone knew, and the story on the streets was that he never slept, just kept dancing about on the lawns. That was impossible, obviously. His monicker wasn’t that imaginative – the guy’s mutilated visage was due to taking a load of errant buckshot across the entire left half of his face, leaving him with a deformed concavity of the skull on that side where he’d been pieced together, and only one good eye.

“How’s the dancing coming there, BJ?” I called out.

One bloodshot eye leered at me for a moment. “Go! Just go!” he drawled from his misshapen mouth.

“Right away, sir.”

A curiosity nearby grabbed my attention: there was what appeared to be some dull-colored toy or piece of tech sitting on the bench I was coming up on. It had three circular depressions, two with glass in them – mirrors, actually – and one filled with a fine mesh. I glanced around, but of the several people strolling down the nearby paths, no one was looking in my direction or indicating any kind of ownership of the object.

I sat down on the bench and prodded it with a finger, only realizing, as I saw it from a new angle, that it was in fact a mask. Concealed beneath it was the strap that would go around the back of one’s head.

From a distance, Buckshot Jerry shouted something that sounded like “ZABIGAN! ZABIGAAAN!” As he kept hollering, increasing his flailing, whatever he was trying to say refused to take correct form from his once-shredded, terribly scarred lips.

I lifted the mask to my face, let the strap fall across the back of my head, and pulled it tight. The rubber seal, as though it were alive, sucked tight to my face, and then I was looking out through those one-way mirror eye pieces at the park, and everything was very clear, but…no, something was off.

Before me was the path I’d stepped off, and the wide adjacent lawn dotted with towering maple trees in their summer prime, the early afternoon sunbathers and picnickers walking about them looking for the perfect spot to put down their blankets and towels. There were kids playing frisbee in the near distance, and in the other direction flailed and swatted crazy BJ.

What was off were the colors. The chlorophyll green of the leaves and grass was decidedly a more bluish color. The sky itself, cloudless and sapphire blue a moment before, was gaining a dusty orange hue, as though sunset were rapidly approaching.

The trees were black. I stared agog. Black, or grey. Charcoal, the color of trees that have been torched in a forest fire. Impossible, though, because the leaves…

I looked up. The leaves were vivid blue. The grass was vivid blue.

There was a happy shriek from somewhere to my left: the frisbee players. I saw the kids – but not as they had been. They were there in profile, but they consisted entirely of bright white light: perfectly human-shaped beings of light.

“I’m tired, mom.” A little girl, whining, somewhere ahead of me. I looked to the glowing light-beings, the people, walking among the great black trunks of the trees. Above them the sky was pure pumpkin orange.

I spied the shape of the little girl. She was tugging at her mother, though the clothing was no more than a hazy shadow at the edge of the light.

Something was terribly wrong. A creature that I can best describe as an insect, though that’s not really what it was, was latched to the back of the girl. This was not a creature of light, but as solid-looking as the black trees and blue grass. It had too many legs to be an insect, though great veined wings fluttered lazily from its topside, seeming to keep its cat-sized body pushed up against the girl’s back. A proboscis of some sort, as shiny and maroon-tinged as the rest of its body, disappeared into the girl’s light-body.

“Mommmm,” she whined. “I said I’m tired!”

Inside that proboscis, I now saw, was light. Light moving out of the girl’s body and into the grotesque flying creature. Slowly, like a mosquito’s belly filling with blood, the underside of the thing began to glow dimly with the meal it was gorging itself on.

“We’ll put the blanket down here then,” said the mother. “And you can take a rest.”

No facial features were visible in the bright glow, save for orbs of blue – blue that was supposed to be the color of sky – that marked their eyes.

There was a whirring, flapping, buzzing sound now. I looked up to the blue leaves of the maples, and saw that there were far more than just leaves in the canopy: they swarmed with the maroon parasite creatures, hanging from the branches, flapping lazily, hungrily, from tree to tree.

“ZAAABIGAN! ZA BIG WAN!” choked out Buckshot Jerry, but I was staring now at the frisbee players. They’d retired from their game and were sitting on the grass, seemingly exhausted from their playing, and on each of them were perched two or three of the creatures, their belly’s glowing with stolen light.

“Hot day,” said the mom nearby. “Think I’ll take a little nap myself, sweetheart.” I already knew what I’d see: one of the beasts had descended from the trees and was pushing itself against her with thrusts of its hideous wings. She felt nothing, though. No one could. This mask was…

A jogger ran past on the path.

