Helios Writing Competition: June

[King Henry V]

Post your entries here. The contest will be open until 9 pm GMT on 27th June.
Good hunting, gentlemen!

[Justinian]

Thomas of Misanthropy

1,500 (and 1) words.

If a butterfly in Africa were to flutter its wings, absolutely nothing would happen. Its muscles would get just a little bit weaker; its life would be a just little less mysterious; eventually it would stop its fluttering and drop dead.

Butterflies are far too unimportant for the movement of their little wings to cause a great tornado in a distant land. Butterflies are the sort of thing that God came up with on a Sunday morning when he had nothing better to do.

Butterflies are comparable to “Revolution 9” of Lennon fame – they might have a meaning, but no one knows what it is and no one really cares. The only interesting thing that will happen to a butterfly is that it might amuse a human child, a prince of the universe, for a few fleeting moments. The death of a butterfly affects nothing; a butterfly’s actions, fears, hopes and dreams are just drips of water in the river of life. The butterfly will be crushed in the gears of the universe and be forgotten. The butterfly lives a life of simple placidity and fades away, without leaving an impression or harming anyone.

If only humans were like butterflies, wasting away the moments flitting from one moment to the next without leaving behind our hate and hope to pollute the river of life. We are the wrench in the gears of the universe which destroys the entire machine. But even in the height of our self-importance, even if we are convinced the circle of life revolves around us, one day we will fade away. Only one question remains.

Will we take the universe down with us?

*

America, land of coke and money, pocked with glittering metropolises and miniature apocalypses from sea to shining sea. Land of the free, home of the slaves to money and power.

Thomas took one whiff of the stale air and knew what sort of air it was. It was American air. It was the best air on planet Earth, but that wasn’t saying much. Thomas was acutely aware of what was in this Earth air; the ashes of a million genocides, the stench of human hunger and greed. Perfume mixed with rotting fish, the façade humans wear over their lies which makes their hypocrisy almost bearable. Thomas looked upon the human race from above and sneered. He sneered at the hustling and bustling in the streets while children were murdered in side-alleys; he sneered at the sparking cleanliness of the rich as the poor wasted away in the dirt; he sneered at the citizens of hell and those still struggling to gain the right to enter.

The particular circle of hell Thomas was visiting was called New York City, a city of hypocrisy like all other cities. To be more specific, he was on the subway, speeding along in a rotten car beneath the rotten earth of a rotting city. He examined each specimen aboard the subway carefully. There was a woman sitting alone with herself, peering at her face in a mirror and dabbing powder and cream upon her countenance. She wanted to look perfect. Thomas considered examining her closer, but decided against it. He was mildly allergic to fakeness.

His eyes fell on a man, huddled in a corner with a newspaper. He wore dirty clothes, ragged holes at the knees and elbows, and had not had the time or leisure for a shave in several days. Or, apparently, a bath.

The man’s smell was so rancid and real that Thomas felt himself inexorably drawn to the seat next to him. Thomas sat down and smiled. “Nice day, isn’t it,” he said, with the crisp pronunciation of someone who had decided to bear with English for the sake of communication.

The man looked up from his newspaper, somewhat suspiciously, as if thinking: Nice day? Doesn’t this man know he is in New York? “I suppose,” he grumbled. “It’ll be nice when my employer drops dead and I don’t have to ride the subway every day.”

“He wouldn’t pay you if he was dead,” Thomas pointed out.

“There’s life insurance.”

“For his wife.”

Dreams temporarily shattered, the man looked down at his newspaper again. Determined to garner more information, Thomas tried to look over his shoulder. “What’s in the news?”

“Um,” the man said. “Sucker got hisself shot in Brooklyn. ‘N his wife is expecting a baby, too.”

“That’s terrible,” Thomas said without feeling.

“Yeah,” the man said equally flaccidly.

“Well, out with one bad idea, in with another.”

“Eh?”

“Never mind.” Thomas expected he never would mind. No one really does.

Thomas stood and walked further down the subway. He spotted another likely candidate; a teenager sat, quietly deafening himself with a sleek iPod. He lip-synced to the words, staring out the window. Thomas plopped himself down next to him, smiling sunnily. The teenager looked over at him uncertainly; after a moment he popped out one white earbleeder and mumbled, “Yea?”

Obviously not from New York. “What are you listening to?” Thomas asked cheerfully. “Is it good?”

“I guess.”

Thomas waited for a more elaborate response. It was not forthcoming, so he continued. “Are you visiting New York?”

“I guess.”

