Hitomi Kelsey Ko
Word count: 542
Title: A world of waste and demons
You’re alone.
You kneel in your own shadow, head bowed down, eyes to the Earth – the only barrier between you and Hell.
Nobody can save you now, from the things you already know but you lie to yourself about, buried in the back of your head.
Think about your leader. Zed.
Tall, black curtain haircut, buttoned office shirt. Leads the resistance. Headmaster’s son. An absolute pain in the ass. But he saved you, he was there when you woke up with no memory. If it weren’t for him, demons would’ve made a breeding ground out of your wasteland of a high school and flooded into the world. He’s also the only reason you can kill off those students – creatures wearing fake smiles, idiots who never saw their own face brimming with the vileness of their own hedonism and self-centered desires, oozing out of them. No, it was never about the resistance – you just wanted to kill every disgusting human, and Zed gave you the perfect excuse to do it.
Now, think about your friend, Julian.
Also tall. Long hair. Kinda looks like a typical band guitarist but plays a harp and ukulele. Gorgeous. Looks more like a cult leader than Zed does – practically brings his friends around him in a circle as they sit on the campus main green. He’s flawed, he admits it, and certainly has his own demons but… He sees it in himself and others. Yet, he’s fine with it. It’s so strange but, he’s the first you’ve met who’s shown you that actually, he does love his friends, genuinely, and them him. It’s not perfect; no ‘order’ or ‘discipline’ to the way his group conducts itself but the affection, the respect is genuine, and most importantly mutual. You wanted to be part of it. For the first time, you didn’t look at humans in disgust and contempt, but in awe.
For the first time, somebody was genuinely important to you.
Nobody had ever glowed so brightly as him, warm, inviting, like an incandescent light bulb. The world was an ocean of desaturated blurs, greys and browns, beiges at best. You lived in it for a year, maybe 17 more before you woke up knowing nothing, no background knowledge of the beings that walk around you everyday, save for the abhorrent visions that had been harassing you – that’s when you’d find yourself yearning for the grey. Even the grey felt like a world of colours, compared to the visions.
Shadowy demons would cling to people. They’d hover like black balloons over the students, their wretched bodies just coils of writhing, tangled, barbwire. With those tails and ash-colored fingers they’d drain the life out of them, growing and feeding off their sin. Their hosts yap to you, typical teenage nonsense while looking you in the eye, still smiling, oozing out black, tarish liquid. These were the first things you’d see arriving at school in the mornings, and the last thing circling your mind before bed, reminding you, this is what you’ll see again the next day.
And somehow, in a world, so bleak, in a world of waste and demons, you’d met Julian. And you’d fallen in love with him. And with it, you’ve realized how empty you are inside.
PROGRESS LOG
1. Good job, Kelsey
2. Writing this felt frustrating at first – this was a character I hadn’t been in touch with for years and failed to develop in another course once so getting back into it was daunting, but after I got the story and creative juices flowing, it came naturally to me and I was excited to keep writing more.
3. Writing about what the world looked like for this character surprised me – the imagery I had for this character’s story was very bleak and bland – I had originally spawned them during a moment of frustration and stagnation in my life and so there was nothing beyond a few faces, and a general location where the story took place. All of that however broadened and spread out, fleshed out into a proper world with so much more potential after I let loose.
After doing this exercise I really want to write more about the lore – you can already see it in the third or fourth paragraph but these characters have relationships to each other and originally there was more I had written. I had to shave off a good chunk of plot that I’d somehow created on the spot from just freestyling.
4. I found that the “You” pronoun, the 2nd person POV makes things very intimate, almost intrusive when you write in this tone. This was especially true in the writing of A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid, where the writer is almost attacking the reader, after making very clear who the reader is supposed to be. It’s interesting because you can choose to hover somewhere between staying on stage, or breaking the fourth wall. I’ve also found from Jeanette Brown that it can be instructional, so it has a stronger voice in controlling or guiding the reader’s eye through the story, and so I’m a lot more aware of the pacing and how it can keep them engaged. I think I’ve taken on a voice most similar to that of Lahiri’s, as she wrote in Once in a Lifetime, without realizing. I noticed what Kincaid and Brown’s pieces could teach me right away, but the entirety of Lahiri’s piece is telling the reader who they are, and they don’t stop until the story ends. Kincaid describes why they feel so much hatred and animosity for people like their white reader, while Brown recounts an experience. But you have no idea who Lahiri or the reader is until you keep reading the story and find out further about the narrator, and what you, the reader, left behind when you flew back to India.
5. These characters were a little more complicated to develop because they come from real people, and I’d often struggle whenever I wrote or developed them because I’d always stop myself and go “that’s too different” or “that’s too similar”. I was finally able to develop them and allow these characters to become their own people when I decided to let go of my source material and accept my instincts and visions for the characters.