Wup-wup-wup-wup-wup. The voracious flap of wings as two of the creatures migrated through the air close behind him in hot pursuit. As he slowed at the end of his run, and as they caught him, he’d start to feel tired, not knowing that he was a being of light, of energy – that he was not supposed to get tired. It was only when they caught you!

Every sleep, I thought wildly. Every sleep was done out of our need to replenish, after a day of being fed upon. We can only handle a day of being prey – and these creatures leave us be while we rest, geared by evolution or some sick, parasitic intelligence to let their food replenish.

Buckshot Jerry was still screaming. I looked to him at last and couldn’t believe what I saw: it was like he was made of burning magnesium, so luminous it almost hurt. Swarming around him were dozens of the maroon creatures – and he was fighting them off!

He can see them. My God. He can see them!

All Buckshot Jerry’s flailing, his swatting… He was locked in eternal battled with these things – and he had been winning!

It’s why he never sleeps. He’s never drained. He can fight forever, unless they manage to latch on.

“THE BIG ONE!” screamed Buckshot Jerry, smashing to the side another of the creatures in his private war. I could hear him enunciate it now, as clear as day. The problem had never been with his mouth, but with my own ability to hear, out there breathing the atmosphere, before the filter of this mask helped me see the truth.

I saw the big one, and I saw its prey at the same time. If the creatures were the size of cats, the big one was the size of a mountain lion. It trundled down out of the tree, too heavy, it seemed, to fly.

An elderly couple, making their way down the path, their advanced age identifiable even through the glow of their light by their diminutive and stooped postures.

The great beast scuttled toward them, taking its time, but too fast for me to get there. BJ didn’t bother: I knew now he must have seen this before. Perhaps these big ones were far too powerful to risk fighting.

This old couple, I thought, were old precisely because of the creatures. Thousands and thousands of drainings over the course of their life, over all those years, and for every draining another sleep.

It was happening to all of us, I thought sadly. We were meant to be unlimited. We were meant to be forever…

As “the big one” came up behind the couple, the two remained blissfully unaware. They had heard BJ’s desperate warning, no doubt, but only a weird sound through his buckshot-mutilated lips: ZABIGAN.

I reached up and ripped the mask from my face, unable to watch. As the colors of our shared hallucination flooded back into my sight, the old man, seemingly flesh and blood, stopped suddenly, raised a hand to his temple, took a half step and collapsed. His wife called his name, but there was no response.

The post Scourge appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

r/WritingPrompts response: “Scourge”

Prompt:
The air we breathe is actually an extremely hallucinogenic substance that affects all of your senses. One day, you stumble upon a strange-looking gas mask sitting on a bench in a park, when you put it on you slowly start to see and feel the world the way it truly is.

Response:
Buckshot Jerry flailed his arms madly as he skipped about, swatting the air with open palms.

“Yah! Yahhh!”

He practically lived in the Maple Way Park, as far as anyone knew, and the story on the streets was that he never slept, just kept dancing about on the lawns. That was impossible, obviously. His monicker wasn’t that imaginative – the guy’s mutilated visage was due to taking a load of errant buckshot across the entire left half of his face, leaving him with a deformed concavity of the skull on that side where he’d been pieced together, and only one good eye.

“How’s the dancing coming there, BJ?” I called out.

One bloodshot eye leered at me for a moment. “Go! Just go!” he drawled from his misshapen mouth.

“Right away, sir.”

A curiosity nearby grabbed my attention: there was what appeared to be some dull-colored toy or piece of tech sitting on the bench I was coming up on. It had three circular depressions, two with glass in them – mirrors, actually – and one filled with a fine mesh. I glanced around, but of the several people strolling down the nearby paths, no one was looking in my direction or indicating any kind of ownership of the object.

I sat down on the bench and prodded it with a finger, only realizing, as I saw it from a new angle, that it was in fact a mask. Concealed beneath it was the strap that would go around the back of one’s head.

From a distance, Buckshot Jerry shouted something that sounded like “ZABIGAN! ZABIGAAAN!” As he kept hollering, increasing his flailing, whatever he was trying to say refused to take correct form from his once-shredded, terribly scarred lips.

I lifted the mask to my face, let the strap fall across the back of my head, and pulled it tight. The rubber seal, as though it were alive, sucked tight to my face, and then I was looking out through those one-way mirror eye pieces at the park, and everything was very clear, but…no, something was off.

Before me was the path I’d stepped off, and the wide adjacent lawn dotted with towering maple trees in their summer prime, the early afternoon sunbathers and picnickers walking about them looking for the perfect spot to put down their blankets and towels. There were kids playing frisbee in the near distance, and in the other direction flailed and swatted crazy BJ.

