Today, waiting for the kettle to boil during my break at work, I
picked up a two or three day old copy of The Sun and read that 'Britain
exploded in fury over...' a misdemeanour someone had made. This got me
thinking: what if Sweden blew up because of anger, or Madagascar
combusted with pity. Here's my ten minute written and edited attempt at
this idea:
The nation's seized by panic. The streets run
brown with the sludge of blasted supermarkets. The land's largest bridge
is strewn with train carriages that were derailed amid the frenzy. Days
after the first reports of hysteria, the cause of the devastation is
still unclear. While the rivers overflow and flood the surrounding
countryside, clogged as they are with tornadoed cars, helicopter-borne investigators seek to make sense of it all. The population's gone
invisible, with people in hiding, or buried under hills of refuse. All
that's known is an outbreak of mass fury was followed by the
spontaneous felling of hundreds of thousands of trees. As indignation
took hold on streets nationwide, traffic jams turned ugly, fires broke
out without apparent cause, birds flocked to flee, and the airports
failed. The Royal Family has been unavailable for comment.
That's a good one. I could do with even a bit more surrealism as in parts it reads like a "normal" desaster but it definitively has some great parts. (is it "tornadoed" cars or really "torandoed" cars? as you wrote, though?) In any case, the whole thing reminded my of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening": http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2430796057/
ReplyDeletekeep it up
Thanks for your comment and for pointing out the typo. I think I was torn between keeping the tone quite conventional, in order to parody the style of a newspaper report, and going into complete surrealism, which I find enjoyable to write, but challenging, since it takes a lot of imagination. In fact, I would like to write more like Philippe Soupault, whose surrealist work I really admire, but I find it hard to sustain that kind of original thinking.
ReplyDeleteMaybe both goes hand in hand. Surrealism plus a seemingly matter-of-fact style we know from the press which, too, all too often sells complete apeshit nonsense as trustworthy news coverage. I liked the Royal Family comment at the end ;)
ReplyDelete