Pink Land
Short Story Extract
This story reflects a woman’s journey from regional Australian to London as she pursues a career as a writer and encounters the cultural shock of city life. I intended to capture the experience of Australian country life and the tension of familial bonds between mother and daughter to provoke engagement in the reader.
In her country the leaves would shield themselves from the sun. She recalled a world in bloom, forever with room to grow and breathe and speak. She looked to an earth soaked in the early light of a blushing sky, moments before the heat would hammer through. A mother’s garden neatly plotted, a north facing suburban block of soil, alive and fertile. Lined with geraniums and hydrangeas, a hue of pink adorned the garden beds, encased in the sweet essence and oil of the land.
And on those summer days, a dryness that would swallow her whole with a heat that emanated from below her feet, blistering the earth’s epidermis. Those days when the hands of the sun carried danger with the whispers of fire, the ground would then transform to a dark clay. But no matter the dryness, the land was forgiven and the plants healed as she waited and listened for their everlasting sigh. This abundance of beauty both comforting and vital, spoke to her as she sat in the garden and breathed life into her stories.
The news of her writing post to London shocked her mother, who’s domestic disposition kept her at odds from ever understanding her daughter’s literary interests. Her mother secretly wondered who would ever want to read her daughter’s strange and unsettling stories, for she knew that her daughter was both strange and unsettling and perhaps unloveable. What would ever become of her? At the breakfast table one morning her mother quietly inquired 'Why don’t you ever write about happy people?’ And sensing her daughter’s swift retreat to the question, went back to buttering her toast and never raised the topic again. Believing it better for his daughter to accept the decent job at the local post office, her mother could only muster a limp enthusiasm for her forthcoming travels.
She had always longed for the opportunity to write in London. She had a sense it would cure her deep-seeded feelings of alienation but instead as she would come to find, the city would only amplify it.
When she arrived in London she was met with a solemn monotonous grey. A city foreign, buried under a pollutant veil. The absence of sun and the daily frenzied movement of bodies disorientated her, left her exhausted and terrified. And lead her to retreat further into her already insular, fragile state. When she finally decided upon her flat, it was not for the typical selling points, for it was suffocatingly small, the ceilings were low and the south facing windows never brought in sunlight. But her decision was made when she caught sight of the bathroom and it’s striking pink tiles that lined the floors and walls in perfect unison. She wondered why the pink room calmed her nerves, maybe it reminded her of the shades of that southern world or did the tiles in their formality create a sense of order, her first taste of control in this new city?
Mothers FPS
Short story extract
This short story is set in a dystopian world where women are old captive and under surveillance, and required to look after young mean who are digital soldiers fighting real life wars on screen. The irony of the story is that over 15 years ago these women raised sons who become addicted to video games. These boys were extracted from their homes and forced into online combat fighting, as a process of evolution the boys physical bodies have morphed to amplify their intersection with technology. I wanted this story to be a commentary on the violence and dark addictive nature of online gaming and technology, pointing to the worlds of our future.
We women are searching for our stolen sons, boys taken from us, to fight in unimaginable wars. Our sons were school boys, gamers, celebrated for their skill and accuracy. They held high scores and death counts in their virtual worlds. And at that time, as mothers who welcomed these video games into our homes, we had no clue we were feeding their addiction, short wiring their brains. We were unknowingly training assassins far beyond games or simulations. Their progress was tracked and at age 10 they were recruited and hand-picked for a new program deep within the military, Operation FPS - First Person Shooter. Training began immediately, and they left promising to return but they never did. They could now fight and kill in wars scattered across the globe. Now on a screen, this was no longer a simulation but reality. That was 15 year ago. The world has completely changed, ravaged by war as continents battle each other, and we women are controlled, dutifully serving the Ecliptors. And now the painful irony of it all, our jobs are to nurture and care for these young men as we once had before. Our instructions, to treat each boy as our collective sons, forgetting our blood lines. But everyday we are in search of one thing, our sons, or our biologs as the Ecliptors called them, dreaming of reuniting with them after 15 years apart.
The drones escort us. They fill the sky and hang in the air above us - watching, following and tracking our every move. Their mechanical hum is forever present, for if one of us tries to escape, the drone would extend it’s fulcrum, reach upon our scalps and shoot us dead. I’m consumed by the sound of their incessant rumble. I feel it on my skin, in my nose and throat. Who would have thought that the outside air could become so suffocating. I’ve forgotten silence and privacy is only a pleasure I reach for, in my past.
Research proved that the boys performed better in screened combat when looked after by a nurturing mother figure. It allowed the boys who are now young men to bring singular focus to the screen while the women would take care of their everyday needs. But this meant in our daily acts of servitude we unwittingly became accomplices to murder and war crimes. It is an unbearable existence to see the carnage but we endure this ritual in the hopes of seeing our lost son’s faces.
And the boys needed us more than ever, they had deteriorated from years of virtual fighting, never leaving the confines of their ‘gaming’ rooms. They had limited movement from the waist down and their bones were weak, tissue fatty and organs squashed. Each grossly obese, skin pale and patchy, incased with a heavy stream of sweat. The only strength of their bodies were their hands which were now muscular and toned from years spent on their remote controls. Each finger was agile and sharp, ready to kill in five, four, three, two, one. But their mutated hands are rendered useless for any other task, now only able to move across the remote and their medication halts their ability to speak or write.
We reach the FPS complex and one by one we step off the escalator, towards the fate of our day. I follow numbers and arrows plastered on hallways, directing to me to the room, the scent of mould and sweat lingers, seeping out from each door, where the boys are kept. We each carry a single basket, holding the contents of the day, pills, cream, needles and packaged food. The drone remains above me, ensuring that I do not stray off track. I arrive before the door, 4735, could it be him?