What was off were the colors. The chlorophyll green of the leaves and grass was decidedly a more bluish color. The sky itself, cloudless and sapphire blue a moment before, was gaining a dusty orange hue, as though sunset were rapidly approaching.

The trees were black. I stared agog. Black, or grey. Charcoal, the color of trees that have been torched in a forest fire. Impossible, though, because the leaves…

I looked up. The leaves were vivid blue. The grass was vivid blue.

There was a happy shriek from somewhere to my left: the frisbee players. I saw the kids – but not as they had been. They were there in profile, but they consisted entirely of bright white light: perfectly human-shaped beings of light.

“I’m tired, mom.” A little girl, whining, somewhere ahead of me. I looked to the glowing light-beings, the people, walking among the great black trunks of the trees. Above them the sky was pure pumpkin orange.

I spied the shape of the little girl. She was tugging at her mother, though the clothing was no more than a hazy shadow at the edge of the light.

Something was terribly wrong. A creature that I can best describe as an insect, though that’s not really what it was, was latched to the back of the girl. This was not a creature of light, but as solid-looking as the black trees and blue grass. It had too many legs to be an insect, though great veined wings fluttered lazily from its topside, seeming to keep its cat-sized body pushed up against the girl’s back. A proboscis of some sort, as shiny and maroon-tinged as the rest of its body, disappeared into the girl’s light-body.

“Mommmm,” she whined. “I said I’m tired!”

Inside that proboscis, I now saw, was light. Light moving out of the girl’s body and into the grotesque flying creature. Slowly, like a mosquito’s belly filling with blood, the underside of the thing began to glow dimly with the meal it was gorging itself on.

“We’ll put the blanket down here then,” said the mother. “And you can take a rest.”

No facial features were visible in the bright glow, save for orbs of blue – blue that was supposed to be the color of sky – that marked their eyes.

There was a whirring, flapping, buzzing sound now. I looked up to the blue leaves of the maples, and saw that there were far more than just leaves in the canopy: they swarmed with the maroon parasite creatures, hanging from the branches, flapping lazily, hungrily, from tree to tree.

“ZAAABIGAN! ZA BIG WAN!” choked out Buckshot Jerry, but I was staring now at the frisbee players. They’d retired from their game and were sitting on the grass, seemingly exhausted from their playing, and on each of them were perched two or three of the creatures, their belly’s glowing with stolen light.

“Hot day,” said the mom nearby. “Think I’ll take a little nap myself, sweetheart.” I already knew what I’d see: one of the beasts had descended from the trees and was pushing itself against her with thrusts of its hideous wings. She felt nothing, though. No one could. This mask was…

A jogger ran past on the path.

Wup-wup-wup-wup-wup. The voracious flap of wings as two of the creatures migrated through the air close behind him in hot pursuit. As he slowed at the end of his run, and as they caught him, he’d start to feel tired, not knowing that he was a being of light, of energy – that he was not supposed to get tired. It was only when they caught you!

Every sleep, I thought wildly. Every sleep was done out of our need to replenish, after a day of being fed upon. We can only handle a day of being prey – and these creatures leave us be while we rest, geared by evolution or some sick, parasitic intelligence to let their food replenish.

Buckshot Jerry was still screaming. I looked to him at last and couldn’t believe what I saw: it was like he was made of burning magnesium, so luminous it almost hurt. Swarming around him were dozens of the maroon creatures – and he was fighting them off!

He can see them. My God. He can see them!

All Buckshot Jerry’s flailing, his swatting… He was locked in eternal battled with these things – and he had been winning!

It’s why he never sleeps. He’s never drained. He can fight forever, unless they manage to latch on.

“THE BIG ONE!” screamed Buckshot Jerry, smashing to the side another of the creatures in his private war. I could hear him enunciate it now, as clear as day. The problem had never been with his mouth, but with my own ability to hear, out there breathing the atmosphere, before the filter of this mask helped me see the truth.

I saw the big one, and I saw its prey at the same time. If the creatures were the size of cats, the big one was the size of a mountain lion. It trundled down out of the tree, too heavy, it seemed, to fly.

An elderly couple, making their way down the path, their advanced age identifiable even through the glow of their light by their diminutive and stooped postures.

The great beast scuttled toward them, taking its time, but too fast for me to get there. BJ didn’t bother: I knew now he must have seen this before. Perhaps these big ones were far too powerful to risk fighting.

