Zach MacDonald's Blog, page 4

July 20, 2020

Story Behind the Story – The Night Side

I was elated to have my story, The Night Side, published last week in the inaugural issue of Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine (Vol 1: Dystopia). You can find the story here, and I encourage anyone reading to check out the full issue of this exciting new magazine.

I hunted around quite a bit for a publisher for this piece. It’s a long one, for starters, with a word count above the upper limit most lit mags and journals stipulate in their submission guidelines. When I came across Fatal Flaw’s request for submissions that “consider the world through a cracked lens” for their Dystopia-themed issue, I leapt at the chance to submit; to me, The Night Side most certainly inhabited a place within that description (and much to my delight, the editors agreed!).





Prayer flags on a ridge above the village of Dingboche



I’m very fond of this piece, so I decided to write a bit here about how it came about. The seeds of the idea for it were planted back in April 2016, when two friends and I were making a trek in Nepal from the village of Salleri to Everest Base Camp. For several days after the outset the trek, especially prior to our rugged trail meeting the main track out of Lukla, we found ourselves completely without internet access. At one point, my friend commented (a bit ominously), “There could have been another 9/11 and we wouldn’t even know.” Of course, he wasn’t explicitly talking about terrorist attacks, but rather that any event of potentially world-changing magnitude could have been happening elsewhere, which we would have remained in ignorance of until we either got back online or a local villager who had acquired such news managed to inform us about it.













Ama Dablam remains a fixture on the horizon for much of the EBC trek.



I knew I wanted to make a story out of this idea, but I would take it further. There would a world-changing event, but one extreme enough that the characters themselves would bear witness to it–and furthermore, rather than be left in ignorance due to a temporary lack of internet access, the event would annihilate the internet and all other communications systems that they and those around them depended on, leaving them deep in the Himalayas and unable to acquire information from the outside world. Thus, as I started writing it (following another trek in Nepal in October 2017), it grew to become more about our tenuous ability to know things with certainty–and beyond.

The story, indeed, is set in the Khumbu region, on the trail to Everest Base Camp. It is a stunning trek that takes one through awe-inspiring terrain of such rugged beauty that it at times leaves one as breathless as the thin air itself. The trails wend through peaceful villages inhabited by the eminently kind and accommodating Sherpa people, whose lodges/tea houses make a physically demanding adventure all the more comfortable.

I’ve included some of my photos, featuring a few locations and landmarks from the story, for anyone who might be interested to see these places for real.





Happy reading and happy trails!





Dingboche from above



Chukhung Valley



Looking down from the Tukla Pass (the tiny village of Tukla is visible in the bottom left quarter of the image).



Monuments for climbers who perished on Everest (Tukla Pass)

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Published on July 20, 2020 03:18

July 3, 2020

Cecil

But she was a Yazidi girl, and so she was raped for weeks by the fighters, in dim tents stinking of sweat and old blood, before being trucked to the killing sands outside the ancient city.





They told her to convert, but she refused.





They told her of the consequences. She accepted them.





Allah is Lord of All the Worlds, they said; and though she does not believe them, she imagines that there could really be other worlds than this.





There are broken human teeth on the floor of the cell. It’s too dark to see, but she can feel their shape with her fingertips.





She remembers Ahmad-Hafiz’s teeth when he smiled: so nicely shaped, so white.





She’d met Ahmad-Hafiz, a Kurmanji-speaking Kurd, only a year before, on her first ever trip to Baghdad to tour several universities. Her village had resolved to fund her study in the capital, pending her acceptance by an institution there. Ahmad-Hafiz was a physics Ph.D. student at the University of Baghdad, who’d shown her around the College of Science.





He was fascinated, he told her, by quantummechanics. She asked him why, never having heard of them but delighted by his attention upon her.





“Because of the possibilities,” he’d said.





“What possibilities?”





“That in reality there are more worlds than this. An infinite number.”





“What kind of worlds?”





“Parallels,” said Ahmad-Hafiz, and refilled her tea cup. He liked tea, even with his white teeth. “Let’s take Cecil the lion, for instance.”





