Three Vignettes

Fiction

The Sound of Having Your Life on the Line

I raised both hands above me, crossed them at the wrists, and then, taking the slowest, deepest breath I could muster, I lowered them again; one curled up in front of me, the other raised behind me — both of them bunched into fists.

They tell you to stay calm. Breathe. You'll never face anything you aren't prepared for.

But as I lowered my arms, I could already feel them shaking.

I don't think I can ever describe in words the feeling of combat. It's terrifying. Whether winning or losing, you act on instinct; you feel so out of control, so helpless. And yet you have never before been so solely responsible for keeping your own life.

With each lunging step forward, I could hear my instructor's voice scolding me. My form was wrong. My movements were sluggish. My punches were weak. But I was so afraid. I was careening into my opponent, vulnerable, unbalanced.

And as I caught myself with each step backwards, I blocked his blows just moments before they impacted, raising my head surprised to be alive.

I didn't even keep it up for a minute. I was scared by my own heartbeat, thumping against my ears in that rapid, plunging pulse. I fell apart. My breaths became sharp, irregular, wheezing. I was on the verge of sobbing.

With each strike and blow my head reverberated with the lessons they taught me. And yet when it all came down to it, I still breathed like a child.

A Bug

Dani here! This story was revised in October 2024 for the sake of my university application. For the original 2023 edition, click here.

When animals get so small, it gets difficult to think of them as living. They become machines.

Take the wasp, parading around the house, playing its monotonous note. Its sole instruction; to fly until it finds food. It doesn't know that it's trapped indoors, going in circles. There's no check for that in the code.

It dodges the cats — it can figure out what they are. Primitive image recognition, hard-coded from millions of years of evolution. What it can't recognise is the plastic cup that keeps trying to catch it. Its misapplied instincts can only categorise it as some kind of large mammal. When it at last gets trapped inside, then, it repeatedly tries and fails to insert its stinger into the thing's "flesh".

After several seconds of this, it suddenly stops.

The wasp has gotten stuck in a loop. It simply cannot figure out what's going on — why it is yet to be swallowed. And to its surprise, soon enough, the huge maw of the "creature" lifts away, and the wasp is outside. For a couple moments, the bug sits still. It is in what could only be described as "awe". The experience of events it was not coded for has changed something in it. Thoughts fire in its tiny brain in so many brand-new, fascinating ways.

But then the code resumes, and the wasp forgets. It flies away, into the air, playing its single, buzzing note.

Broken Corpses

In a crater, in the desert, lay two corpses, back to back. Whatever colour their skins once were is indecipherable, for one body has been bleached white, the other, charred black.

The black one's legs are curled up, its hands cup its face. The skin is hard, cracking off at the touch, like burnt pastry. It still smells of fire. At points on its belly and back, the flesh has burst, leaving round holes rimmed by black blood. If you could see its face, you would find its eyes have melted away.

The face of the white one is clearly visible. The skin is pale, yellowing, almost see-through. Lips dry and colourless, eyes that look right past you. It smells rotten. Far from bursting, this one's belly is sucked in, collapsed, and where the belly would be, a thousand bug-like holes tunnel through the flesh.

The commonality between the bodies in the crater is that they are hollow. De-boned. They look so human, frozen in time, mannequins — but the black one's insides have melted and spilt out like tar, and the white one's insides have been infested, eaten. They are husks. If you pressed on either of them too hard, they would simply collapse. They are not corpses. Corpses are bodies that have ceased functioning. No, they are seashells; exoskeletons once inhabited, now abandoned. There is nothing human in either of them.

And all throughout this desert, it is the same. In each crater, sprawled on each dry dune, each desolated place. All I see are broken corpses.