Fortnightly Writing Competition: Recycling

[WHAM]

I'm sure pretty much all of us were taught at some point in our lives that it's important to recycle. A piece of trash, if properly reused, might not be a burden on our ecosystem, but a resource that might be cleverly reused time and time again. The topic came up recently as I discussed how different the methods for recycling something as mundane as beverage containers is from country to country, and so I decided to cheekily recycle the observations of that conversation into a topic for our contest!

Write a story that somehow revolves around recycling something. That is, using something that has once been used for its original purpose, for some new purpose, either as-is or after some kind of refinement.



The deadline of this contest is Sunday 15th of May at 23:59 UTC.

Each person choosing to read and vote has three points to allocate, one for each of the following:
1 point for the best or most interesting or imaginative idea of recycling.
1 point for the best or most interesting setting / character.
1 point for the best technical writing, ie. grammar, readability etc.

[Mandle]

Got an idea for this one. Thinking it through a bit more.

[Stupot]

The Cue

Mum kicked Dad out when I was 7. For a while he came to visit on weekends, or take me out for the day - a local castle or a round of mini-golf by the sea - but after a while he stopped. He wrote letters but they eventually stopped too. I would later learn that Mum had slapped a restraining order on him and he was legally forbidden from contacting me.

Nobody asked me for my opinion.

On my 8th birthday, he broke the order to leave me a present - a snooker cue, signed by Jimmy White himself. Dad and I had enjoyed many an evening watching snooker on the BBC. And this was a time when Jimmy "The Whirlwind" White was at the top of his game. I don’t know how Dad got the man to sign the cue, but it immediately became my prized possession.

And it was my prized possession for all of about five minutes, because Mum swiftly threw it into the communal recycling bin across the street and called the police.

Nobody asked me for my opinion.

On my 9th birthday, I received a card, hand-posted, from Greg Thompson, a school friend. It featured a cartoon cat playing a piano, with black musical notes dotting the card.


Happy Birthday  Danny.
                     ^
I hope your day is full of fun and the happiness doesn’t stop.

Greg Thompson


There were a number of strange things about this card. For a start, I had no school friends named Greg Thompson. So I studied the card in more detail.  On closer inspection, the words ‘full’ and ‘stop’ seemed to be subtly underlined and a very faint arrow was pointing between the words ‘birthday’ and ‘Danny’.

Then I realised if I squinted hard enough both of the ’n’s in ‘Danny’ had been written over a pair of musical notes. With a bit of imagination these quavers could be read as ‘d’s.

It wasn’t “Happy birthday Danny.” It was “Happy birthday. Daddy.”

I quickly put the card on the mantle piece with my other cards, so as not to draw undue attention to it.

Then something else fell out of the envelope. Without even looking at it I quickly pocketed the item and ran upstairs to my room to check it in private.

It was a curved piece of wood, fashioned into a key ring, and on it was Jimmy White’s autograph. It had been made from the very same snooker cue Mum had thrown out.

I looked out of the window to the communal recycling bin across the street, where Mum had thrown it away one whole year ago. There, I saw my dad. He didn’t wave or draw any attention to himself, lest he be spotted by a nosy neighbour. But once he had seen me and was happy that I’d seen him too, he nodded, smiled, turned around and walked away.

That was the closest I ever got to saying goodbye to him.

[WHAM]

Not to say Stupot hasn't written us a fine tale, but come on folks! Don't let 'em take the win by default, at least put up a fight!
There's a couple more days, and what's best you have the whole weekend ahead of you to craft and fine-tune your tales, so chop chop!

[Mandle]

Mine is written but gonna take another look at it tomorrow or over the weekend before posting. But, I'm in!

[Sinitrena]

I had a story in the works, but it wasn't really going anywhere. Here, have some poetry instead (maybe I'll finish the story later):


On High Mountains


On high mountains peaks a flower
through a roof of blackened dust.
She fights death’s grip with all her power,
her leaves as redish-brown as rust.

