Riot

About a month ago a friend laid down a challenge to me; posting a link on my Facebook page.
This is the same friend that awesomely-dubbed my approach to literary technique 'word frenzy' and who has often (and completely accurately) hassled me about my tendency never to use three words when fifteen will suffice.

I'm one verbose son-of-a-bitch, what can I say.

Seems that every year they (yup, that inscrutable anonymous force - 'they') run a national flash fiction contest. The rules are clear: all entries must be fiction, short-story form, on any genre and in any style. But they must not be more than 300 words long (excluding title). The woman that challenged me to this thought it would be fun to see if I could do it.
Honestly, I had some doubts myself. Hell, this opening is probably more than 300 words long already.

But somehow, by hook or by crook, I did.
Twice actually. In the end I submitted two entries. The first, entitled 'Five Fragments; a Love Story' made the long-list (but alas, not the short-list). The other one was called 'Riot' and did not place anywhere. In truth, I hardly expected it too - I figured if one of my entries were to make it to the next level it would be the former - it had more of the necessary ingredients: it was sentimental and (hopefully) poignant. The other - 'Riot' was much darker, nasty, vicious and bleak as hell; it was also sufficiently heavy on adjectives to more closely resemble my normal writing style.
And I didn't really write it especially for the contest.

Instead I found it when I was transferring a bunch of files onto the hard-drive of my new laptop. There it was, a page-and-a-half of some manuscript thing that I'd started and subsequently abandoned. Re-reading it I remembered that it was to be some pitch-black, disturbing dystopia or whatever. It was intended to open with a Columbine (and now tragically; also Sandy Hook) - style school massacre and to climax with a city wide riot.
It was to be some seriously heavy shit, man.
I'd planned for it to depict a society heavily dosed and tranquilized on prescription medication, numb from years of mindless entertainment and junk food. A society grown fat and passive, grown fearful of its own passions and its capacity for violence. It was to be a world of burned or 'sanitized' books and secret prison camps. Etc.
Basically, I was a really angry young man, okay.

So, I got a page and a half into it before I realized that I really didn't know how to write a dystopia or where I should roll with this one. Seems odd, actually as virtually every dystopian novel since George Orwell's masterpiece '1984' has basically used his recipe for the first few turning points of the narrative.
i.e. We meet the protagonist - usually a man. They are a true believer, almost fully embracing the values of their society. But they have some nagging doubts; something in them cautions that all is not right...
So they pursue these doubts - secretly going against the ingrained rules of their society. They meet another character - usually a woman - who has fully embraced this doubt and is actively working to defy the dystopian society.
These two fall into a relationship that becomes itself an act of subversion; the protagonist getting drawn deeper and deeper into rebellion. Typically they are then betrayed by someone both of these characters has come to trust and handed over to the authorities. They are then tortured, brain-washed and perhaps executed (or something even worse in the case of '1984').
The end.

Heck, even 'Fight Club' by Chuck Palahniuk follows a surprising number of these rules.

But, I stopped and shoved what I'd written away on a hard-drive somewhere. When I found it again I thought, heck, that opening paragraph isn't too bad, perhaps I should pick this up again at some point. When I heard of this contest I figured that I'd dust off said opening paragraph, add a bit/delete a bit and then enter it. Just for kicks.
I got it down to 300 words exactly.

So here it is: it doesn't feel like a self-contained story - it feels like a frigging opening paragraph (which yup, isn't all that surprising) and yeah, it didn't win a damn thing. But I still rather like it.

(P.S. If I'm permitted to I will also post 'Five Fragments; a Love Story' on this blog - I think the folks who run the contest are still hanging onto some kind of rights with it as it may or may not get read out at the awards ceremony in Auckland next weekend. After that, I figure it'll belong to me once more.)

                                                                           (...)

Tonight the city is melting back into the dirt.

The sky is full of salt and fire. Dark snowstorms of ash drift through the streets. They melt on my cheeks, blackening my skin. They could be the pages of a thousand banned and burned books drifting to pieces on the dusking breeze. I can hear raised voices churning the air; they could be shouting anything. Far away you can hear the stutter of automatic weapon fire - the kind of guns you can order through the post if you know the right web addresses, have the right connections. We had the connections, we had everything we needed.

But I was wrong about how far away they were.  They weren’t all that far away at all.

The city screams as it dies, it sounds like a hundred sirens, a thousand babies wailing, the grinding roar of statues falling, all underscored by the dull timpani-thuds of homemade explosives.

Like I said; we had the connections.

Concrete and tyres, metal, wood and flesh, paper and fabric, gasoline and bone – it all smells pretty much the same as it burns.

I wonder if the smoke of our burning will reach as far as the camps. Will the people there – less than people now, truth be told - watch those black waves curling over the barbed wire: will they stare with eyes like boiled marbles, clutching at the wire fences with fingers of picked bone. Soon the militia will come with batons and assault weapons, high-pressure hoses and tear gas. They will be too late.

My lips are red from the heat and licking-wet, I curl them back from my teeth like a dog. The ash cracks and blisters in my mouth and I am laughing. For the first time in forever I am laughing.