Plaza
This week, an odd little story I wrote as a writing student.
Weekly Three
HEAR: I've been diving deep into Detroit-style house music. Here's a goodie: "Raw Cuts #3"- Danilo Plessow, Motor City Drum Ensemble
READ: Does nature have legal rights? Can an endangered tree file a lawsuit? This New Yorker article explores the bestowing of legal rights on natural things.
VIEW: A dermatologist answers skin questions from Twitter.
No. 70: Plaza
This week, I'm sharing an odd little story I wrote a while back, called "Plaza." The story was made into a zine and distributed to a hundred-ish people. I'm not sure what made me think to write a story like this. I believe it was a take on Genesis in the bible, in which God creates the world. What if our world wasn't his first try? What if, in the process of creating our world, he failed a few times before getting it right? Did he ever get it right?
Have an excellent Friday and weekend, everyone. I appreciate you and love you all. Truly! That you're still here, reading these always-random newsletters (even if you only check out the weekly three), means a lot.
* * *
PLAZA
In the beginning God created heaven and a square plot of land 100 yards wide by 100 yards long. It was laid with stone bricks and was quiet and empty, a plane surrounded by blackness. And God said, “Let there be street lights,” and there were street lights. They lit the uneven, cobbled surface of the square and cast shadows over their subtle contours. They were evenly placed four street lights to a corner with four more placed halfway between each corner. And still, beyond the edges of this now well-lit square, there was nothing.
And God said, “Let there be tall, Spanish-colonial buildings,” and, surrounding the perimeter of the cobbled square, there were tall, Spanish buildings jutting high into the air in a variety of designs and colors, the tallest being five-stories high with a satellite on top that flashed red. Complete with balconies enclosed by iron wrought fencing, shuttered windows, and intricate architectural garnishes, the buildings stood extravagantly, taking on a yellowish tinge from the buzzing bulbs of the streetlights at their base. Some of the buildings had cafes on the ground level, like the Cafe de Flore or Le Procope. But these cafes were closed, their doors locked, and their chairs turned over on top of the outdoor tables with a chain wrapped around their upturned legs.
And God said, “Let there be living creatures: the livestock, the insects, rodents, and reptiles that crawl close to the ground, and wild beasts,” and it was so. Lions, tigers, deer, horses, cattle, snakes, frogs, dinosaurs, and more roamed the hard surface of the square, one of each species. At first they roamed in peace, becoming familiar with the plaza — sniffing the ground, nudging the surfaces of the buildings, biting the cold metal of the street lights, sliding and hopping along the stones. But hunger soon set in and the animals began to attack each other. The weaker creatures were killed by stronger ones, and the smaller creatures fled, hiding in the cracks of the cobblestones after finding no way out of the square.
And then God said, “Let us make mankind, so that they may rule over the livestock and all the wild beasts, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,” so God created mankind. Fifty men and fifty women fell naked from the sky onto the cobblestone floor of the plaza, writhing on the ground as they struggled to realize what and where they were. Some looked up into the black nothingness above, others scanned with wide eyes the buildings on the perimeter of the plaza and the animals that looked on them from afar. They stood on their weak legs and communicated to each other through grunts and wails, having no language. But God had assumed too quickly that man would rule over the animals, and a circle of snarling predators began to close on the group of one hundred. A collective panic, inherent to their acutely conscious kind, set in, and their eyes dilated as they began to perceive the consequences of their current situation.
All at once mankind scattered, trying to break through the shrinking circle of deadly predators that was closing in around them. Some were caught in the snapping jaws of the lion and others were disemboweled by the lightning swipe of the raptor’s claw. The floor of the plaza grew red with the blood of the dead, with small creeks of that thick crimson fluid trickling slowly through the notches in the cobblestoned ground. Now there was chaos, screaming, a frantic scene of people running here and there, being chased by animals while searching hopelessly for a way out.
A small band of people in a far corner of the plaza loosened the chairs in front of Le Procope from their chains and attempted to fend off the animals by pointing the legs of the chairs defensively outward. Others tried relentlessly to break the glass of the cafes, a task which proved impossible when it was discovered that the windows were made of a strong plastic. The animals, at first confused, soon learned the fragility of the chairs, and before long all in the plaza, including the animals, who had turned against each other, were dead or dying. Corpses lay scattered across the stones, and near the center of the plaza little ponds of blood accumulated, fed by networks of narrow streams that poured from the stomachs and mouths and heads and limbs of lifeless hosts.
And God saw all that he had made, and it was very bad. ♦
Mailbox
Have a question or response? Hit reply. Write-ups and questions from readers will be published here each week.