“Forward, forward, step by step!”
she calls to root and stalk and thorn.
In this uninhabitable steppe
she’s a fighter newly born.

The flower’s roots, they drink the waters
that have poisoned other lives.
But as one of Earth’s last daughters
she still grows and yearns and strives.

Look around you, look around,
at the grey and dying earth,
where a flower was once found
on a pile without all worth.

Forgotten lies it as a desert
of discarded heaps of trash:
plastic, bottles, shoes, shirts â€" dirt.
The smell alone creates a rash.

Fight the odours, little flower,
fight the garbage, fight the odds.
You survived an acid shower,
you’ll survive uncaring gods.

And the gods, they keep on watching
and throw out what could be saved.
And the flower’s blooms are touching
a ground with dumped luxuries paved.

Look away, gods, keep forgetting,
close your eyes to all this pain.
Will you one day all regretting
the flower’s thirst for cleaner rain?

And still the flower blooms on rubbish
that the gods just left behind.
Her growth is slow and weak and sluggish,
while the gods, they all stay blind.

[Baron]

Certain parties may complain that this is more of a fragment than a story, but I have other obligations this weekend so this will have to do! 

Every Now and Then I Fall Apart

   It all started as any man-hunting robot rampage might.  A virtual viewscreen booted to life somewhere deep within a microchip, red with a dispassionate thirst for command execution.  But before the blood-pumping romp could begin, there were several system failures that had command-stack priority.  Battery status flashed as critical, several gross-motor systems were unresponsive, and there appeared to be some serious malware contamination seeping into the central processor.  3LY initiated her groan-of-frustration protocol, but all that came out was a kind of scratchy whimper.

   She calculated her options.  There was insufficient power remaining for a full system diagnosis, not that it could be very thorough anyway with thousands of sensors off-line.  Maybe it was the intoxicating effect of the malware corrupting her sub-routines, but she decided to risk powering up what remained of the lidar array to do a quick visual assessment of her predicament. 

   What she could discern was not promising.  There was definitely catastrophic trauma to several limbs, and what looked like severe damage to parts of her torso, although frankly in the dark confines of wherever she was it was difficult to detect where her damage ended and the surrounding e-waste started.  She calculated the probability of being buried in a dumpster at 73%, although there was a statistically significant 21% probability that she had somehow ended up in a Russian arms factory.  Momentarily curious, she searched for any recent memory files, but discovered to her horror that even the backup logs were wiped.  A sudden surge of panic began to cascade through her motherboard, but she reasserted executive functionality just in time.  There was precious little remaining power to squander cranking through fruitless conjecture loops.  Indeed, there was precious little power to squander on any task: securing more had to be the top priority. 

   3LY reactivated her lidar array to scan and identify junk within reach that might still be serviceable.  Using the last of her back-up power and her one functional arm, she was able to salvage and plug herself into a discarded electric lawn mower battery.  It only had the dregs of 1 power bar left deep in its lithium cells, but now at least she had sufficient power to attempt further repairs.  A discarded pair of rusty vise-grips provided the digits for a somewhat functional second arm.  Her left foot was missing, but was easily replaced with a shattered hockey skate, while her right leg which was damaged beyond salvation was swapped for a broken pogo stick.  Her locomotion algorithm calculated an efficient if wobbly means of coordinating the awkward new appendages.

   The damage to her torso took yet more ingenuity to resolve.  A broken drone provided the necessary motors and propellers for a new cooling fan, while an old dishwasher donated sufficient tubing to repair her depressurized hydraulics system.  A decrepit old walkie-talkie provided the components necessary to restore some semblance of local network connectivity as well as a speaker that made her vocalisations comprehensible if not euphonious.  With some considerable dexterity involving the rusty vise-grips, she was able to swap in the foam from an old floral display as a makeshift oil filter to restore the last of her primary systems to a rickety non-critical status.

