Short Story 'Engine' published by Emerald City

My short story 'Engine' has been published by the nice folk at Emerald City, formerly Cow Creek Review. Check it out and the rest of the first issue published in December 2019 here

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Fragments of Colonization in Ray Bradbury’s “The Long Rain.”

Image from here

We weren’t meant for this; no Earthman was or ever will be able to take it.

                                                                                                                        -p.64

Article may contain spoilers

“The Long Rain,” one of Ray Bradbury’s famed short stories within the collection The Illustrated Man, is first and foremost a science fiction tale. This should be fairly obvious to the reader from the outset; all of the surrounding stories are science fiction, ranging in subject from artificial intelligence, virtual reality, to nuclear apocalypse, also the story is set on Venus (a dead giveaway, some say.) I believe that, intentionally or not, Bradbury has effectively used the short story form to give an allegory for colonization, from the vapid perspective of the colonizer.

            The Illustrated Man was written in 1950 and published in 1951. Although fairly removed from the traditional colonial sphere in America, Bradbury still collected the stories for publishing in the midst of a colonial overhaul; independence movements were springing up across Africa, Asia and the rest of the globe, with India already gaining independence from Britain in 1948, just three years prior to publishing. The twentieth century would continue to see revolutions and recedings as empires in their last formal appearance were beaten back. Although America was and is not usually seen to be an empire in comparison to the former empires of Britain, Germany and other nations, it isn’t impossible that the global backdrop to Bradbury’s working period worked it’s way into his writing thematically.

            The environment of Venus in “The Long Rain” is horrific and treacherous. Bradbury describes it thus:

           

The white, white jungle with the pale cheese- coloured leaves, and the earth carved of wet camembert, and the tree boles like immense toadstools- everything black and white. And how often could you see the soil itself? Wasn’t it mostly a creek, a stream, a puddle, a pool, a lake, a river, and then, at last, the sea?

                                                                                                            -p.55

The image of a jungled and treacherous landscape plagued with dense rains is reminiscient of previously colonized lands such as Bangladesh that have monsoon seasons; many logs from soldiers in 17^th century campaigns in these regions complain of the heat, rain, damp, jungle plants & beasts, and disease, as if  they had invaded a forsaken planet rather than another country. It should be noted that the description of the land as being bodies of water is relevant to the colonial experience, as water has frequently acted as a conduit of empire; the Americas were discovered and claimed during Columbus’ voyage to find a quicker way to India, the Atlantic would eventually be crossed time and again for the trade of sugar, spice, and humans as slaves while rivers would be used as prying paths into continents such as South America and Africa.

            Despite the obvious hostility of the Venusian landscape, humans have built abodes on the planet’s surface, called ‘Sun domes.’

A yellow house, round and bright as the sun. A house fifteen feet high by one hundred feet in diameter, in which was warmth and quiet and hot food and freedom from rain. And in the center of the Sun Dome, of course, was a sun. A small floating free globe of yellow fire, drifting in a space at the top of the bulding where you could look at it from where you sat, smoking or reading a book or drinking your hot chocolate crowned with marshmallow dollops. There it would be, the yellow sun, just the size of the Earth sun, and it was warm and continuous, and the rain world of Venus would be forgotten as long as they stayed in that house and idled their time.

                                                                                                                        -p.55

As part of the process of assimilation, the colonizer will bring in their own systems of governance, commerce, finance, and ultimately culture. Bradbury creates an excellent image of this in the mini-earths, complete with mini-suns, existing in ignorance and defiance of the host planet’s own environment. The story ends with the lieutenant entering a Sun Dome, feeling its warmth, looking at all of the luxuries, and abandoning his wet clothes, and indeed the memories of the events outside the dome.

The Venusians themselves never actively appear in the story; instead, the aftermath of one of their attacks is observed at the anguish of the rocket crash survivors, who hoped to find the shelter of a Sun Dome. Instead, it lies in ruins.

Every once in a while the Venusians come up our of the sea and attack a Sun Dome. They know if they can ruin a Sun Dome they can ruin us.

The Venusians took [the Sun Dome survivors] all down to the sea. I hear they have a delightful way of drowning you. It takes about eight hours to drown the way they work it.

                                                                                                                        -p.59

The reader is given only savagery about the alien inhabitants of Venus; we are not offered a view as to why they attack the Sun Domes and torture humans in such a way, but only that they do. We perceive them through the eyes of the colonizer, appalled by the actions of the host inhabitants who may be actively resiting colonization.

