In the past week I have received five new creative projects for A4A. One of my worries concerning Art for Art is its dependence on contributors (somewhat like the unease that comes with group projects...you know, like having to gauge who's going to put in the work and if anyone is actually interested and living in fear of a poor grade from then on). Turns out that plenty of people are interested and even during the nauseating month of November, when it's really crunch time, people are willing to put some time aside for art. When Kaitlin emailed me Thursday night (I believe she had an essay due Friday morning too) she expressed that willingness to create: "Once I got the ball rolling on this, I just couldn't stop." To everyone who has taken that time out of their hectic lives or has corresponded with me with ideas and excitement for a potential project, thank you. Anyway...
Kaitlin decided to write a short story based on Beast's track "Devil". I'll let Kaitlin take it from here:
Beast, a band from Montreal, offers a different kind of music to the songs previously worked with in Art for Art; it's a mix of indie and electronic (you may recognize "Mr. Hurricane", one of Beast's songs from 2008). Betty Bonifassi, the vocalist, has previously worked with DJ Champion, providing the lyrics to his song "No Heaven".
When I started listening to Beast again with this project in mind so many different ideas developed with her assortment of songs! It was hard to narrow it down to one, but I finally picked "Devil". When I first got their CD, the title of the track completely threw me off, but I listened anyway and like it immensely. The song gives me this sense that the world is ending but no one is doing anything differently.
I have a fond like of dystopian novels. The paradox of society continuing in the same manner while it should be falling apart because something is wrong excited me. It's that tone that I carried into my own piece, which I'm having trouble titling.
Here is Beast's track "Devil":
Here's Kaitlin's short story:
The city rose out of the horizon; great towers of steel and glass, shimmering in the desert sun. It was a spectacular sight to behold, but nothing that Erys hadn't seen before. The highway, that black snake that ran, never ending, into the distance, was waiting for her. The last piece of her journey was right in front of her. She gave her bike a small nudge with her foot and revved the engine. She might as well get this over with.
The man-made masterpiece that sat on the barren ground of the desert was a world unto itself. To its inhabitants, the outside that didn't exist. Nothing existed outside the slummy edges. They believed the world was contained to their precious city and to other cities like it. Their logic washingly flawed, but they didn't care.
On occasion, Erys unhappily found a need to enter one of the cities, whichever one happened to be closest to her at the time. While she loved the outlands and made her home there, she needed supplies that the outlands couldn't provide. Food. Medicine. And most importantly, water. For these, she would make the trip into a city. This occasion was no different.
The device at her hip buzzed before an image came up the visor of her helmet.
"Shit, Amiya!" Erys exclaimed, quickly stopping her bike on the side of the road again. "I'm driving!"
"Oh, I'm sorry Erys! I was just checking to see if you were here yet, but I can't see the city behind you," Amiya replied.
"That's because I'm still in the out lands --"
"Mother was getting worried because you're late," Amiya cut her off, refusing to talk about the nightmarish places that her sister called home. "Try and be here before the sun sets, okay? I need your help picking out the baby's eye colour."
The call ended abruptly, leaving Erys fuming. She hated visiting her family. They were blind, like the rest of the city dwellers and her mother highly disapproved of her lifestyle choice. Erys took a deep breath and put her bike back on the road and continued her doomed journey into the city.
The sun was just clipping the mountain range in the distance when she pulled up at the gate outside of the western slums of the city. The entry control guards scanned her passcard and glanced disapprovingly at the bike that was rumbling under her. She saw their eyes flick reflexively towards their own bikes parked beside their gate house. Shiny silver bullets that needed no wheels and nothing but the charge of the sun's rays. She preferred her bike.
The slums were what remained of the old way of life. In some ways, they resembled Erys' own house deep in the clefts of the mountains. They were short, only one or two floors at the most. Many of them had been abandoned. The city was completely different. The road ran right into it, as if it dove into a narrow canyon where the sky was so far above it didn't appear to exist anymore.