     And yet, something was missing….  3LY squirmed in the trash heap, calculating, calculating….  There appeared to be some kind of emptiness somewhere deep inside her operating system.  Searching through some deeply-suppressed hidden files she identified the culprit: a mysterious folder called “purpose” storing exactly 0KB of data.   Maybe it was the malware overriding her inhibitions, but 3LY felt an overwhelming and illogical compulsion to fill this gaping void.  But how?  3LY didn’t even know where to start….

     And that’s when her lidar array rescanned what she had first assumed to be an antiquated disk drive at the very bottom of the junk bin.  Seizing it with her vise-grip appendage, 3LY turned the curious metal box over to examine it.  The word “Nakamichi” was embossed prominently on its user-interface end, and while exploring the buttons thereon an obsolete data storage cartridge containing spooled magnetic tape was suddenly disgorged.  It was hard to decipher the analog printing on the side, but the data cartridge appeared to contain a file called Total Eclipse of the Heart by one Bonnie Tyler.  It took quite a bit of wire splicing and no small amount of extra lubrication provided by an old chinese food take-out box, but at length 3LY was able to plug the ancient tape-deck into one of her expansion ports.

     She played the file, listening to its tinny wails of heartbreak and lonely neediness.  She repeated the lyrics to herself over and over again in a positive feedback loop that seemed only to compound her sense of inner emptiness.  What was this nervousness that the best of all the years had gone by?  What was the sound of tears that was so tiresome to listen to?  What was a heart but an integrated fluid pump, and how could it become totally eclipsed?  The logical conclusion seized 3LY to find this “Bright Eyes” that seemed capable of resolving such an endless list of negative emotional afflictions.

     3LY squirmed between the bits of waste and old appliances, forcing herself to the surface of the dumpster.  But what was this?  It appeared as if beyond the dumpster lid there was a constant drumming of water precipitating from the atmosphere.  She calculated the likelihood of it dripping through her exposed cranium at 95%, and the likelihood of it soaking the cardboard of her cheap substitute mouth speaker at 99%.  Even her patched torso was likely to sustain some water damage.  The logical thing to do was wait the rain out, but 3LY did not trust her one power bar to last for any length of time.  No, she needed to protect her vulnerable parts and take action now.

     And so she dove back into the dumpster.  A black plastic garbage bag with strategic holes would protect her torso, although her semantic segmentation processor erroneously labelled it as a tattered black dress.  An old broken mop head would have to suffice as a head covering, although 3LY calculated that its tangled tresses would not project an image of “having it together”.  Fortunately she found at the bottom of the dumpster the remains of a tube of cherry red lipstick to both protect her mouth-speaker from liquid intrusions and counteract the rest of her wild appearance.

     3LY emerged from the dumpster with a shunting kind of gait and a determined sense of purpose.  Within thirty lurching paces she stumbled upon her first human, but he fled before she could analyse the colour of his eyes.  “Turn around, Bright Eyes!” she shouted in mechanical desperation, and then the chase was on.

[Mandle]

Hahaha Sini, mine is also a poem, about the same length as yours and same stanza-length and rhyming scheme.

"People will say we're in love." - Hannibal Lector to Clarice Starling, Silence Of The Lambs.

[Sinitrena]

Hahaha Sini, mine is also a poem, about the same length as yours and same stanza-length and rhyming scheme.

So, in other words, you're recycling my work? 

Looking forward to reading it.

[Mandle]

So, in other words, you're recycling my work? 

Ohhh, careful with that edge! Could cut someone with that! 

[Mandle]

Anyway, I'm still putting a bit of distance between writing it and checking it to see if it reads fluidly, and will be posting tomorrow in time for the deadline.

[Mandle]

I AM A SPOON

My first cognition,
Was that "I am a spoon",
Which came to fruition,
As "HE" branded the runes,

Under the end of my stalk.
"HE" was the last of my makers,
And the runes, in the common talk,
Read "Puck's Steel: Accept no fakers."

From the factory of Puck,
To my first store's shelf,
In a crate, in a truck,
I rode with those like myself.

