Here are two pieces that I wrote using what I called "inductive composition" in my previous post. I of course need a minimum of two to demonstrate it. These use the same characters and could be a part of a larger story, but I wrote them as independent stories, each centered around a particular idea. I also wrote them in reverse of the order I present them here, which is chronologically. I wrote the second one first and that spawned and idea for the first.
Both stories were inspired by some of the concepts I related in my post on genetic engineering, I also tried to relate these ideas in Divide The Sea, a much longer story. I wondered if I could refine the concepts to their purest narrative form. I don't know If I've succeeded, but in any case I offer these for your consideration.
Flowers And Sand
Compared to anything else that came across her tablet screen, the questions were stark. Their semantic and visual simplicity is what terrified her. Each was a sequence of no more than ten words without a conjunction or dependent clause among them. The eggshell white background and black, monospaced typeface served only to heap more anxiety upon Lizette as she stared at the exam and nearly saw it peering back into her.
The first question out of one thousand read: “Do flowers ever make you feel sad?”
Lizette had answered this with a yes and failed to move on because the next question read:
“Do old friends sometimes feel distant?”
She sensed movement and looked up to see a hazy figure against the ocean and sky. The beach was made of rough sand and it ended in grassy dunes. The person, the only other human Lizette could see, stepped onto a boardwalk that wove among the dunes and ended at the slender brick road on which the house stood. An autumn breeze had descended and was messing around with sand and the grass and the figure’s floral dress.
A moment later, the woman had climbed the porch and entered the large room that faced the ocean. It was cool in there and full of plants, some nearly two stories high. A table stood in the middle and Lizette sat at it, across from the other woman. The tablet lay near the edge of the table, face down. The woman looked at it and raised an eyebrow.
“It’s no use.” said Lizette. “I know what it will say. Lian, do you think I’ve changed so much?”
Lian said, “Are you asking because your husband didn’t come home last night?”
When Lizette didn’t answer, Lian removed a deck of cards from her purse. She lay them face up in a grid. Each bore an image, a title, and a couplet. Lian instructed Lizette to stare at the arrangement for a moment and try to remember what she saw. Then she flipped them over changed their positions, making sure that she moved with enough care to allow Lizette the opportunity to follow where each card went. She assembled them into a grid again.
“Turn over three.” said Lian. “This isn’t a magic trick or a seance. You saw the cards and your brain followed them, even if you weren’t paying attention. Whatever you pick, something inside of you has chosen it.”
The first card pictured a man standing on a balcony and holding a burning sheet of paper,
The top read, “The Perpetual Actor” and the couplet at the bottom said,
He needs no crowd, no audience for his voice
The script is loud and divines every choice
Lizette turned over a second card, entitled “Lover’s Shade” and picturing a man followed by an inverted shadow, a silhouette with a head that touched its owner’s feet. The man covered his eyes from blinding sunlight, but was unable to stop a crack that was splitting open is face. An eye peered through the crack.
Daylight uncovers hollow faces and eyes awake in kind,
hoping strangers lie in places of lovers left twice behind
As Lizette touched the third card, Lian put her hand on top and held Lizette’s hand down.
“You know what this is?” said Lizette.
Lian nodded and let her eyes flood, saying, “I was hoping for something different, but you see things too well. I’m the dishonest one.” She drew a long breath. “None of this is your fault; I’m to blame. Go to my house and you’ll find him there. Hate me if you want, but you should forgive him.”
Lizette left and Lian went back to the beach, where she dialed someone on her phone.
“I went over thinking I was going to tell her the truth, but when I saw her face I couldn’t. She was taking the exam again because she senses that she’s changing and you won’t love her anymore. That poor woman, she doesn’t know how else to live. You were right, if she finds out that you cheated on the test, it will crush her. The only thing she’ll ever think is that you were never meant to be together. Better to let her believe I led you astray.”
Lian held up the third card, the one Lizette had chosen but never seen. It was “The Lock and Key.”
If you think that this key guards a secret then you are wrong
Captive truth wants to flee, but you’ve been the keeper all along
Prophecies Once Spoken
From the distance afforded by the hills, the descent of mortar shells sounded almost calm, like the soft shoed rumbling of a thunderstorm gathering a few miles out to sea. Aaron stood in the archway of his chapel, where morning dew clung to the moss on the stones. He surveyed the steppes cut into the hills on which his abbey stood. Each plateau blossomed in a different brilliant color. They bore wheat and vegetables as well as weedy grass on which pigs grazed. The most important crop was Aaron’s unique breed of peonies that looked like candy because of their glossy swirls in purple and white and blue and gold. Aaron was dismayed the see a depression in the middle of his flower bed. The shadow assumed the shape of a human body.
