The pine cones may have been a mistake. The squirrels steal them, you see. But I needed something with the vital essence, to breathe life into my creature. Anyone can make a robot these days, calculating engines with grabbers. But to build a living creature, with a soul! Now, wouldn’t that be something!
Do you think I need to change up the pine cones? It’s true, trees have exceedingly contemplative souls. Do you think something nimbler would be an improvement? A human heart perhaps?
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
I write a flash fiction piece of 100 words every week. Some of these weekly stories are, of course, about the pandemic. A year and half into it, I wondered how living through this history had changed the way I thought and felt. So I collected all the stories that had been directly or indirectly about the pandemic and put them together, wondering what, if any, pattern they made.
Art piece made by Sophia Black
The pattern I discern was a surprising one: fear, followed by tranquility and hope, then doubt, and finally a search for meaning.
Fear
It was February 12, 2020. There had been just over 2,000 cases of covid worldwide and 97 deaths. None yet in Britain.
We knew something was coming. But we could only watch what was happening in China and wonder if this isolation was our future. I wrote Meal By Cloud.
Meal by Cloud That’s what we’ve come to name it—meal by cloud. Quarantined in our own homes, we take to inviting virtual guests for dinner over Skype. We call from window to window across the city “stay strong”. Only ambulance sirens and the rumble of military vehicles echo between buildings in the empty boulevards.
The pandemic and hope for change
A recurring theme of my writing about covid became the way the world might be different on the other side of the pandemic. On March 4, 2020, when there were 56 cases in the UK, I wrote the first of these: Seed Bank.
Seed Bank “That’s such a great idea,” Pfennig said. “A seed bank.” And it was true. The metal shelves held hazelnuts, garlic cloves, and lumpy nodules I couldn’t identify. We’d survive, Pfennig decided. Dig up the parks, plant the seeds, harvest our own food. When the soldiers at last removed the barriers around the city, they’d find us healthy and thriving. Then we’d walk out proudly into the sunshine of the new world. He clapped me on the back, and I beamed with pride, unable to confess a squirrel had done the collecting. All I’d been gathering was graffiti.
As the pandemic got closer, I got more frightened. On March 11, I wrote this:
The Knock It cannot be so terrible, so decisive. Look! The sparrows continue their squabbling in the branches. A thin rain is falling, like yesterday, warm and gentle. The sun continues its climb up the wall of the sky as always, and the water plays in the fountain. Nothing decisive has happened. When the summons comes, I will open the door.
And then came outrage. There was much discussion in March of “herd immunity” as a strategy. I wrote this:
The Experiment I am aghast. “It’s monstrous,” I say. He seems faintly amused by my outrage and turns from the keyboard with a shake of his silver head. “It’s necessary,” he says. “The way we stop this disease is to isolate the vulnerable and let the healthy catch it. Most will recover and when they do, we’ll have a shield of herd immunity.” “You can’t know that,” I say. “You’re running a terrible experiment with millions of lives.” His mane tosses like a lion’s. “The peak will be sharp, but it’ll be short.” Somewhere, faintly, a phone is ringing.
Everything went quiet
We were locked down in the UK for the first time on 23 March 2020. And suddenly it all went quiet. We stayed home, apart from our daily one hour walks, and watched TV pictures of empty streets. There was no cataclysm. Contrary to what some pundits expected, though it was hard, people didn’t become stir crazy and go walkabout. Goats took over Llandudno in Wales.
On April 8, there were 5,129 cases in the UK and 73, 639 worldwide, when I wrote this:
Earth Abides The air holds a limpid clarity. A goat, nibbling my hedge, looks in the window at me looking out. Birdsong resounds over empty streets. I skype my neighbours, even those I don’t like. In the highway’s asphalt, a crack widens and a seed takes root. There will be no going back to “normal” after this is over.
A week later, the strange sense of peace and of hope was still with me.
Dreaming Spires The city dreams, respiring slowly—the outbreath no longer poison, but blossom-perfume. I sniff the reveries, and they’re heady. My head swims, and lips curl in a smile. From window to window we call and birds swoop from among the towers carrying our cry like pollen. Buds break on spires and pinnacles. Basements put out roots and taste the earth. Newness is being born.
But of course, this peace was the privilege of being comfortably off and living in the developed world. As the first wave in the UK peaked and began to subside in mid-April 2020, I began to reflect on how this was playing out elsewhere in the world. On May 13, there were 81,576 cases worldwide. I wrote this piece about a Pacific islander.
Jesus wen cry I look out to sea. Gentle waves stay all the way out to an empty horizon. No cruise boats. Nobody come. For the fourth time, I rearrange the wire bush of tourist hats, bobbing in the breeze like shrunken heads. Gaudy shirts billow and cowrie shell necklaces clack. My feet do an anxious little dance. Maybe I’ll go tend my taro patch instead. Jesus wen cry.
