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I post a random title. You write a random story to go with it.
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6 comments:
Maybe you could keep posting 3 times a week but offer up two titles each time?
...and my story is over here.
participation might increase if your sister would get off her lazy brain and start writing.
Niriti was furious. Her hands, normally so graceful and long, were clenched into tight fists, her whole face squinched up in the effort not to scream and betray her presence to the humans in the clearing. At this moment, she almost didn’t care if she was seen if it meant humans might stop their folly. They wouldn’t though. They would just have a new thing to hunt.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she thought to herself.
She was probably railing as much at herself as at the humans. If she’d only been a few moments earlier, she might have been able to stop this folly. That was the crux of the matter though, wasn’t it? In different times, there would have three others here with her, ready to do the rituals. But thanks to the proliferation of humans, they were stretched too thin. Each jhahara went out alone, equipped only to conceal until a full gathering could be freed. And she had, once again, arrived to late to hide anything but herself.
Niriti ground her teeth in a potent mix of grief and anger as she forced herself to watch the humans go about their task. They chattered like monkeys, the more important among them waving their hands impressively, while the lowly scuttled to do the work. She watched as they carved the elephant’s body apart piece by piece.
They started with the hind legs, slicing through the flesh and muscle to reveal the gleaming bone underneath. They were careful not to cut the bone itself, but they just ripped the flesh away until they reached the joint, cut away the tendons and slid the bone out of its casing. They would continue with the whole body, she knew, removing bone after bone and leaving the rest of the carcass to rot or be eaten.
The noise started and Niriti clapped her fists over her ears. The humans had begun to grind the first bone. She wanted to flee or to attack — she wasn’t sure which she wanted to do more — but she could do neither. She must watch it all and wait until they left to perform the last rites. She would leave no elephant’s spirit in distress, tied to the powder of what was once its bones. Niriti had to free it.
Somewhere, long before Niriti was born, one of the jhahara had apparently let just enough information slip to a human to create a superstition. “Elephants never forget,” the saying ran. It was nothing but a saying for centuries. She would never know for sure if another jhahara had let more slip or if humans, always greedy for more (“More of what, it doesn’t seem to matter,” she thought), and endlessly inventive, had just discovered it on their own.
Whatever the case, they had realized that elephants carried their memories in their bones. And just as they did with bear livers to increase human potency or the skin of alligators for safety, they decided to gather this resource for memory. Now there was a thriving trade of ground elephant bones. Just a pinch of the stuff was worth half a gold piece. If you could afford to buy a pinch once a month, you would never forget anything ever again.
“Such a waste!” Niriti thought. “Locked into only their only memories. Who wants to remember the banality of everyday life?”
Elephant memory was carried in their bones. It was more than their own memory, it was the memory of the herd passed down through generations. When a calf was born, the herd would surround it, singing their memories in a thrum too deep for human ears, weaving all the stories into the baby until the weight of them let its bones harden and it could stand upright. When it died, the jhahara would perform the rituals to collect the memories from its bones for their archives. It was the wisdom of the world, these memories. They contained not just elephant lives, but all they heard, all that the world knew. Even the human’s discoveries were laid into the knowledge of their bones. The entire history of the world from the very first elephant were in the jhaharan archives, the bones interred in a massive burial ground.
Until now. These elephants were slaughtered before they had time to pass on their knowledge. Gaps were showing up in the information. It wouldn’t be long before there would be no more memory. Which meant no more scientific discoveries, no more great works of art or music, no life-changing literature.
She and her people were doing their best to protect the herd, but humans were ingenious and Niriti and her fellows were often too late. Now she could only watch and wait. When the humans were gone, she would separate the soul from the memories in the bones so that it would not splinter itself trying to follow them all. There was no more she could do.
Niriti’s world was dying and when it was gone she would die too, she knew. Her only revenge lay in the knowledge that when the last elephant bones had been consumed, the human wouldn’t outlast her for long.
participation might increase if your sister would get off her lazy brain and start writing.
Well, there is that, too. :)
"The tusk bone's connected to the...skull bone. The skull bone's connected to the...neck bone. The neck bone's connected to the..."
"Shut up and finish dusting the mammoth, Stu."
I love my job.
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