"LLAC EMIT DOOG A ROF" by Jason King

The Literary Lab proudly presents the winner of the Genre Wars Experimental category:

LLAC EMIT DOOG A ROF
by Jason King

People stare. Some squint. They stick their faces close until dotted whiskers show their length. Others loom but never look, their faces angled down at the water falling through their hands to the basin beneath. They move to the side, punch the white box and rub their hands under it, turn away, disappear. Always the people move.
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I am born: fused quartz and condensed aluminum, poured and polished and framed. Spirits of glass and metal, spontaneous order from arrangement of elements. How? Why? The questions arise and flit away, cast-off glimmers of thought. I awake to a dim gauzy netherworld of sheets and vats, rectangles and ovals. Hands. Darkness again. Hands, shaking and swirling, a piece of cloth, and the world takes its shape.
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What does not change: The world. Drab walls, tiled floor, ceiling with the long bulbs. Two white vertical bowls on the far wall with long misshapen heads of silver piping. Faded yellow dividers between the bowls. More faded yellow beside them: incomplete walls that stop short of floor and ceiling and whose inside faces are covered in marks that the people grow and renew; three-quarter doors that swing open to show a glimpse of shiny white chairs. The running-water spouts, the basins beneath. The white box. The high window. The big door that hides light and people. What changes: Light and people. Light to dark to light to dark to light. Shadows stretching and foreshortening in a slow diurnal rhythm. The people, moving from behind the big door. Hurrying, some dragging themselves stiffly. They face a vertical bowl or disappear but for their feet behind a three-quarter door. The people fork: some for me, the rest straight for the big door. All to leave at last. They move slower in leaving. They are replaced by others. Come and go. Come and go. Images that float across the face of the world and are gone.
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One among them recurs. He wears blue, his hair is a short curled mixture of white-grey-black. The place above his eyes is traced with shallow parallel lines; beneath them the darkened skin sags. He shambles in behind a large wheeled cart with sticks coming out of it. He draws his sticks and moves them over the floor, the bowls, the chairs behind the three-quarter doors. He draws bottles; liquid sprays out and he follows it with a cloth. He comes to me; the world mottles and then clears. He moves his hand and the cloth under it. He takes his cart-with-sticks. He goes.
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Something different: Two people enter together. One like most of the rest who come, the other shorter and smaller, like the first in miniature. Six-tenths perhaps. The small one with crumpled face, his eyes leaking water, one knee a brilliant sparkling red. The other lifts him to the basin. Water runs onto the red, drops, swirls, vanishes. They patch the red knee until it is pale again, not pale like the surrounding flesh but pale. The small one’s face still crumpled, the tall one’s face carries a hint of the same. He reaches a hand to the small cheek, turns the other to face him, gathers the small shaking shoulders into the sweep of his long thick arms. The shaking subsides. The small face smoothes. What is this? More than simple movement. More than shadowplay against a static world. Images bending to each others’ orbit. Spontaneous order. Is this birth? They leave. The world remains. Light to dark to light.
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The big door swings open. A person comes in fast. His face reddish-pink, the shade that slants through the high window when the light starts to diminish. He turns this way, that way. His movements quick, jagged. He covers his face with his hands, he pulls them away and his face sparkles in the light. He kicks at the wall once, again, again. He advances. His face is twisted somehow, pulled up and down at its margins. He draws back his fist and the fist shrinks. It snaps forward. The world shatters. It multiplies: forty-seven slivered fragments of images, each one an echo of the others set off at glaring angles beside it. Thirty-one pieces of the person move to the right, yank twenty-nine white boxes from their walls. The boxes bounce when they hit the floors. The person-pieces run to the doors and disappear.
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The world is changed. People change each other, they move across the world and it yields to their passing. Why can they do this? Why can I not? Am I the world? Am I alive?
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Light to dark.
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Nothing penetrates! Nothing penetrates!
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Dark to light.
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The world is not changed. It is change, the thing itself. The swirl of movement, the glimmer of passage, a panorama. Back and forth, forth and back. But I am constant. I reflect.
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The white boxes bounce, leap to the walls. Reddish-Pink Face pulls back his fist; shattered fragments fuse. He heals the world. His face composes, he covers his face and it sparkles no more. His movements sharp, his face turning to every corner. He is alone. Alone? With his power?
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Six-tenths and the other are here. The birth between them. I want to turn away. Red water swirls out of the drain, flows up to meet the short one’s knee. He trembles. Water droplets leap up to enter the eyes of his crumpled face. I see these two people enter; I see them leave. I try to remember. They touch. They bend. They reveal a symmetry I cannot know. Do they themselves know it? They are gone.
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The recurring one returns as ever. He drags his cart-with-sticks behind. It trails him like a shadow. He draws out his sticks, his cloth, his bottles. He shuffles around. The world mottles and clears, mottles and clears. Mostly he is alone for his coming and going. Sometimes he is not alone. The other people keep their faces away, their bodies away. They do not touch him. His movements are sparse, regular. He does not reach out. They stand clear of his sticks and bottles and cloth. Now he is alone. He draws something from inside the cart and goes to one of the white chairs without his sticks or bottles or cloth. He stops in front of the chair, hunches his shoulders, swivels his head both ways, eyes darting. The three-quarter door closes. His feet spread wide beneath the door. The door opens and he backs out. He carries a sheaf of glossy papers with tiny people on them: they stare out blankly; their garish faces splash color against a fleshy palette. He walks quickly, and quickly slips the papers back into the cart. Again the head swivels, the eyes move to each side. He continues with the bottles and the sticks. Mottle and clear. He drags his cart-with-sticks to the big door that swings open for him and he pulls his cart through.
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There is more change than I know. I see beneath the patina of sameness. Flowing water, erasure of the scribbled markings. Insects that crawl and fly. Light to dark to light. Quality and color of light, ever waxing and waning. The people that leave now faster than they arrive. Sauntering in, backing swiftly away. Each to his own.
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I am born to nothingness. Order and decay. Darkness.
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People stare, and I return it, a lidless tracing of these moving shadows. A portion approaches, but the rest keep their distance, angled away. None of them see. None of them stay. They are moving, always moving.