Life was becoming more and more like normal again in the UK. Yes, we still had social distancing and mask wearing, but cases had dropped from around 4,000 a day in the UK to around 400 by mid-June. Yet, things were far from normal. For about two months, none of my stories featured the pandemic. Then on July 15, about two months before the second wave, I wrote Strangers. Some of us had remained safe, but changed.
Strangers Up to the edge of my hedge, I am safe. I stare out into the empty road—no cars, no people, only increasingly bold foxes. Then there, at the bottom of the lane, a figure silhouetted by the early morning sun. It walks towards me, as if out of a dream. Another person. Tentatively, I raise my hand. “How do,” it says, stopping at my gate. Stranger danger! Who knows what the creature carries? I run inside and bolt my door.
And some of us lacked the choice of remaining safe. On August 12, with cases still low in the UK, I wrote Defining Moment.
Defining Moment Harvey was appalled. The street below pullulated with people, jostling and pushing noisily through each other. “Mum,” he said, “Those folk are idiots. No social distancing. Don’t they know they’re going to die?” Taking him by the shoulders, she gave him that look, the one that said she had something important to teach him. “Those folk don’t have the option of staying home. If they don’t go out and earn money, they’ll certainly die.” Harvey asked why. Because they’re poor, she explained. But this only led the lad to ask why they were poor. Her answers ran out then. And that set the course of his life.
The second and third waves: doubt
The second wave in the UK began to grow in September 2020. But the second national lockdown didn’t happen until 5 November. Cases had reached almost 25,000. Perhaps oddly, I still thought we’d come out changed and better as a society. But I wasn’t quite so sure now. On 2 December, I wrote The Future.
The Future I sense it. I can almost grasp it. The future. Sitting just outside my window, like my first shiny new car on a festival. That time is not here yet, but anticipation brings it into the present. One day, soon, this will all be over. We’ll emerge, blinking in the sunshine, laugh and greet old friends. Now it’s clear who we really depend on. We’ll put an end to misery and want. We can build back better. Can’t we?
The third lockdown followed hard on the heels of the second on 6 January 2021. The wave peaked at around 60,000 cases a day in the UK. By then, there were almost three quarters of a million new cases worldwide. But the vaccines had arrived. And with them, the bizarre politicisation of public health, which left me bewildered and angry. On 10 February 2021, I wrote Anti-Vax.
Anti Vax There ain’t no pandemic. I seen inside the hospital. Empty. It’s all a lie. Probably, you’ll decide I’m one of those nutjobs. Think you’re better than me, don’t you? You’re certain, right? You seen it on the news. I got a big shock for you—the media lies. All them wards full of sick people? Actors. They do that, you know. Why would they? To stop us finding out what they’re up to, of course. I’m talking deep state here. The vaccine ain’t no cure, cause there ain’t nothing to fix. They made it up so’s they can inject everyone with trackers.
What did it all mean?
If 2020 had been the year of adjusting to, and indeed embracing change, 2021 became the year of trying to discern meaning. I thought about the history of other pandemics, and about the way we were responding to ours. On 24 March, thinking about Shakespeare’s experience of the Plague, I wrote Writer in Lockdown.
Writer in lockdown Cries and moans punctured the sky, a flight of bats escaping into the night. The church bells tolled and tolled ceaselessly for the dead. The scent of rosemary burning in the chafing dish irked Will’s nostrils, but at least it kept the stench of rotting corpses at bay. Mayhaps, Mistress Tomkins next door had succumbed, along with her babes, boarded as they were into their quarantine house. And yet, the closure of the theatres gave Will time to write. His quill poised over the page. “A plague on both your houses,” he wrote. Aye, it had a ring to it.
For many of us, living through history, we just tried to keep to the old patterns. On 31 March, I wrote Baking.
Baking The past occupies my present. I make tea, bake biscuits, cut the grass. The change is too vast to comprehend. I take the garbage out, go to the shops, do the laundry. The machine runs out of control and the engineers panic. Old gods shake their shaggy heads and snuffle in the underbrush. When it’s all over, when today has become yesterday: maybe, then, we’ll be able to tell what it meant.
Others, as the vaccination campaign accelerated, decided they knew what it all meant. On 16 June, I wrote Hero.
Hero I’m a hero, me. They oughta give me a bleedin’ medal for what I done, mate; saved the country, din’t I? Sat on me arse for fourteen months, never going out, never letting any bugger in; it was hard, I can tell you; but I stuck it out, ‘cause that’s what an Englishman does. Fourteen months! That was my war. Double vaccinated, I am. Stopped the virus in its tracks, so we did. So where’s me bleedin’ medal now, and me war pension from a grateful nation?
