Stealing from the Everyday: The Road
to Woop Woop
People ask: Where do you get story ideas?
If you have a nose for a good story, ideas
are everywhere. I’ll share with you an excerpt from Writing
Speculative Fiction (2019) by
Macmillan:
Stephen
King in his book on writing saw stories as relics, parts of an undiscovered
world for writers to excavate. Feel, smell, see—ideas float everywhere. Stories
cartwheel in little word associations in your vocabulary. Unfound plots flirt
all around you: in the rubicund bell innocently dangling on the Christmas tree
in your unswept lounge; in the bald young man with honey-brown eyes who beamed
at you in the lift on your way to work; in the ash-eyed tramp by the wayside
who held your gaze a particular way and asked for nothing, but something drew
your hand to your pocket and you pulled out a note; in the tarmac-black pebble
that a little girl with braids throws onto a chalked out square on the gravel,
and you see nothing but the blackness of the stone as the child hops on one
foot, square after square, humming a nursery rhyme … --Writing Speculative
Fiction
I was powerwalking in Melbourne’s
Botanical Gardens one dawn, when I remembered an ad I saw on Seek.com: Must
have a phone.
It struck me, right there, an idea of a
black speculative fiction set in Old Kampala, where a village woman sacrifices
everything for her family. It starts with an ad the husband sees:
“Must have a smart
phone,” the job ad said.
#
Ping! A job alert.
He was good with
gasfitting, roofing, drainage, even power outlets, ladders, testing and
repairing. Most electrical things he could do, and gardening. His hands were
clever with greenscapes. He could water and feed lilies or stinkwood, trim
shrubs or mow grass, fertilise sunflower or pluck cashews from the plant.
What he wasn’t good with
was lies. The employer hadn’t been upfront at the interview about the data, how
it was out of pocket.
—“Unlimited Data”, unpublished story
The husband gets employment as an
itinerant handyman on call:
… peddling over fields,
tarmac and potholes, moving from suburb to suburb, gasfitting, roofing,
draining, mowing. Ping! Another job and he wheeled to it, phone in his pocket.
But doing jobs on call gobbled data.
The black-market solution is cheap but
costly.
Most stories in my new collection, The
Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories—be
they surreal, fantastical, scientific—came about walking, swimming, watching, listening
to people… A word, a phrase… It’s silly, really, how easy you can craft a
poignant story by taking something ordinary out of context and extrapolating:
What if?
Eugen Bacon’s work is cheeky with a fierce intelligence, in
prose that’s resplendent, delicious, dark and evocative. NPR called her
novel Claiming T-Mo ‘a confounding mysterious tour de
force’. The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories imbues the
same lushness in a writerly language that is Bacon’s own. This peculiar hybrid
of the untraditional, the extraordinary within, without and along the borders
of normalcy will hypnotise and absorb the reader with tales that refuse to be
labelled. The stories in this collection are dirges that cross genres in
astounding ways. Over 20 provocative tales, with seven original to this
collection, by an award-winning African Australian author.
Eugen Bacon is African Australian, a computer scientist
mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She’s the author of Claiming T-Mo
(Meerkat Press) and Writing Speculative Fiction (Macmillan). Her work has won,
been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards,
including the Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Australian Shadows
Awards, Ditmar Awards and Nommo Award for Speculative Fiction by Africans.
AUTHOR LINKS: Website | Twitter
Tumbling
down the stretch, a confident glide, the 4WD is a beaut, over nineteen years
old.
The argument is brand-new. Maps are
convolutions, complicated like relationships. You scrunch the sheet, push it in
the glovebox. You feel River’s displeasure, but you hate navigating, and right
now you don’t care.
The wiper swishes to and fro,
braves unseasonal rain. You and River maintain your silence.
Rain. More rain.
“When’s the next stop?” River
tries. Sidewise glance, cautious smile. He is muscled, dark. Dreadlocks fall
down high cheekbones to square shoulders. Eyes like black gold give him the
rugged look of a mechanic.
“Does it matter?” you say.
“Should it?”
You don’t respond. Turn your head,
stare at a thin scratch on your window. The crack runs level with rolling
landscape racing away with rain. Up in the sky, a billow of cloud like a white
ghoul, dark-eyed and yawning into a scream.
A shoot of spray through River’s
window brushes your cheek.
A glide of eye. “Hell’s the
matter?” you say.
“You ask me-e. Something
bothering you?”
“The window.”
He gives you a look.
Classic, you think. But you know
that if you listen long enough, every argument is an empty road that attracts
unfinished business. It’s an iceberg full of whimsy about fumaroles and
geysers. It’s a corpse that spends eternity reliving apparitions of itself in
the throes of death. Your fights are puffed-up trivia, championed to crusades.
You fill up teabags with animus that pours into kettles of disarray, scalding
as missiles. They leave you ashy and scattered—that’s what’s left of your
lovemaking, or the paranoia of it, you wonder about that.
More silence, the cloud of your
argument hangs above it. He shrugs. Rolls up his window. Still air swells in
the car.
“Air con working?” you say.
He flexes long
corduroyed legs that end in moccasins. Flicks on the air button—and the radio.
The bars of a soulful number, a remix by some new artist, give way to an even
darker track titled ‘Nameless.’ It’s about a high priest who wears skinny black
jeans and thrums heavy metal to bring space demons into a church that’s dressed
as a concert. And the torments join in evensong, chanting psalms and canticles
until daybreak when the demons wisp back into thin air, fading with them
thirteen souls of the faithful, an annual pact with the priest.
Rain pelts the roof and windows
like a drum.
He hums. Your face is distant. You
might well be strangers, tossed into a tight drive from Broome to Kununurra.
The lilt of his voice merges with
the somber melody.
You turn your face upward. A drift
of darkness, even with full day, is approaching from the skies. Now it’s
half-light. You flip the sun visor down. Not for compulsion or vanity, nothing
like an urge to peer at yourself in the mirror. Perhaps it’s to busy your
hands, to distract yourself, keep from bedevilment—the kind that pulls out a
quarrel. You steal a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. Deep, deep eyes. They
gleam like a cat’s. The soft curtain of your fringe is softening, despite
thickset brows like a man’s. You feel disconnected with yourself, with the
trip, with River. You flip the sun visor up.
Now the world is all grim. River
turns on the headlights, but visibility is still bad. A bolt of lightning. You
both see the arms of a reaching tree that has appeared on the road, right there
in your path. You squeal, throw your arms out. River swerves. A slam of brakes.
A screech of tires. Boom!
The world stops in a swallowing
blackness. Inside the hollow, your ears are ringing. The car, fully intact, is
shooting out of the dark cloud in slow motion, picking up speed. It’s soaring
along the road washed in a new aurora of lavender, turquoise and silver, then
it’s all clear. A gentle sun breaks through fluffs of cloud no more engulfed in
blackness. You level yourself with a hand on the dashboard, uncertain what
exactly happened.
You look at River. His
hands . . . wrist up . . . he has no hands.
Nothing bloody as you’d expect from a man with severed wrists. Just empty space
where the arms end.
But River’s unperturbed, his arms
positioned as if he’s driving, even while nothing is touching the steering
that’s moving itself, turning and leveling.
“Brought my shades?” he asks.
“Your hands,” you say.
“What about them?”
“Can’t you see?”
His glance is full of impatience.
You sink back to your seat, unable
to understand it, unclear to tell him, as the driverless car races along in
silence down the lone road.
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