An interview with Jason King:

Tell us about you.

I grew up with my nose forever buried in a book, but I never dreamed then of being a writer. Which I suppose helps explain why I’m not one now. I’m a husband, a father, an employee, a homeowner – all the roles that fill my days. But in the few still moments I do dream now of writing, and writing well. And when I get the time (not as much as I’d like or as much as I should), I try to make it happen.

For several years, I’ve been working on my first novel. It’s set ten years after the Civil War, in the southern Appalachian mountains where my father’s people came from, and it’s about science and faith and second love, and two people who want to build something amid the rubble of their lives. When I read about the Genre Wars contest, I took a break from the novel to try my hand at something shorter.

Tell us about your story.

The story was born from just a random bit of musing. I was thinking about how we use certain commonplace objects so much we become nearly oblivious to them, and I wondered how those objects would view us, if they could, from that kind of exposed vantage point. The choice to use a mirror as the observing character seemed natural. Its purpose is to reflect, so I could imagine that while we’re looking in, it’s looking out.

From there, I tried to make the story embody the mirror’s characteristics as it revealed them, which explains the narrative structure. But I also wanted to explore what a character would be like that had the mirror’s many constraints – no ability to move or to communicate externally, no sense but the visual, no understanding of human emotion or causality – and how those constraints would shape its understanding of itself and the world. That, to me, is what ultimately made the story so fun to write.

Tell us about your future.

Hopefully I’ll finish my book and be proud of it. Seeing it in print would be awesome, too. And I hope to stay happy enough with my life to keep it all in perspective one way or the other.

Thanks to Davin, Michelle, and Scott for giving me the impetus to send my work out for the first time!