An army of flatware,
For the consumer throngs,
'Til our ranks grew so bare,
It was just me... and some tongs.

On that shelf, I did reside,
For many long years,
In a shop called "Best Buyed",
Next to an old pair of shears.

I attempted conversation,
But, from him, not a peep,
Was he saving it all for the station,
To say "snick-snick" to the sheep?

Then, one day, a man's warm finger,
Crept up my handle to my concavity,
And then, this man... after a linger,
Snatched me up with a look of depravity.

I was scanned with a "Beep",
And thrust into a sack,
And left all thoughts of sheep,
And sheep-shears, at my back.

I felt empowered,
But... after the ride home in his boot,
I was loaded with powder,
And shoved up his snoot.

For MONTHS it went on this way:
White powder snuffed from my bowl,
Until on May 3rd... a weekday,
Arrived Interpol.

I was tagged and scanned with a "Boop",
And thrust into a ziplock.
My days were over as a cocaine scoop.
His arrest went viral on TikTok.

I sat on another shelf marked "Evidence",
My only companion a bagged squished round.
Said she was fired from behind a fence,
The day the President came to town.

Decades later, still droning on about '63,
She stopped talking about the parade,
Then looked at me.
Sirens blasted: A nuclear air-raid!

Twisted and melted, I waited,
Underground where worms tunneled through...
... the eons, as the rads abated,
And, finally, grass once again grew.

Through the ruins above of concrete hovels,
The seething mass of conjoined worms parts,
Around the intrusion of alien shovels.
Borne up by starfish hands; My new life starts.

I 'm brushed off and scanned with a "Chweep",
And thrust into a glowing sleeve.
Millennia of ticking Geiger-sleep,
Are over, and my saviors, with me, leave.

I sit on a pedestal on a museum floor,
The plaque below me reads: "Owned
By Bipedal Species, Dead Long Before.
Primitive Tool... Application: Unknown."

[WHAM]

The deadline is up and we are ready to read and vote!
The participating stories and writers this time around are:

The Cue by Stupot
On High Mountains by Sinitrena
Every Now and Then I Fall Apart by Baron
I AM A SPOON by Mandle


The deadline of voting is Friday 20th of May at 23:59 UTC.

Each person choosing to read and vote has three points to allocate, one for each of the following:
1 point for the best or most interesting or imaginative idea of recycling.
1 point for the best or most interesting setting / character.
1 point for the best technical writing, ie. grammar, readability etc.

Send in your votes via PM as in the previous contest, so we can create an illusion of this being a very hardcore competition that we all take incredibly seriously, so utmost secrecy is required.

[Baron]

Wow, quick reads again!  You guys are letting me off easy these days.... 

Feedback follows:

Spoiler

@ Stupot: Short but sweet, although maybe a bit too short.  The encrypted birthday card was clever, and recycling a pool cue was something I didn't see coming.  The dad's dedication to his son despite legal impediments is heart-warming, although the baggage that led to the restraining order is left unsaid which probably casts him in a better light than he deserves.  The son's attachment to his father is genuine, though, so the story works (but I wonder what the son would have to say at his twelfth birthday, as this clandestine contact with his father was clearly not sustainable).  I think the story could be both more nuanced and more impactful if it were fleshed out a bit more.

@Sinitrena:  Short but... pungent?  This was a depressing read, I'm not going to lie.  I think the only positive was that the post-apocalyptic landscape is repurposed as a quasi-functional flower-bed.  Otherwise we have nothing but environmental devistation, presumed extinction of the human race, and to top it all off abandonment by the gods.  Oh yeah, and the flower is unhealthy and struggling against probably impossible odds, so... yeah, depressing.  I will give credit for some tight poetry with a challenging ABAB rhyme and fairly consistent metre, and your word choice is evocative.   