By 14 July, in the UK, with well over half the population double-vaccinated, we were well into the experiment of releasing restrictions. Personally, I felt safer, though still in danger.
But I was more worried about releasing the brakes, as this apocalyptic story shows:
Something’s Coming The motor coughs and stutters. The engineers, with wrenches and oil cans, crowd round in agitation. Stern sentinels patrol the city walls and, beyond, a dark beast bays in the night. “All will be as it was,” the engineers promise. “in the eternal city.” “Build back better,” the citizens beseech. “We are of nature,” says the seer. Crowds gather round. “But not everything we choose to do is natural.” “What must we do?” asks a woman. “Go back,” some scream. Others yell, “Go forward.” A chant begins, “String up the engineers.” Down the plaza, a crack dances like lightning and widens. Me, I wonder what might be coming for us. And whether we will recognise it as kin.
Around 130,000 people were dead in the UK and 4.27 million worldwide.
If you’ve written during the pandemic, what does your pattern say?
He come. Slow. Old man come slow. You got time to get used to he. One day, he not there. Next day, a spot far away on the edge of the world. Maybe only something in eye. But then closer, a little closer. Birds swoop over. Wind blow grasses. Seems he always been there. Old man always there. Soon, he reach me. Then, something happen. Maybe.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Thoughts sprout from my head like wispy hair, slowly, insistently. They buzz in a whirling cloud around me, wavering in the wind. Perhaps, I should seek a barber of cerebration and get a short back and sides.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Stories are about individuals, the challenges they face, and how they cope. There’s a protagonist (which come from the Greek for first struggler) and an antagonist (which means opposing struggler). Right?
Wrong. Or, at least, it’s right for contemporary Western literature, but not true of all places and all times. It wasn’t always so in the West either. Different cultures use very different ideas of the individual.
That idea seems so natural to us that it’s hard to imagine an alternative. But, in fact, we invented the individual only quite recently.
What Guatemalan refugees can teach us about the self
As a way of explaining this odd suggestion, let me tell you a true story. I used to be involved with aid projects in Latin America. One of the projects we supported was psychotherapy for indigenous women fleeing the civil war in Guatemala. The therapists, who were from North America, would say to the women “tell me about yourself.” The women would describe their villages, and where the maize fields were, and their community, and so on. And the therapist would say, “Yes, but tell me about you.” And the women would look puzzled and say “But I just did.”
The therapists and the refugee women had different understandings of what a self was. Obviously, if we can have different understandings view of the self, there will be correspondingly different forms of story-making.
Is Antigone a heroine?
Let’s take, for example, the ancient Greek story of Antigone, famously dramatized by Sophocles. The events of the play follow an unsuccessful invasion of Thebes by Polynices to oust his brother from the throne. Both brothers are killed in the battle. Their uncle, Creon, ascends the throne, and decrees that no burial rites should be performed for Polynices. Antigone, sibling to the brothers, defies the order, arguing that the religious duty to honour the dead overrides human law. Creon orders her buried alive.
What does this story mean? It depends on whether you are an ancient Greek. Berthold Brecht staged a performance in 1948, when the crimes of the Second World War were still raw in memory. He set it in a Berlin air raid shelter. Brecht’s Antigone is a heroine, standing up to the cruelty and tyranny of Creon.
But this is not how Sophocles understood her, as Kenan Malik argues. Though Antigone is championing religious duty, Creon defends the safety of the people. Antigone is guilty of what the Greeks knew as hubris, overweening pride that sets the individual above the law. Her unswerving confidence that she is right causes her to go too far. For Sophocles, this was her tragedy. For the Greeks, heroes embody the best values of the community. They do not stand against the community.
The Greeks were more like the Guatemalan refugees in this than like the therapists. In the more communitarian cultures of Asia, stories today still often focus less on changes in the protagonist than on the unfolding of events.
The change in thinking in the West was quite recent. Malik argues that, until the sixteenth century, most Europeans would have readily understood Sophocles’ original intention. The individual had no meaning, except as a member of a community. It is a person’s actions rather than their thoughts or intentions, which are important.
The proper end of love is death
According to a fascinating essay by Laura Ashe, modern Western fiction could only come into being when it became culturally meaningful and interesting to wonder what was going on in someone else’s head. She argues that it was the development of the troubadours’ tales of courtly love that spearheaded this change in the twelfth century.
