Hello again everyone,
Here’s another example of fast fiction from my monthly writers group’s warming up exercises. For anyone interested in a full explanation, here’s a link.
A quick rundown of the rules:
Rule #1: These pieces of fast fiction were generated from a prompt chosen at random during one of my monthly writers group meetings. I will label that prompt at the top and where I use it in the prose.
Rule #2: WordPress allows me a ‘click here to read the rest of the story’ break, and that will be used before the fast fiction begins in earnest so people browsing through this blog are not overwhelmed.
Rule #3: The prose of the fast fiction shall be transcribed from my handwriting accurately: Line breaks, grammar, punctuation, spelling, what-have-you. The point of showing a 10- or 15-minute first draft is saying what you tried to do in that time, so what does editing really get me? The very rare changes I really do deem necessary shall be noted with an asterisk and an apologetic explanation at the end.
Rule #4: After the fast fiction I will include a few sentences about my first thoughts of the prompt. These entries are less about the actual prose and more about the exercise as a whole. Post-gaming that exercise will be a big part of the end result.
And that’s it. Here we go.
Prompt:
“It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.”
Brain dead.
Those are the magic words: Brain dead.
My father needs a new heart, but the nature of his problem is such that porcine and bovine valves will not do the trick. No wizardry with stents or shunts or things made out of non-carbon mesh that are heralded as the wonders of the modern age.
My father needs a new heart.
Full stop. End of statement.
Organ donors are only half a solution, too.
A man in the morgue will not give his heart in good enough condition for the kind of old school chest-cracking 10-hour-surgery my father’s surgeons say they need to get the job done. Too much of the tissue would be necrotic if it comes of a willing organ donor already on the slab.
“It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.”
That’s what the head of cardio-thoracic surgery said to me.
Then I held my father’s hand for a while, prayed over his hospital bed as he slept, and then –without any sleep in between– I walked into my next shift overseeing the signalling system for my major metropolitan traffic system.
Brain. Dead.
They have to be brain dead.
That is what is going through my head, over and over again in a loop, as I do my job.
Most of the signals are automated, of course. Lights cycle every 45 seconds, Green, Red, with a ten-second Yellow in between.
At rush hour, with a lot of good metrics and the aid of video monitoring, we tinker with the cascade of lights up and down blocks to try and ease traffic through the major commuter corridors.
And I watch the people on the television, going about their lives.
Brain Dead.
Brain Dead.
Those are the magic words.
“It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.”
And I worry. It gnaws at me. What is going to happen when I see a bicyclist get side-swiped, or a motorcyclist rear-ended, or a motorist t-boned? Am I going to be horrified, or hopeful?
And what about my job? Am I doing it to the best of my ability? Last night temperatures plunged. There’s black ice out there. It would be within my power to flip a switch, turn a knob, and the statistical odds of my father getting his new heart would increase because of my actions.
How good a person am I, really?
Do I not do it because it is wrong, or because I can’t guarantee my innocent victims will go into the hospital brain dead?
“It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.”
My mind races as the hours tick over. A tractor trailer overturns, but the driver climbs out of his rig right as rain.
A minivan skids off the road. The airbags function as they are supposed to. Everyone is okay.
Ambulances come. Ambulances go.
It’s the dead of winter, and I cannot grow my father a vegetable.
It’s not even a case of watched pots never boiling. The element under the pot is on minimum.
I have the power at my fingertips to make that water boil.
What an evil thought, and yet…
“It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.”
The hospital calls me seven hours into my shift. The ringing phone makes me jump. They tell me my father’s heart failed on him an hour ago, despite their best efforts. He didn’t get enough oxygen to his brain.
He is brain dead.
What do I want them to do?
—
Note: That’s where I ran out of time. I will say right at the top that, “It’s the dead of winter, and I cannot grow my father a vegetable” has to be one of the better off-the-cuff witticisms I have made in these exercises.
Okay, so what do I remember about this one? I remember my mind immediately went to a ‘Doctor Frankenstein and Igor’ thing, but it felt really forced. I kept repeating the prompt over and over, looking for a fresher take, and then I came up with the idea of using the prompt over and over again, as if someone was mulling it over. Why would someone mull over such a weird thing to say?
Because they might have the power to make new corpses, but would they?
If memory serves, I only came up with the ending on the fly with less than a minute left on the clock. I remember the writers group really liking this one. I’m fond of it too, with a lingering feeling that maybe I go to the well of people dying for some fast pathos a little too often in these exercises…
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