“Brilliant conversationalist, aren’t you,” Thomas muttered, sunny disposition momentarily blackened. He had wished to extract some mediocre meaning from the teenager’s mutterings, but had only received the ubiquitous “I guess”. “I guess” is an extremely hard pair of words to decode; it can mean anything from “You’re completely right” to “I don’t know” to “I wish this child molester would go away”. Angered, Thomas simply sat himself down in the first empty seat he saw. He found himself next to an old woman who smelled of beans and bygone days. She clutched the armrest with both hands, knuckles white, stiff as a board.

“I think you ought to relax,” Thomas said. “Subways are very safe.”

She looked up. “It’s not that they aren’t safe,” she mumbled. “They’re simply so ... so crass. Back in my day, trains ... trains had class. Trains were stylish and smooth, and didn’t smell like someone did his business on the ceiling.”

Thomas looked up. “That’s probably paint,” he said comfortingly.

“Yellow paint?”

“Colorblind painter.”

She laughed quietly at that, a pathetic laugh that suggested it would be hilarious if she could muster up the courage to care. “What’s your name?” She asked after a moment.

“Dakdak groboMalog the Seventeenth,” Thomas stated.

“Gesundheit,” she said.

“Thomas.”

“Oh, Thomas!” Her eyes lit up. “Thomas is such a lovely name. And so classy! Back in my day, all the boys were named Thomas.”

“Really? I’m sure you had a veritable horde of Thomases swarming about you then,” Thomas said. He doubted it.

“Oh, no . . .” she said, waving dismissively. In Woman, it meant “please continue flattering me.”

“Why not, a beautiful lady like you?”

“Oh stop,” she said, blushing bright red. The only difference he saw was that she looked like a red raisin instead of a white one.

*

Childhood.

That delicate stage of human existence where everything has a meaning, which is so often marred and mutilated by older, more enlightened humans. In the human, it lasts a few years, years of bliss and simple contemplation. The child accepts without needing an explanation, yet is always curious. The sky is blue, but he would like to know why. Whatever he learns, the sky will still be blue. The sky was blue, is blue, and will forever be blue.

The cynical product of the smashing of childhood by the boots of Reality dismisses the blissful years as ignorance. The grown up human learns everything but knows nothing. The grown up human forever asks how things work like they do, but never why. They seek to know how the universe functions so that they can control it, limit it, force it to do what they want it to do.

The child asks why things are as they are. He knows nothing, but he learns everything from it. They seek to know why the universe is so that they can be part of it, learn from it, and teach it.

Children attempt to make a difference. Children try to be involved and to improve their world; but their ideas are influenced and perverted by the adults.

In the twelve hundredth and twelfth year after a man died on two overlapping pieces of wood, children in Europe united under a common goal fed to them by adults: marching to Jerusalem, incidentally to take it in the name of that same man (the one on the two overlapping pieces of wood). The children marched to a great port, were loaded onto merchant ships, and vanished from the face of the earth. They were sold into slavery.

It is, of course, the adult, not the child, which holds all power on this planet. In a child’s world, the crusaders would not have been sold into slavery. They would not have been crusading in the first place.

[turtle]

An Essay Introduction To The Divided View

Life continued, as always, to grind forward at an ever-increasing rate. As a child I had always thought I would live forever… I soon realized my misconceptions. For when I grew older I began to see my world grow smaller and the years seemed as if they were accelerating eagerly toward my life’s end. I felt as if I’d begun to sink into a hole so writhed in mystery; I couldn’t bear not knowing what would become of me as I slipped into that hole. Would I be aware of my end, would I go to a different place, or would nothing but blackness engulf my existence for the rest of eternity? As I made the journey toward my end, I was so sure would come, my heart began to fill with fear. I feared nothingness, I feared pain, and I feared the idea of remaining alone for all time. My fears I recognized and accepted… but what would elude my senses would be the unknown. One can never know what is, to his world, impossible.




Who would have thought I would become an Archeological Historian for an international research foundation. I sure didn’t pick my cards when it came down to that one. Everything seemed to just snap into place as my life rolled forward. I suppose I should be grateful for the way things lead back then. In my heart I feel I did the right things in the right way to have led me in a good direction. But I still wish things could have turned out better… happier. I will never understand why hatred became such a wide spread commodity in that place. I didn’t know they would come. In fact, I had a totally different idea of what would become of me and the rest of my world. Seeing so much hatred tear something so beautiful to shreds will forever leave a thick scar on my heart.

