20 & 21
The child moves a fire engine back and forth across a kitchen floor.
From a chair, an old man says: I want to tell you things you do not know.
When they came, we were children fed reassuring stories and sent into battle. I thought it an adventure. We streamed toward each other from all sides taking impossibly long strides over the pastry grass patched with confectioner's sugar because gravity had leaked away.
When we reached them we stopped. We looked at their machines and had no idea what to do. Then the ground exploded and everything went black.
The old man is silent.
The machines overhead are sent to watch us. They have sensors that search for types of movement. When they find that movement, they attack.
We changed how we live so as to not provoke them. We tried to avoid mistakes. But we did not know what a mistake looked like. The tension that created was unbearable.
We closed ourselves up in what worked. Then we tried to forget.
But you remember what you try to forget.
The old man is silent.
The future is the present is the past repeated. The same arrives again and again. Each time it appears as something new. From the sense of something new we derive hope for redemption. But it never comes.
The child moves a fire engine back and forth across the floor.
21.
It is the signal that gives way to noise. It is a mass of white. It is clouds of black flecks. It is the way their movements buzz. It is the insects in a wall of grass. It is full of holes. It is the line animals that stream through them. It is the ways they shake. It is the curved air that comes. It is the miniature tree of life on a table. The secret is there is no secret. It is a mass of white. It is the holes that fill it. It is the girl made of sticks. It is her arms that open like fans. It is the expanse that pours through her eyes.
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Author's Note
two more elements from the new sequence. i think they're free-standing. i think the pieces are fun to say aloud.
in the sequence, everything is streamed through surveillance cameras. what you see is and is not arbitrary: the selection follows on cues that are not present in the stories, like what would obtain were you confronted with an array of monitors.
these follow 19, the piece about the disappeared girl. they're all parts of a section called a catalog of disappearances.
21 is a signal failure. the tree of life repeats from no. 16. the whole series is here, backward, if you're interested:
http://postreality.tumblr.com/
btw i was shown the tree of life when i was in costa rica. it is enormous. i remember looking up into the canopy. it is, in fact, an amazing thing.
enjoy.
Other stories by stephen hastings-king
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21 is wonderful writing -
"The secret is there is no secret. It is a mass of white. It is the holes that fill it. It is the girl made of sticks. It is her arms that open like fans."
20 is good as well. *
So good to have your work at Fictionaut again. Splendid work.
Insightful and concise: I enjoyed. *
"The future is the present is the past repeated. The same arrives again and again. Each time it appears as something new. From the sense of something new we derive hope for redemption. But it never comes."
There's no sin in that.
I like 20 very much. Taken by itself it feels postapocalyptic to me.
I like both very much.
Re 20., bracketing this piece with the simple, everyday sentence, "The child moves a fire engine back and forth across the floor." is both powerful and haunting.
I also love the line: "From a chair, an old man says: I want to tell you things you do not know."
The old man's story might benefit from being a little more concise and vivid, perhaps by adding more specific detail?
Love 21. The structure. The language. Bravo.
I'm going to your link to read the previous 19 now. Very cool project.
Stephen, good to see your work here again.
thanks for the reads and lovely comments. it's nice to have the space that enables me to be back here again. and i'm pleased that the writing seems to work for you.
the project has been interesting to make: the game of sticking with and violating the constraint of surveillance camera mediation is interesting. the violations have to appear consistent: the trick is to blur the objective/subjective division.
@lilia--the reason the old man remains general follows from the surveillance constraint. you don't know who this guy is--he could be anyone--he is a type. the idea was to use the situation to trigger detail about setting: whence the emphasis on the child moving the firetruck. it works in two ways--to trigger filling in detail about the scene and to set up the fact of non-communication. in my head, that is. i never really know how these things translate. but that's the idea.
Super tight writing, Stephan. Love this: "We tried to avoid mistakes. But we did not know what a mistake looked like."
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thanks much for the read and comment, fos. pleased that the piece works for you.