“Cecil?”





“It was a lion killed in Africa a month back. A popular lion, I guess. People are calling for the hunter’s blood.”





“Because of a lion?”





“Well it was special enough, after all, to have a name. Anyway, imagine the hunter is there with his bow, and he’s about to shoot.” Ahmad-Hafiz mimed pulling back a bowstring. “And roar! A lioness suddenly leaps on him from behind, killing him!”





“Oh . . .”





“Now that didn’t happen. But consider, just for fun, that there could have been this lioness nearby. She smells the hunter and a thought is about to spark in her brain, either to attack or not to attack. But if we accept what’s called the Everett interpretation, both of those sparks occur, and from there the world splits into two. In one, the hunter dies and Cecil lives; in the other—the world you and I inhabitthe opposite happens. Those two worlds branch away from each other, forever undetectable.”





“But is it possible?” she asked, mystified.





Ahmad-Hafiz offered his gleaming smile. “Well, it’s theoretical,” he said. “Nothing is certain.”





The door of the cell slides open. She places the broken teeth, belonging to some forgotten man or woman, in a row where the wall meets the floor. A hood is placed over her head and she is led outside. She is slapped when she does not stand in the right place, though she can’t see the line she is meant to be a part of. She can’t see anything. Her ear grows hot where she was struck. Her heart thrums violently behind her ribs.





The hammers of multiple guns are drawn back. Her bladder wants to let go, but she fights to keep from dirtying herself, determined not to let them know her fear.





She waits for her lioness.





She waits to find out which world this is.





She is buried with the others in a shallow grave.


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Published on July 03, 2020 20:16

July 2, 2020

The Big Ones

“Listen, some of the deckhands might’ve told you there are squid down here that can suck the bolts out of a submarine’s hull. Don’t let that crap get to you. This is an S-155 Conger and it doesn’t have any bolts in its hull.”





The three of us eyed the captain, waiting to see that he was joking.





Mel chuckled.





The captain stared back.





“Nothing funny about the squids, little miss. If one of ‘em got a hold of you it’d bury its beak in your belly and eat the soft parts first. Of course, should one breach the sub, you’ll be dead before squiddy gets its suckers on you.”





Mel, Joong and I exchanged glances.





“Jesus,” said Joong.





“Cthulhu more’n likely,” said captain Snipe.





The sub was dropping fast. 500 meters, 700, a thousand. There were windows, but they might as well have been wall. Blackness.





“So this is considered a prize, huh?” said Mel.





“Plenty of people would trade places with us,” I replied, even though we were only runners-up. First prize was a luxury sub-orbital flight.





“I think it’s pretty cool,” said Joong. He was peering through one of the porthole windows, probably hoping to glimpse some bioluminescence. Joong took marine biology for a year back in college and hadn’t shut up about it since we won our tickets.





“Lights,” announced Captain Snipe. “To the front.”





We shuffled forward and passed into the viewing chamber, where a large round window made up the most of the sub’s bow—a giant pupil, absorbing the ruddy glow we were basked in.





The flood-lights came on, forcing back the dark.





“Look at that!” cried Joong, squashing a finger against the acrylic glass. A pair of pale crustaceans, nearly translucent, had flitted into sight. They were gone a moment later. “Spirit prawns,” he said matter-of-factly. “Incredible.”





“Protein,” captain Snipe sneered. “For the big ‘uns.”





Some kind of ray passed by the window next, also pale white, the size of a wok.





“Do you see that?” marveled Joong.





“More protein,” said Snipe.





Mel whirled on him. “You’re a lot of fun.”





“Protein,” repeated Snipe. “Big ‘uns.”





Now Joong and I turned to face him as well. “What’s wrong with you?” Joong asked.





“Proooteeeiiinnnn,” groaned Snipe. And stopped. He just stopped. His eyes were lusterless marbles. His mouth hung open.





Heavy silence fell around us. We studied the captain. “Dry…” said Mel.





“What?”





“His mouth. It’s…it’s dry inside.”