This old couple, I thought, were old precisely because of the creatures. Thousands and thousands of drainings over the course of their life, over all those years, and for every draining another sleep.

It was happening to all of us, I thought sadly. We were meant to be unlimited. We were meant to be forever…

As “the big one” came up behind the couple, the two remained blissfully unaware. They had heard BJ’s desperate warning, no doubt, but only a weird sound through his buckshot-mutilated lips: ZABIGAN.

I reached up and ripped the mask from my face, unable to watch. As the colors of our shared hallucination flooded back into my sight, the old man, seemingly flesh and blood, stopped suddenly, raised a hand to his temple, took a half step and collapsed. His wife called his name, but there was no response

(u/PrimitivePrism)

Photo by  Егор Камелев

The post r/WritingPrompts response: “Scourge” appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Political Pie

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
A month ago a mysterious, indestructible robot started appearing at political rallies of international leaders. He does nothing except humiliating them by throwing pies in their faces. You are the leader of a small island nation and the robot announced to visit you tomorrow.

Response:
I am loathe to admit that I am frightened by anything, especially not to the hungry ears of those who would spread word amongst the populace. I didn’t gain the presidency of Perimonia, this fertile island of my birth, by showing fear.

But I do feel it.

That robot scares me.

No one knows where it came from, or how it crosses borders. Some say it can walk along the seafloor, emerging at remote beaches and marching to the rallies from there. It’s believed it can navigate the wildest forests and tundra, and it has been known to cross through the Himalayas to reach China from India. It must schedule its travels precisely using some combination of AI and online access to rally schedules, taking into account the time needed to traverse the many environments between it and its next destination.

Tomorrow it will arrive. Nothing will stop it. Its exterior, hypothesized by scientists to be made of woven carbon nanotubes, titanium and diamond, cannot be impacted critically by any known physical weapon. In addition, there is a belief that even if a military managed to destroy it, its destruction might automatically trigger something dubbed “The Last Pie,” which could be anything from a nuclear launch on the capital of the offending nation, to indiscriminate chemical weapon attacks on the populace.

Yes, I fear that godforsaken robot. That menace. But not for the pie. I do not fear pies. I do not fear losing face to a creamy dessert. The approach of the robot is an inevitability, yet that is not how my supporters feel, nor my party. No. For them the idea of me getting hit in the face with one of those pies is unacceptable. It’s true that many world leaders and prospective leaders, even of the most powerful nations on Earth, have taken the pie – but Perimonia is different. Her people are different. Passionate. Proud. Political. Immensely, immensely political.

No, I do not fear pies. My fear is of what the robot will do to reach me. Its programming is cold, inflexible, and its calculations cruel. If people stand in its way, if they act to impede its progress – or, God forbid, attack it…

Beijing, Dallas, Calgary, New Delhi, Warsaw… We all saw what happened. Who can ever forget? Even when most of the carnage was removed from the main social media platforms, the videos still existed in mass all over the internet. Gore sites loved them in particular. A Tor browser could you get any angle you wanted. So many phones recorded what happened in those places, and, when their owners were left as glistening trails of guts and screaming torsos and piles of bone and sinew, those phones were still found and collected by the sneaking ghouls of our societies. It’s amazing how many people’s passwords consist only of the number 1, but even more amazing that there are people that will force the severed upper body of a dying human being to press a thumb to their own dropped phone before they expire. All to get that footage shot from inside the crowd. Footage of the robot’s slaughter.

People had stopped standing its way after Warsaw, of course. Warsaw totaled more than 100,000 dead. It took the robot less than five minutes. Then it strode up to the podium where Prime Minister Kaminski stood in the shock that would later give way to his utter madness, removed a perfectly chilled coconut cream pie from its inner cavity, and lobbed it into the man’s face.

I’ve begged my people not to stand in the way of the robot, whether they are followers of me or my rival. I’ve pleaded on national television for them NOT to deter that machine! Yet they are full of pride! The pride of our stalwart island! Our ancient home! They say this is war. Armed with machetes, guns and steel chains, they are convinced they can put an end to this robot once and for all, to protect their leaders from humiliation.

And despite my grief, I must admit: I am proud as well. Proud of them – of these people that have defended this mountainous, generous land, glowing like an emerald in the vast sapphire, ever since our ancestors landed on these shores in the time of the gods.

I will watch them – all who turn up tomorrow. I will do them the honor of watching them die under the robot’s many blades, its bombs, its lasers, its ultrasonic weapons that scramble brains and shatter skulls. It’s the final and greatest act of respect I can offer. And then, like Kaminski, I will take my pie.

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