Bradbury’s story retains a focus on the journey of a group through a hostile and maddening imaginary landscape where the rains never stops, the storms are lethal and all colour has been washed away, but still the story carries some signifiers at the relationship between colonizer and colonized subjects and objects that were apparent at the time of writing, and remain important in reading the story today.

Bradbury, Ray. “The Long Rain” in The Illustrated Man. (Bantam: New York, 1967) pp. 53-65

Isle

        

  "I will leave behind my terraces and my walls... They will be enough. 

              They will be more than enough."   - Cruso in Foe by J.M. Coetzee.

           It’s Narda. It just won’t get better, the cancer has really charred a hole through his jaw. Probably shouldn’t eat his meat. Good job I don’t have to milk him either. Still, I let him continue grazing with the others on the slopes. Can’t see the benefit in killing him. Maybe it’d leave more grass for the others, but not very likely. I feel the rest of his warm, short coat for ticks and lumps before sending him on his way for whoever I grasp out of the herd next. I often find wounds from play and tease among themselves, or from when they’ve gotten too far into the woods, among thorns and denser brush, or maybe something jagged washes ashore. Ten. I always make sure there are just ten of them. I don’t need any others.

            There wasn’t much more when old da was about. Back then counting the goats was his job. He did it with rough hands and force; the goats would bleat and spring away in confusion renewed daily. It was to feel the meat he said. To feel the bones. There were even more goats when mother was there too, and even more back when the old terraces and the old huts were just the huts and the terraces and people skittered and roamed the Isle completing constant tasks in smiling groups. The goats would skip and tumble about the terraces and be found in the huts. They shrunk the woods with their trampling and munching and browsing. It’s grown back now. It’s even spread.

            The goats have complete free roam of the terraces, no longer filled with rich dirt and crops, but grass and stubble. Gale’s pregnant, so soon I’ll choose an old one to bleed out. Still unsure if Narda’s flesh, hide and bones will be consumable or usable. I don’t like putting out the goat’s sparky little lives, as I find myself openly chattering away to them, treating them as my brothers and equals. It’s not often I have to kill one, though. Just to keep the even ten. There’s the fish of the sea and beach, the birds and their eggs which they lay in crevices in the Northern cliff face, and the leaves and roots and berries and mushrooms of the woods. A good crop to top it off, mainly hardy root vegetables and perpetual greens. I collect the rainwater when it comes, and there’s the stream that comes through the woods around the old huts. There’s a well, too, but I don’t always trust it. Too old. Too underused. I’d go down and clear the tunnel, but I don’t like the thought of the dark, small space. That was old da’s job too.

            I can still talk mother’s language. On stormy nights when the wind and rain roar at the hut an I can hear the sea blast the shore, I whisper some of the things she might say to me, out in the air as it goes from humid to a crisp coolness in the eye of the storm. After storms, the beach is filled with some small an large treasures, and a decent stock of driftwood. I hear my mother’s language in the lapping of the waves of the post-storm morning, a calm swash forever up the bay.

            Old da tried to beat the language out of us. Re and throbbing, he’d scream that on the Isle we talk the same tongue, we have to be part of the same group, we must all be the same. The others would go silent and sad. I remember their voices warbling old un-understandable songs out in the fishing boats coming back in to the bay. Mother would sing her own tongue’s songs when working the terraces, and everyone admired them. Slowly, after old da’s first explosion, the Isle became emptier and emptier, until we had to slaughter more than half the goats and burn their corpses before they rotted. The woods swallowed the huts, once populous, and the terraces got riddle with weeds. Soon, the well started to become untrustworthy. It was just old da, mother, me and the goats. The goats knew nothing. Gleefully, they explored the territories opened up to them. I’ve seen the stories and histories painted on the walls of the old huts. Their colours and patterns once soothed me but now they make me sad, as they are written in some other language that some of the other Islanders brought with them. Somehow I felt their language and writing was much more ancient than I’ll ever truly grasp.

            The goats congregate around old da’s grave, as it makes a sudden and unnatural change in the otherwise naturally sloping topography. When he died, with just me and him on the Isle, he smiled, weak and feverish, rook my hands, and whispered “It’s all yours. I leave it all for you, my lad. The Isle is your inheritance.”

I do not count the seasons as I should. I understand the changes that happen over a year, but no longer have anyone to share the significance of time with. I wait for them. Mother told me about them, the groups, and their many names; “coast guard,” “army,” “police,” “government.” Strange, nonsensical names. They will come, and they will be people, as I am people, and we will finally share the Isle, just like before. Just as it should be.