Erys compared the experience of living in the city to one of living in a brightly lit, colourful cave; but a cave nonetheless. Everywhere there were light standards, radiating false sunlight for the people who milled about in the artificial gardens of plants painted in shades of green, blue and yellow that were too obnoxious for Erys to stand. Happy images of advertisings sprawled across most flat surfaces an sometimes they even took over the curved surfaces also.
It was so fake. Nothing in the city was real. Sure, the people were real in the sense that they were alive, but everything form their hair to their smiles were fake. That was the way of the city. Erys vowed to make this visit as short as she could.
Her sister's apartment building looked exactly like all the other ones in the sector of the city that Amiya lived in; one hundred floors high, covered in shiny glass windows. Eight hundred families live in this building alone. Erys parked her bike right outside the door of the building, under a large, metal number '247' before walking through the doors that sighed as they automatically opened.
Amiya gave her an enormous hug as Erys walked through the door into her sister's apartment on the 57th floor.
"I'm so happy you could come Erys!" she said cheerfully. "I'm stuck on choosing blue, like our mother's or going for a deep purple. What do you think?"
"You know exactly what I think Amiya."
"Erys! This is a time of joy for your sister; you should put aside your silly little beliefs and be happy with her!"
"Hello mother, it's good to see you too."
Erys dropped herself on Amiya's synthetic leather couch and shoved one of the pieces of food from the plate on the table in her mouth. She wasn't sure what it was, but it tasted a little bit like chalk. She suspected it had been made out of some chemical. She washed it down with a swallow of water from the jug beside the plate.
"Erys."
Her mother's voice had dropped an octave and her eyes narrowed as she watched Erys ignore her. A small growl grew in the back of her throat.
"Here we go again," Amiya sighed.
"Erys, I don't understand why you won't give up this wandering of yours and live in the city sensibly, like your sister. I looked at the advertising boards in the lobby and there's a nice apartment on the 42nd floor that you could move into right away."
"I can't live here mom. I don't get how you can. I've been asking you for years to stop pestering me about it. I like living in the outlands, where I get to actually see the sun. It's still there in the sky you know, it hasn't disappeared. But then you wouldn't know that, would you? All you get is artificial sunlight--"
"Which doesn't give you cancer like the real sun does!" her mother rebutted. "Honestly, Erys, that thing that you call living is just so primitive..." Erys was back up on her feet.
"And your life is blind! Look at you! You're more plastic than you are flesh and Amiya is buying a child from a genetics lab! Can't you see how wrong this is? How terribly backwards this way of living is? It isn't natural! Nothing here is!"
"Erys--"
"No, mother. These cities, these havens of blindness that you praise, they are killing everything. It hasn't rained in over two years because of the resources that the cities suck out of the environment!"
"It rained yesterday..." Amiya interjected, trying to change the subject. "It was forecasted. And they're saying that we're going to get snow next month! Can you believe it?" Erys ignored her.
"You are both chained to this way of life!" Erys exclaimed in frustration. "If the sun didn't rise tomorrow, no one in this damned city would even notice. You'd just keep on going, like everything was perfect, just like yesterday, just like the day before that! I don't know when you would finally stop, if you ever did."
Erys was seething. She stormed toward the door and impatiently prodded the 'open' button.
"Amiya, maybe you should pick bling eyes for your child so she doesn't have to see the dying world that she is being born into. You could save her the pain of watching the world become more and more fake until nothing real is left."
The door finally opened and Erys was quick to put herself through it as Amiya was responding.
"Actually, I'm getting a boy..."
* * *
Kaitlin Vanderveen was born in Calgary and is currently taking a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at Ambrose University College. She enjoys leaving projects until the last minute and tends to work best between the hours of 11pm and 2am. More on Kaitlin and her writing on the contributors page.
I encourage you all to check out the band Beast and their self-titled album from 2008. Betty has one of the most powerful and evocative voices I've ever heard. You'll be seeing more of them in years to come.
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