Though love has always been a feature of stories throughout ages and cultures, the idea of romantic love, which sprang from the troubadour tradition, is distinctly different. Before this, in great love tales such as Tristan and Isolde, love was a devastating destructive force.. There is no room for the modern idea of the protagonist who has a desire and struggles to achieve it. So a “happy ever after” ending is not available. Love is independent of the wills of the lovers, is incompatible with everyday life, and its proper end is death. Even in the sixteenth century, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet embodies this older understanding of love.
It took the historical uproar of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of mercantile and industrial capitalism to create a world in which modern Western fiction, particularly the novel, could exist. A world which created the ideas that individuals matter, and that they can have agency outside of fate and social station.
Why does any of this matter?
This little romp through a couple of thousand years of Western history tells us how important culture is. What we can imagine depends on the resources our culture gives us. People in Sophocles’ day were probably much the same as they are now. There simply hasn’t been enough time for evolution to have made us biologically different to the ancient Greeks. And people in London or Los Angeles have pretty much the same dreams as people in Lagos or Lima. But all of us live in worlds shaped by the societies we live in. The ancient Greeks lived in a world shaped by fate. The power today of possessive individualism is probably more marked in Los Angeles than in Lima. As they say in Southern Africa, “Motho ke motho ka batho” (people become people through other people).
We can, perhaps, investigate through different stories different ways of being people.
It felt nice. Generous. Whimsical. Someone had left a Christmas decoration on the tree by the fence. This brightened my morning, and I smiled, giving a little skip in the snow.
The next day, a stocking hung beside the shiny orb. I searched inside for chocolates, nuts and tangerines. But it was empty. That disappointed, and my heart sank.
A day later, and they’d tacked a sign on the stocking. “Fill me, cheapskate.” Now my environment was making demands with menaces. Fear squeezed, and I gulped in a breath of air.
After that, I followed a different route to work.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
The motor coughs and stutters. The engineers, with wrenches and oil cans, crowd round in agitation. Stern sentinels patrol the city walls and, beyond, a dark beast bays in the night.
“All will be as it was,” the engineers promise. “in the eternal city.”
“Build back better,” the citizens beseech.
“We are of nature,” says the seer. Crowds gather round. “But not everything we choose to do is natural.”
“What must we do?” asks a woman.
“Go back,” some scream. Others yell, “Go forward.” A chant begins, “String up the engineers.”
Down the plaza, a crack dances like lightning and widens.
Me, I wonder what might be coming for us. And whether we will recognise it as kin.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
They cut the head off to make her fit. My fridge is small.
For six days, grief ravaged me. On the seventh, I grabbed my Desert Tech MDR and fitted the clip. In my head, music played. I knew this story. I was this story.
There would be blood. There would be vengeance for my wounded masculinity. There would be congratulations.
But reality’s not like that. The black dude dies first. Do it by the book: the book of law, not the fictional one.
I wish I’d known Mary better before they killed her.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
I am not here now. I serve the future. We are making memories. One day, Mary, we’ll look back and see how happy we were today: the freedom of the open road in our campervan; the exotic food we ate; the carefree way we ran into the breakers and embraced.
Such memories!
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Do you enjoy cracking codes? I’ve been fascinated by codes and ciphers since I was a kid. Now, I have the chance to include a cipher in the novel I’m working on, Boundarising. Here it is:
Can you crack this? This isn’t just an empty challenge. I need to be able to demonstrate that a teenage boy, armed only with paper and pencil could do it, so I really need to know how easy this is to solve.
My protagonist, Sol, has been dispatched by his parents to live during wartime with his uncle, Zand in the countryside where he should be safe from enemy bombing, Many children were sent out of danger in this way in Britain during the second world war.
Just before he gets on the train, Sol’s father, William, presses an envelope into his hands and asks him to give it to Zand.
But Sol is a curious boy, opens the envelope and discovers the coded message. He spend many months trying to crack it. To give you a running start, Sol, recognizes that because there are no numbers greater than five, this code is probably created in a 5×5 grid. This would be sufficient to store all the letters of the alphabet, if two (such as I and J) are doubled up.
1
2
3
4
5
1
A
B
C
D
E
2
F
G
H
I/J
K
3
L
M
N
O
P
4
Q
R
S
T
U
5
V
W
X
Y
Z
So, Sol reasons that the numbers code for letters (where 11 is A, 12 is B and so on). But, there are groups of four numbers, while two would be sufficient to code for a letter. So, Sol thinks the code involves pairs of letters. There must be some coding rules for relating the members of the pair to each other.
He readily sees that the grid above doesn’t decode the message, so he decides the letters cannot be arranged simply from A to Z. He thinks it’s unlikely the arrangement is random. That’s as far as he gets for some time.
Can you break the code? If so, please let me know how you did it. The first reader to do so will get a free copy of the book when it’s published.
Neil MacDonald Author 