Skip to main content

limp soil, live seeds




“Look!” Yong whispered to her little brother as she cracked the door open a little further. Within seconds, Han’s head popped up below her chin as he peeked at the sleeping dog. Its leg was pedalling furiously. He looked up at Yong and giggled in delight. “I wonder what it’s dreaming about.”

“Shhh, you’ll wake it up.” Yong hissed. “Go help Intercom set the table!”

Whilst pedalling on its back in the cramped grey yard, tongue haplessly lolling on warm asphalt, the dog felt all the smells of the cold night wind rushing — as it ran across a wasteland of rotten fields, leaping over dappled pools of moonlight. Nose primed and quivering, it sniffed the bitter notes, the crackling browns of dustiness, the strong alkaline crunch of chemicals … and latched onto a new scent that pulsed in the air.

Curious, the dog bounded home in fits and starts, following the metallic smell, ears cocked in the direction of the dilapidated barn.

“Aish. Heel.” came Master’s low growl. He was pushing a creaking wheelbarrow exuding that metal scent — blood! It padded excitedly towards Master, with a half-bark that immediately faltered under Master’s fierce glower.

The dog dutifully followed as Master began fervently murmuring while sowing his bag of seeds and smearing the fields with mush from the wheelbarrow, until the scent of fresh blood and bone covered everything else.

Then came the sun, piercing the earth in reds and violets, cooking the field of mush. Alone, the dog dug, and gobbled the rust-stained dirt in a frenzy. Then came fear. “It’s not sprouting.” Master warbled and warped, towering above the dog as the wasteland radiated wavy lines of heat.

The dog ran.

Yong and Han ate their pills quietly as Intercom busied with sharing the news. “Environmentalist Cult busted for unauthorised killings — Ha! More like necromancer wannabes think they can resurrect plant life. Global Strain Leaches Nitrogen, Green Famine follows. That’s the true end for organic farmers, but on the bright side, there’s been a breakthrough in lab-grown nutrients-”

A sudden barrage of barking sounded, and the tension uncoiled like a taut string cut loose. The siblings slumped in their chairs. Intercom pinched the bridge of its nose and blared over the barking. “That's it! Override! We never should've allowed a stray canine to-” Yong ran out before it could finish.

She hurried to hush the dog before it bursts a lung, but it fell silent as soon as she came. Yong slowed as she saw fresh turds on the floor, and her brain short-circuited. She stopped in her tracks, stunned. Yong slowed as she saw the dog's fresh turd on the floor, and short-circuited. She stopped in her tracks, stunned.

It was a curious sight. The turd was definitely warmer than it should be — tendrils of heat were clearly rising off it before her eyes. It sported an off, spotty colour, and it had a grainy texture, almost as if-



Yong cried out as the seeds began to sprout.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ABSURDISM, EXISTENTIALISM, FREE WILL, POSTMODERNISM

 After the war, Introduction The first world war threw society into a state of disillusionment, and a fracturing of the staunch belief in morals became prominent, sparking literary advancements that challenged romantic ideals, advocating for a new perception of stability and sensibilities. In the poem Gerontion by T.S. Elliot, the modernist stance of fragmentation and the pursuit of purpose lies in man’s actualization of himself. Meanwhile, Samuel Beckett’s waiting for Godot written in the post-war environment of World War II can be viewed as an attack on modernism, rejecting its ideological claims to legitimise purposeful meaning that interprets the world of Estragon and Vladimir with a Grand Existential Narrative . Nonetheless, both these arguments provide a post-war lens that views life without inherent importance nor singular purpose/essence, resulting in the rise of ‘absurdism’— a search for answers in a world that offers no true answer . In this essay, the aforementioned conc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bredlik

 https://yeahwrite.me/writing-help-bredlik/ Bredlik isn’t as easy as it looks, folks. It’s a very tight form with very tight parameters. Technically bredlik is four lines (two rhyming couplets) in iambic tetrameter, or two stanzas of four lines each in iambic diameter with an ABCB rhyme scheme. The other thing that bredlik has going on is that the original poet took inspiration for the poem not only from the incident but from the fact that it happened in a re-enactor setting. So he used 18th century spellings (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) for some of the words.
Post a Comment
Read more

Manglish and its Cina Particles

"The ubiquitous word lah ( [lɑ́]   or   [lɑ̂] ), used at the end of a sentence, can also be described as a particle that simultaneously asserts a position and entices solidarity.  Note that 'lah' is often written after a space for clarity, but there is never a pause before it. This is because originally in Malay, 'lah' is appended to the end of the word and is not a separate word by itself." SNEAKING SUSPICION: "lah" was originally from the Cantonese practicing south of China. The land of Malaya had relations with China since the Ming dynasty, when China was the protector of the Malaccan Sultanate (maybe even from the 5th-6th century), and the use of la as a sentence-suffix particle got integrated into the Malay language its formation, probably during the second phase is Early Modern Malay (1500-ca. 1850) that witnessed the indigenization of Arabic loan words, changes in the affix system, and a rather liberal word order.  Confirmation alternatives: ...
Post a Comment
Read more