Snipe fell over, his body unbending. The thump it made on the floor was not quite one of flesh.





The sub rocked without warning, nearly knocking us off our feet, and we were cast once more in red light. The front window was black again.





For a moment we stared.





The blackness shifted, drinking us in.





A pupil.





The sub rocked a second time, filling with the groans of tortured steel.





“The big ones,” said Joong.


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Published on July 02, 2020 23:44

July 1, 2020

Synaesthesia

The morning that Janica began to hear numbers, five months before, was easily the best in years. Years of bruised breasts, of scraped elbows, of a damaged and repaired rib cage (it gets stronger that way). She’d heard the numbers on the clock that morning. They sang in the chords of an angel’s harp. They played a melody as she passed her gaze from the 12 down to the 1 and around through the numbers back up to 12 again. She could compose any song she pleased on the harp. Practice would make perfect.





It gets stronger that way, as Brian might say.





All around the world people had woken on that morning to wonders. Some saw sounds erupt in color, or tasted emotion on their tongue, or smelled patterns and facial expressions. A shift in the earth’s magnetism, theorists proposed, or the impact of radiation from a distant supernova, or the world’s governments drugging up the rain clouds. No one had a sweet fucking clue. No one knew why the phenomenon had suddenly been gifted, or cursed, upon billions of people. Early estimates were that roughly half the human population was affected.





Not Brian, though. And what would he do with such an ability? Would he taste his fists on her chest? Would he see the sores deep inside her when he forced his fingers in dry, the textures leaping in kaleidoscopic explosions before his eyes?





No, half the world had been left wanting, but many were trying to reverse their exclusion. Over the following days the news covered reports of those taking blows to certain areas of the skull, identified online by latter-day phrenologists, all in frantic desperation to experience what so many others could. It had worked for a few, and the media had flaunted success stories, reporters staring with liquid, laughing, childlike eyes as they detailed the places those lucky individuals had been struck on the head. Many who tried it died with their heads split open. Cerebrospinal fluid drained onto linoleum floors, onto concrete, onto hardwood, onto sand. Everywhere. In every nation.





People wanted the experience. The experience was everything. Those who couldn’t have it needed it. Those who had it couldn’t help but gush their wonder, their rapture, their revelations, on the web and every other form of media.





“Swing, bitch,” said Brian. “And you better hit the fucking sweet spot.”





The base of the skull, behind the right ear. Brian was waiting.





“You’ll die if it doesn’t work.”





“If it doesn’t work, you’ll die, cunt.”





She swung the bat. Too hard, perhaps. Brian hit the floor, moaning, writhing.





“I’ll try again,” she said.





“No,” said Brian, blearily. A violent purple crack had appeared at the site of impact. “No more.”





“It gets stronger that way,” said Janica. She looked to the kitchen clock, ran her eyes through the numbers. An angel stroked its harp, just for her.





 She swung again.


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Published on July 01, 2020 21:24

June 30, 2020

Heralds

Aunt Hilda has always warned me about crows, and how they sometimes show up to herald a coming death.





She’s told me the story plenty of times. Before my late uncle died, he’d managed to get himself lost in the woods beyond Mink River. He was only found, days later, when a farmer and his boy spotted a murder of crows circling just beyond the back of their field. Thinking something large had died, they investigated and found my soon-to-be-late uncle slumped at the base of a tree, a little frostbitten and starved, but very much alive. He got treated at the hospital for the frostbite. Overall he seemed fine.





But it was just under a week later that he didn’t wake up in the morning. Heart attack in the night, the coroner said. Just a plain old heart attack. His ticker gave out; shlip-shlump.





The crows had known.





“You see?” aunt Hilda will say, leaning forward, right into my face. Her skin is crinkled wax paper when she grins, pale lips receding to reveal a shiny silver canine tooth. “The buggers wasn’t there cause he was hurt from the elements. They was there cause they saw his ticker giving out, only it hadn’t happened yet.”





“Wow,” I’ll say.





“You best remember that.”