The Last Fisherman

(click to see The real-life last fishermen)

Each knot of the net is another nobble in his history, swimming in his memory unwittingly; the moments where his father would come home, cold and wet, cracking the knuckles of his index fingers with his thumbs, standing in the threshold dripping & huffing while he warmed up to greet his family; those same beaten & burned fingers pointing out the carving at port, marked 1604, a crude picture of a boat, which the fisherman's own hands, a child's hands back then, traced out by the freezing beach. Unbeknownst to him, as he methodically counts knots, he counts the details of himself; the view he breathed in of the village from the slopes; walking past the huge Captain Mickey Morton to work on his boat, fresh-faced & wearing new boots; hauling his first catch, being coerced quickly to disentangle and release the young fish back into the ocean; the storm that overturned Morton's boat, sprawling the fisherman into the twilight depths while cruel waves swashed above. He tosses the net overboard.

The knots of the net scrape the deck as the net returns. Husks, shells, the odd wee fish, and a boatload of plastic. If only it were edible or useful... Ha! If only it were non-existent! He empties the net, folds it, ties it up, and puts it back in its place on deck, where it will never be touched again, save by the slime that will build up over time as neighbouring empires of microorganisms duel for the rich nutrients the net has captured from the sea.

When the ship comes ashore, it will sit upon the beach, giving way to splayed ribs, like all the other hundreds of boats already dwindling away; once, those ribs held together a vessel that clogged with barnacles and bumped with sharks. As the fisherman sees the dull glint of his village in the distance, he eases off the engine of the boat, allowing it to coast, and then finally be tugged dimly by the current. His mouth gaping with silence, he imagines his life from the moment he touches shore; his boat unfolding and rotting; the sea turning black, riddled with flotsam; his hobble-backed shuffles to pick up the dole; his face becoming blotchy and red as he wears out a seat in the pub, telling tales of storms, catches, fish and gulls, knots he once tied, an ocean that brought the village and himself into being.

Silently, amid the reel & writhe of the ocean, the great booming womb of the sea, robed with ice, carressed with sand while dancing with rocky cliffs, the last fisherman exhales, and falls over the side of the boat, leaving it to drift in fog at dusk, mooring itself alongside old fridges and washing machines on the rocks down the way.

The Birth

I wrote this piece last year for a 'micro-short' story competition, with a word limit of 300 words (I think.) For whatever reason they never got back to me, perhaps an email mess-up on my part. 

edit: more recently, this story was printed in the "Bangin' Lemz" zine, along the theme of 'the birth,' along with a poem entitled 'Foetal. Infantile.' 

The Birth

Crawling from planet to planet, so huge that its great haunches kick these spheres out of their gravitational prisons, hurtling them through space until caught by a greater star, throwing the planet around itself infinitesimally; barely noticed by the hulking creature. Sometimes there is the bubbling of evolution in the placid lakes, sometimes the cusp of a civilisation. All discarded by the immortal beast. He had visited these planets once before, barely a fledgling. They presented no promise, not to the in-built preconceptions reeling in the daemon’s many brains.

            The pulsing mass of sensors on the creatures head rotates, receiving and computing radiations and vibrations, chemicals caught on solar winds. It smelt, tasted, heard and saw everything. It witnessed suns crack open and die, unloading hearts in a tragic finale spanning thousands of years. It saw planets grapple into formation, asteroids closing together, some just making it, others gaining too much weight, or not enough. The qualifications are random, undetermined.

            One of the beast’s many sets of wings would propel it, its great arms outstretched for clumps of rock and dust. Its muscles were humongous, its organs monstrous, pumping dark fluids through continent-wide veins, its brains pulsing with instinctual thoughts.

            In one hand it clutches a small moon, with a species nigh on the brink of developing light-sensing cells in their amoebic bodies, so close to breakthrough. The mighty beast decides that this small moon is not worth it; it has failed. It crushes the rock, dust and particles spiralling out carelessly into the orbit of a nearby planet. The beast continues on its journey.

            Its goal comes into view; the green and blue planet. It seemed most promising in those fertile years hence. The beast stills for a moment, its outlandish organs throbbing and pumping in the deeps of space.

            It caresses the planet; observes the crags and falls of its geography, tastes its mineral rich waters. Eventually satisfied, the beast rises, stirred by internal twinges and workings; with twitching limbs it ensnares the planet, and something hatches from its chest, bursting; a strange blue fluid flowing outward, almost a gas; it fills the sky, entrenches the sea and litters the dirt. Soon it has seeped through, dissolved into the very core of the globe.

            The beast seeps off into the dark of space, observing the planet for a time before turning to a planet on the outer cusp of the universe that it had fertilised aeons past.

It will return when its children have grown.