He crossed the courtyard, throwing corn which chickens pecked from the seams between paving stones. When he reached his peonies, he realized that one of his guests had died. Aaron fetched a cart and took the corpse into the basement of his chapel, where he kept a morgue in which he prepared bodies for their final passage. On the wall hung a dried and pressed flower behind a square of cracked glass. Handwritten words on the backing paper read, “In honor of your first artificial breed, love Elish.”
The next morning, two women and three men climbed the hill. The three men were nearly, though not entirely, identical. The same was true of the women, the most striking difference between them being the blue eyes of one and the golden eyes of the other. They passed a dead pig in the tall grass. Its mouth was turned to the sky and a dark mass of insects flew in and out of it. Aaron had been crouched over the pig and when he saw the group he stood.
He said, “Elish”, as though unsure it was her.
The blue eyed woman said, “The natches burned out our neighborhood.”
“Won’t your own kind take you in?”
“Things with us aren’t good. Perhaps you can pretend to be our kind again?”
One of the men said, “Were you lying when you said he was refined?”
Aaron said, “Yes, I’m not a victim of genetic design. I’m a natch.”
Elish said, “When we met he was pretending to be refined. How could I have known? He was lucky; he was born just as smart and strong as any man designed to be that way.”
The five of them argued and the three men left.
Aaron said to the yellow eyed woman, “I’m surprised you came Lian, let alone stayed.”
Years before, Lian had claimed that she and Aaron were having an affair. Even though the match making program had placed Aaron and Elish together, it wasn’t perfect. Lian was herself a constant reminder of technology’s imperfection. Her eyes weren’t meant to be gold. When Elish pressed Aaron about the fictional fling, she found a truth far more unsettling. Aaron had forged the results that placed them together. He had said it was because he’d wanted so much to be with Elish. His wife concluded it was because he was a natural born who wanted so much to find acceptance among the genetically engineered elite.
Lian said, “When war comes, sometimes you find friends among former enemies.”
Elish smiled and said, “Our argument with the others was a ruse. My kind, as you call us, sent me here to spy on you, but as for me I’d like to make amends. Will you come back down the hill?”
She held out a wedding ring, to which Aaron replied, “You might want to look at something first.” He brought them to the morgue and said, “I get a lot of pilgrims.. They want to be more than they are and blame the regulations of refined society for their impoverished creativity. Unfortunately, the peonies killed this one.”
Elish shook her head, saying, “No, you’re lying, just to drive me away. You never forgave me.”
She left, leaving Aaron and Lian alone. Lian asked what Elish had meant and how she could possibly think that Aaron has somehow arranged the body as a stunt when he didn’t even know they were coming. Aaron explained that Elish understood the truth immediately, but that people believe what the need to.
“You know that.” he said.
“What do you think she wants to believe?”
“I designed my peonies, but now they’re sick. It’s the germs that give them those colors. The effect on nearby animals is a change in pheromones that draw poisonous blue flies to breed in their mouths when they sleep. But it only affects those with a particular gene that is, unfortunately, essential to the engineering process. It is like inbreeding; it weakens us. The result is a complex disease that science cannot cure fast enough. All of you being the same, you lack the happy accident that would reveal the truth. And all of you may die of the same thing.”
Lian nodded, saying, “Elish is an agricultural engineer. It seems her work is meaningless now.”
“In work, as in love, she is insecure. I had hoped she changed, but she hasn’t. She’s like this man.”
The woman considered the man. His mouth was ajar. Behind the teeth blacked by insect waste, she could see a tongue pot marked by thousands of tiny craters. Blue flies inject their victims with anesthetic before borrow inside and laying their eggs. The larvae gestate in a matter of hours. Given that the cadaver’s eyes were opened, it wasn’t unreasonable to think this man had awoken to find himself paralyzed with a mouth full of worms competing to escape.
Lian said, “Aren’t you the happy accident?”
“I don’t know. I’m not so sure it’s happy for you and your kind.”
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