She didn’t work another day after the death, not with the financial inheritance she was left with, and the enormous house, and all the acres of property to sell. She banked well over two million, retired early from her job at the philatelic center, and spent her time taking visitors and telling stories. Her favorite story is the crow story. Her favorite visitor is me.





But aunt Hilda’s been looking different lately. Thinner. Her eyes are sunken and raccoony, her wax paper skin more crinkly than ever around her mouth.





Crows have been roosting at night in the branches of the oak. The one in her front yard. They chatter with each other at sunrise.





“I don’t like it,” she tells me.





“It’s fine,” I tell her. “They just like the tree.”





“They lookit me through the window, I swear it.”





“It’s nothing.”





She’s written me into her inheritance. I guess it’s since I’m the nephew that visits. In fact, I’m the only regular visitor she’s been getting for years.





Some in her situation, such aloneness, might be at risk of suicide.





I’ve shown up at noon today. The branches of the oak are black with crows. A few are hopping along the top of the roof, cawing raggedly. I didn’t think they’d be here so early.





The rope is heavy inside the bag. The latex gloves feel greasy in my pocket. It won’t do to leave prints.





 Two million bucks. Even a fraction of that is a big piece of pie.





The crows take wing as I knock, as though I’ve signaled the end of their watch.


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Published on June 30, 2020 22:41

June 1, 2020

The 32nd – a short story

I’ve tried to figure out how I knew something was off. It could have been the quality of the light, but really the curtains were drawn too tightly for that to be noticed–though later I would see that the light had indeed changed. The noises rising from the street? Maybe. It should have been quieter, I suppose, but how often do street noises separate themselves from that incessant din our city-dweller brains file away as universal static? The hum is as irrelevant to my primate ego as the cosmic microwave background. Probably what alerted me was something much more immediate to my being: I’d woken up oddly well-rested. I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I emerged from sleep like that.





Despite my unusual freshness, I started a pot of coffee brewing just like any morning, and slumped into my office chair, fingers tapping through muscle memory for the World News subreddit online, where at a glance I could see what thousands of strangers felt were the most relevant global happenings.





That’s when I knew for sure something was out of place. No Covid-19 headlines, no mention of the Black Lives Matter protests across the US or elsewhere in the world, and no updates on the Space X manned launch to the ISS. There was plenty of news, of course: a quick scan down the page revealed tragedies and conflicts in abundance, but they all seemed strangely alien, like oddly-patterned mushrooms that had sprung up overnight in the yard. Historical sites in Iran overwhelmed by summer tourist numbers; Deadliest Everest climbing season in more than 20 years; Politicians under fire for anti-LGBT Visit Brazil 2020 ads.





Perplexed, I Googled for George Floyd, the man who’d died pleading beneath the knee of a Minneapolis cop a week before. A short list of results appeared matching that name, but I could see nothing of the man whose face had been everywhere when I went to sleep the night before–the man who’d been murdered, whose last moments had been seen around the world in civilian phone footage, and which had sparked mass protests and riots. Despite the heat, a distinct chill came over me, sweat breaking out on my back.





I called Ryan immediately, even though it was barely 8am. We’d been chatting about this no more than 12 hours before. He answered after a few rings.





“Dude, what’s going on. It’s kind of earl–“





“Ryan, who was the guy that was killed?”





“What? Who and by who?”





“In Minneapolis. The black man who was killed by the white cop. The cop was pressing down on his neck with his knee.”





“Huh. Minneapolis . . .? I think you mean Massachusetts, right? Er, the name was . . . Darren Jackson. It wasn’t his neck. The cop drove his knee into his back and broke his spine.”





“Darren . . .? What? I’m talking about George Floyd’s murder in fucking Minneapolis! The thing America’s a war zone over right now. We talked about him last night.”





“Are you having me on? No we didn’t. We didn’t talk about any of this stuff at a–“





I ended the call, frantically opening WhatsApp to our previous messages. There was our conversation, coming back to me in scraps as I scrolled up through it: bbq–Bitcoin–lambo–lol–BOTW–Netflix . . . Nothing about George Floyd and protests, nothing about the pandemic or lockdown, nothing about anything relevant at all. When did these conversations happen?





