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:
The prompt was a picture of two young Roman aristocrats, one with his face chiseled off.
(I did this exercise fifteen months ago as of the time of this post and do not remember the exact picture. It may even have been the picture above, which I was already vaguely familiar with and which informed my writing exercise.)
The Senate and People of Rome, in their enduring wisdom, deified Septimius Severus* after his death, and I can admit there is some justice to that. He ruled us well after a long lone of men who ruled us poorly. He rose from nothing –Some pissant town on the southern shores of the Mediterranean where the Sahara can be seen even from the water.
He became a politician, then a soldier, then a soldier-politician, and now that little pissant town can claim to be the birthplace of a God.
I am sure it is the most exciting thing that has ever or will ever happen to that sun-scorched place.
Ah, well. I begrudge the pissant place only because I needed to spend so much time there, and between the sun and the sand and the heat and the dust and the smell of camel dung burning for fuel and heat, I loathed the place.
Or really I should say I loathed the two boys of the Great God Septimius Severus.* They sent me there, one by Imperial command, the other because of his incompetence and greed.
I am a minor priest of the deified Septimius Severus.* My room and board and tickets to the games and brothel money all come as a result of my holy duty to maintain all the portraits of Septimius Severus* as befits the pride and dignity of a member of the Pantheon of Rome.
The Pax Romana, the Roman Peace that keeps the whole world quiet and calm and paying its taxes may just depend on Septimius Severus’* likeness smiling down on us. We saw little enough Roman Peace before his army made him our Emperor.
After his death, after his deification, two sons followed their father, each hoping to found a dynasty out of their pissant North African town.
There was Geminius, who won, at least for a little while, but not long enough to become a God himself, and Galbus, a greedy little boy who had the crimes of being both second-born and stupid to live down.
He did not.
He did manage to convince the garrison legions on the Rhine that he should be an Augustus like his old man, but he was no Septimius Severus* to win a civil war.
Galbus died. Geminius and the legions of the Danube and the East saw to that.
Now I walk the Earth in my role as holy priest to the deified Septimius Severus.*
I wander hither and yon with hammer and chisel, paintbrush and paint pot.
You see, in his life, Septimius Severus* —a God in the making — believed in family portraits.
It is my loathsome duty to find every single one in the world and remove Galbus’s face.
The divine Septimius Severus* had only one son, the noble and victorious Geminius, and I cannot return to Rome until no portrait proving otherwise remains.
Searching the pissant city of Leptis Magna alone took me two years of inspecting household altars and city temples and little likenesses people put into their dinnerware, their mosaics, their murals in their dining rooms.
Damn those boys. Damn my God.
I want to go home.
—
Note: I will begin with an explanation for the asterisk. As I said in the rules, I by and large have not corrected typos or other mistakes. This one was a little glaring. I knew who I was talking about, but I consistently wrote the emperor’s name as Severus Septimus not Septimius Severus. It was late, and I had already enjoyed a couple of pints. I hope my history nerd street cred remains intact despite this unfortunate lapse. In the meantime, I have corrected it with an asterisk in the published writing exercise so anyone looking to read some fast fiction about the Romans can enjoy a Septimius Severus story properly.
With that explanation out of the way, I will next confess that all of this history is largely wrong. I don’t remember the names of Septimius Severus’s sons, and I only remembered the name of the town —Leptis Magna— towards the end of my story. I made up the civil war between the sons using half a dozen similar power struggles as my template. One of these days I should look it up on Wikipedia and see how close I got.
The prompt was a picture of two young Romans, one with his face chiseled off. I am familiar with ‘damnatio memoriae,’ the concept of removing someone’s name from history. I have often wondered who is in charge of doing such a thing and what their life is like. This little writing exercise was my chance to play around with that idea. I had fun with it —especially in repeating ‘pissant’ and ‘loathsome’ as often as possible— and my writers group by and large thought I had all the history right, which was a gratifying if misplaced trust.
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