I’d been working for the International Pyramid Research Foundation (IPRF) for about seven years when I first noticed the strangeness of my days and how things around the world began to fall into pieces. I lived in Central America and had been assigned to the ancient Mayan pyramids, so the conditions were fairly calm. But as I watched the rest of the world fall to the tides of hatred, I couldn’t refrain from asking for help. I knew asking wouldn’t do much good, but what the hell… it couldn’t hurt, right? So, I prayed in the way I pray and conversed with whom ever would listen. I asked that we might be released from our prison of hatred we created, so belligerently, for ourselves. I asked that we could realize our potential and be the good beings we so strictly insisted on avoiding. After my prayers I silently thought to myself, “I hope someone was listening”. Although I knew in my heart that something greater than us had to exist, I couldn’t help but feel a pinch of skepticism. For I saw our world and knew we wouldn’t stand together to help ourselves out of the hole we fell into. With my feelings boiling over, I wanted to join in with the hate and try to make a difference, but something kept calling me back to the ancient temples, urging me to stay the course life had lain down before me. So, I stayed among the ruins of what used to be the great Mayan people, despite the lingering itch that had built up in my mind. As the world continued to gnaw away at the things that stood for goodness and peace, I watched and waited. Even as anarchy flooded the streets, I kept working, following the feelings that had surged into my thoughts as my world continued to rip at its hair.

One day, as I finished up a restoration of the top platform on the pyramid, a feeling of excitement overcame me and the air seemed to buzz with an unseen energy. It put me at ease and made my body feel warm and comfortable. I had felt it all day, but despite my many attempts to reveal its source I drifted into another night of sleep, dumbfounded to this strange aura. The next day I walked the perimeter of the pyramid and found four black circles seared into the earth’s surface. I took a few measurements and found that thermal radiation, heat from extreme light, was to blame. An odd thing struck me as I realized the burns were the product of thermal radiation… there were no burns around the immediate area or even next to the circles. Extreme light would have surely scorched the nearby area as it irradiated from its source. When I finished pondering this over, I took a couple of mathematical measurements and found the circles directly encompassed to the magnetic north and south poles, and that wasn’t even the most spectacular thing either. I also found that the circles weren’t just circles, they were perfect circles. Not just good, but perfect… down to the millionth of a centimeter perfect. These strange burns, which surrounded the pyramid on all sides, gave the native people an uneasy feeling. Although the elders knew something bad was coming, my gut told me this was what I had waited for all of these long years.

I finally pulled myself away from the burns around eight o’clock in the evening and as I walked back to my trailer I felt like I had stumbled upon something magnificent. I couldn’t keep my lips from curling toward my ears with every thought of the day’s events. Then, as I neared my home, I saw the leaves of the palm tree in my front lawn begin to sway back and forth. Then I saw the palm’s shadow and my own cast against the paneling of my trailer, bringing the thought to mind that some richy sponsor was driving up to cut my budget, again. But as this thought drifted in and out of my mind I noticed the wind had increased and the trees were blowing hard toward the research site. Simultaneously, the light got even brighter and the previous night’s aura came back, but this time it made my body feel drenched in static. Before I could even turn to let my eyes catch a glimpse of what my heart told me to be true, a low but loud thump drifted through the air and popped my eardrums! And before I had comprehended the effects of the thump, it was followed by a high-pitched sound that I couldn’t describe if I had to. As I soaked all of this in a sudden and overpowering burst of wind, the opposite direction of the site, overcame me and thrust me to the ground! My mind raced so fast I couldn’t even function enough to break my fall. As I made contact with the ground a faint horn, so beautiful and soothing, engulfed my sense of sound, making me believe I had found a happiness that had been, otherwise, unattainable. As my thoughts tried to piece together I drifted into a comforting state and fell asleep.

……….7 days later………..

The people who inhabited the planet we call Earth have come to a stunning realization: We are but children in the fight that has raged for millions of years and will continue for millions of years. Hatred is neither here nor there; it’s not on paper, it’s not in stone, but it will always be there. Hate will separate beings from one another and we can do little to stop it. The war, which we had been oblivious to since our creation, had finally spilled into our place of being. The hate between two people had run rampant for eons and we were not but mere pawns in their eternal game of chess. A classic tail of good versus evil played out and showed us that we had known nothing and we fools couldn’t even begin to fathom what was to come of us. I too fell under the same blanket of deception and swallowed the world’s distortions. I almost couldn’t believe what had happened. And as the days passed, I too realized that death will come; but as death came, I was not afraid. I will always welcome the next place I shall call home. And as I shifted from one place to the next I always remembered… we knew nothing.



EDIT: I just spaced a couple of the paragraphs out and put indents in

[Rolanbek]

withdrawn through lack of interest


R