As I returned to my phone’s home screen, I saw, for the first time, the date displayed there: May 32nd.





I stared. Blinked. I tapped at the number, as if it were a mirage that could be dispelled by contact.





I phoned Ryan again, panic taking hold of me now. Either I was in the most vivid dream of my life, or I was developing a severe mental issue.





“Hey, did you just hang up on me befor–“





“What day is it?” I almost shouted.





“Monday.”





“I mean what day of the month?” My heart hammered, and I felt almost sick. “May what? What day?”





“It’s the 32nd,” Ryan replied impatiently. “That’s why I’m trying to sleep in. You forget that I don’t have to work today?”





“I . . . “





“Now c’mon man, let me sleep. I can call you later.”





“O . . . okay.”





I glanced out the window and saw, for the first time, the pall of smog settled over the city. The smog that had all but disappeared during the lockdown, with so much traffic off the road. The morning light was strained a bluish amber through it. I’m sure I couldn’t have noticed it through the curtains in my bedroom, but there it was now. Only a city packed with running vehicles could create such haze. This world didn’t know the novel coronavirus pandemic. This world had not seen two astronauts launched into space by a Falcon 9 rocket. This world didn’t know the name of one George Floyd, because, presumably, that man was still out there living his life.





This was the 32nd, a day that slipped through some crack in reality. It was no departure from tragedy and injustice, certainly–what had Ryan said about a Darren-something, body broken from an officer’s knee to his spine? No, it was merely a departure from the world I knew, and it occurred to me then that it had not slipped through a crack in reality, but the other way around: I had slipped into it. The departure was mine alone.





I wanted to go outside, but didn’t. What if I merely passed through another rift in this damaged fabric of the universe? What if I found myself in a world irradiated and ruined by nuclear war? What if I passed into any strange timeline where the privileges of my birth didn’t exist, where history had progressed differently along any of the infinite paths of variation, or where I had essentially traded lives with any of the billions of people that in my heart of hearts I didn’t want to tread through life in the shoes of? No, I had to stay where I was, like one lost in the forest. Straying could only put me at greater risk.





If I stayed put, I thought, I might pass back into my own tragedy-riddled universe–and maybe once there I could try more to play my part in making it a little bit better, a little less tragic where it didn’t need to be, to view my moment in history as relative to all possible futures. All this I told myself as I huddled there in fear of what other realities might await me, where I wasn’t born under so lucky a star.





Eventually the sky darkened, and I slept. My slumber was dreamless, seemingly momentary, and when I awoke it was June 1st, 2020. A few internet searches and reviewing my phone’s message history showed me I was home, as full of suffering and struggle as that home was.





I expect I have a month to play my part in this world, and then I’ll see if there’s a June 31st.






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Published on June 01, 2020 09:10

May 28, 2020

Bangkok in the time of coronavirus

Sometimes I forget how stupendous this city is. The lockdown has naturally led me to spend much more time cooped up in my apartment than ever before, but even with the view from my little balcony, seen through the kitchen sliding door, I somehow became walled off from the shining and megalithic grandeur of this City of Angels.





In my day to day life here over the preceding years, whether it’s been the hot and dusty commute on aging city buses, with their wooden floor boards rattling below our feet and exhaust fume breezes slipping through the open windows, or the impeccably clean and cool BTS Skytrain that coasts down the arterial trackways running through the commercial heart of the city, the macro view of this sprawling urban realm becomes lost in the organized street chaos. The traffic jams, lane-splitting motorbikes, hybrid motorcycle-street food stall contraptions, death-defying offensive driving–it’s all hemmed in by the towers, apartment buildings and office blocks. The street drama plays out in the shadow of dark-windowed concrete structures that house bustling lines of vendors and mom and pop shops on their bottom floor, but whose gloomy upper floors, concealed behind walls that have never heard of or desired power-washing to remove the sooty coatings of age, remain a mystery. At times only the micro perspective can be given attention in these furious roadways of necessity, these packed intersections and swirling roundabouts with their shrilly whistling brown-suited cops.

