Be Kind To Your Web-Footed Friends · 2:28pm Jul 4th, 2023
Welcome readers!
If you're an American, happy 4th of July! Please try and make sure you come out of this with as many fingers as you started with! If you're not an American, my condolences for your having a perfectly normal Tuesday.
Anyway, a new little short story today. I had missed the previous year's Thousand Words contest, and I had told myself that I would not do so again. In the spirit of experimentation, I picked "Horror" as my theming. I generally do not like "horror" content - I love classic slashers, but I'm not scared of them, and the more modern psychological horror stuff just bounces off me. That's not to say that I don't enjoy or respect such works - The Silence of the Lambs is one of my favorite films - but that I just don't have a primal fear response to the content; indeed, much of the King-style horror that I've read (mostly King himself) just falls very flat to me.
Spoilers below, maybe? Just go read the tagged story.
That being said, the much lower stakes of a thousand-word contest, combined with, of all things, an anon figuring out that stories can be sequels to themselves inspired me to try my hand at this genre most unfamilliar. Every two years or so, I read a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. GEB, as it is known, is a book written by a legitimate super-genius for people much more intelligent than I am. It covers, unsurprisingly, Bach's canons, Escher's "impossible" art, and Godel - but what it's about is the construction of meaning from parts without inherent meaning, particularly through repetition. Bach's perpetual canons, for example, are naught but short melodic lines, but their repetition and interaction between different repetitions creates a new meaning from the component parts that was not present in the constituent pieces. Or something like that.
Anyways, that clever anon's trick struck me: I found myself fascinated by a thought of how one could turn a very firm word count limit into, through some trickery, a story with an infinite length, one with no clear beginning or ending, just loops and loops and loops. That's a frankly pretty eerie premise for a story, and so I thought, with a little bit of meta-contextual trickery, that it could make for a really solid little scary story - all at an E-rating, an accomplishment I'm particularly proud of.
Enjoy and stay safe.
As a Canadian, you guys are three days late.