Which was it that spread faster, the actual virus or the lockdowns? Who remembers in the heart of this harried limbo? Borders closed, flights were grounded, hand sanitizer and thermometer guns appeared everywhere. Your public face is a mask face. We’re all eyes now. Those who couldn’t smile with their peepers, who grin only with their mouth, soon learned that the two windows in your skull hold soft power in the shape of their frame. It’s easy for timelines to become murky, even in this age of timestamped social media updates–or perhaps because of them. Our minds have grown lazy. There’s no need to organize your memories because they’re recorded in labyrinths of servers somewhere. Share a memory, dear user. One year ago you . . .





I don’t know about a year ago, but I remember midnight, New Year’s Eve. 2019 ticking over to 2020 in Thailand. I stood with friends on my little balcony where my motley family of young cacti spend their quiet lives, and we watched the city explode with fireworks. The shows along the Chao Phraya river in the distance lit up the night with burning enthusiasm for the future. It’s an enthusiasm that may be rare, that may only be represented with such expensive and spellbinding displays to denizens of the cities of the world, but it’s still an indicator of the flame of optimism that lives in the collective human heart: we survived another year around the sun, all of us watching this, all of us together drawing breath across the planet–and this year will be better.





Yes, this year will be better.





Once my Thai language classes moved online, much of my daily life completed its transition to the medium of a computer. With a roof over my head, my health, food and clean water, I can’t complain. My eyes are on the screen. I make words appear. I speak and am spoken to. Outside, aglow from above by day and within by night, is the same view that stretched before me on the eve of this insane year, even as, unbeknownst to most of us, a virus waged its biological invasion in Wuhan far to the northeast of smog-bound Krung Thep.





This is the macro view: the resplendent megacity before me. These legions of bright towers. The new golden Buddha being constructed at Wat Paknam. The placid waters of a wide khlong stretching away toward the unseen great river, and the green foliage that populates the spaces where buildings are not. Invisible from here are the uncountable spirit houses tucked away on each property, installed to honor the ethereal guardians that share the land with the millions who came to build this city, to work here, to survive, to profit. The macro take is that this place is a monument to life itself.





It’s all visible now, though I sometimes need to take a moment to truly see it, to consider all that can be taken in. That smog has lifted, at least for the time being. The air is clear. Awash in hot sun, concealing the struggles and sorrows and joys of its inhabitants, Bangkok shines as far as the eye can see.






December 2019May 2020

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Published on May 28, 2020 02:14

April 30, 2020

ITSUKI goes into the world

It’s May 1st, 2020, and this is the first post on my new site. Though it’s been up for pre-order for a while, today is the official release of Itsuki. When I started writing this novel many years ago, shortly after my return home from Japan, I couldn’t have imagined a day when it would actually be published and available to just about anyone, anywhere–but here we are.













Itsuki has travelled a long road since the first draft was completed. Though it’s seen several subsequent drafts, the departure of a number of characters which once populated those word processor pages, and gone through final rounds of important editing, the heart of the story has always remained. So too has it always opened with Brook’s car running out of fuel on a deserted highway, forcing him to continue his desperate journey on foot.

I’ve read before that once your novel is published, you need to be able to let go and accept that it is no longer only your story, nor are the characters only yours either–in a sense those things now belong to everyone who reads your work. Only recently did the truth of this strike me. I’ve had a number of short stories published, but never anything I spent as long working on, wrestling with myself over, or contemplating as much as Itsuki. A couple months ago I had to come to terms with the inevitable reality that the final version was complete, a done deal, and further obsessing over it or going back to make tweaks was, for the first time since I wrote that opening passage, no longer an option. From today, all of it belongs to readers, who will interpret, visualize and imagine as they will, bringing the book to life for themselves as we all do with the stories we read. I’m happy for that, but it’s a strange new feeling nonetheless.

So, Itsuki, I bid you adieu for now, as you not only head out into the world, but become a part of it. I’ve done a lot of growing up on this road with you.


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Published on April 30, 2020 15:55