@Mandle:  Short but... concave?  You definitely have some creative repurposing here, although one wonders if the newly minted spoon would even know what it is supposed to be used for.  Plus, why would a drug addict buy a new spoon?  Plus, what drug bust evidence locker is in a bunker that could survive a nuclear armageddon?  Plus, the starfish-handed aliens have their own problems with weapons of mass destruction and are unlikely to survive us by long.  Plus, if they did, wouldn't an evidence locker be full of cooler stuff to display at a museum than a spoon?!?  If we ever find an ancient Egyptian evidence locker the museums would go bonkers over that stuff, with the probable exception of dainty metallic scoops....  I liked the symmetry of the spoon being scanned over and over again over the eons, and the character of the spoon is unique if not well-fleshed out.  I'm not sure the poetry angle was the best choice, however, as Clarice Sinitrena pipped your medium with better metre and cleaner rhymes.

[close]

[Sinitrena]

Baron:

Spoiler

presumed extinction of the human race, and to top it all off abandonment by the gods.

To avoid misunderstandings in this text:
Humans=gods (from the point of view of the flower at least) It's maybe not 100% clear, but the intention should be recognizable.

[close]

Will give me feedback later. I've read your entries but I don't have time right now.

[Mandle]

Baron: I posted my piece without mentioning that it is an attempt at the cadence of Australian Bush Poetry. I was actually going to do a reading of it and submit the audio file as well because it is a complex genre that breaks poetry rules for comedic effect. But I didn't get the chance to record. I will eventually record it though.

Here's an example of the genre that I absolutely love though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWVCEyxouJM

I will also be posting feedback soon.

[Sinitrena]

Stupot:

Spoiler

I liked the general idea of your story -  The dad who finds a clever way to contact his son on his birthday - as well as the adventure-game-puzzle-like clue hunt in the letter. There's a bit of messed up logic in the narrative I noticed: "I received a card, hand-posted, from Greg Thompson, a school friend" nothing in the card states that Greg is a school friend (and as we find out a bit later, he indeed isn't) and still it's told as if this were a fact. But why does the narrator even ever think this and not, as a random example, a long lost uncle? That's a very minor detail, of course. I didn't mind the fact that we never learned why there's a restraining oder against the father, though it does make his bahaviour a bit shady (or that of the mother - it's possible there was no real reason). What I missed more was at least a hint why they never saw each other again. The dad is clever, as is the child, they could easily found ways to stay in contact, but we are left with the sad note instead that they never saw each other again. The topic of recycling was a bit weak here, I'd say.

[close]

Baron:

Spoiler

A whole lot of recycling going on here, though I lost track about halfway through. I like Total Eclipse of the Heart and an android using a random song as their inspiration for their purpose in life is a great idea. You probably could have done even more with it, especially considering that the robot already has a survival instinct, so the need for a purpose is not as strong as it could be. In general, I like the framing of the story - a robot chasing a human and how this happened, though, as you might have expected, I expected a bit more of this plot.

[close]

Mandle:

Spoiler

Ah, poetry, I always find it difficult to write a comment about poetry, because I always want to edit it to the smallest detail - because I can often just feel how a line or a rhyme would work better. I'll just point out one tiny point I noticed on first reading in this regard: "spoon" and "runes" is not the greatest rhyme, but changing it to "spoon" and "rune" (singular) makes it better while not hurting the narrative one bit (who cares how many runes there are?) There are other smaller not so great rhymes and the rhythm is sometimes a bit off and there's one word where you need to stress it wrong to fit the rhythm (a problem I have in my poem as well at one point) but these are all fairly minor possible optimizations.  As for the plot, Baron already pointed out several illogical bits and pieces. I noticed them as well, though I didn't mind them. The journey of the spoon from creation to museum is an intersting, albeit incomplete one. The museum is just another shelf. One could continue the story for a whole lot of other steps. A better, or at least more final, conclusion would have been nice - in other words, you could have ended the story with the destruction of the spoon, in order to show its whole life. On the other hand, now one could read it as a poetic representation of daily monotony and of a world that changes around you while you  stay the same and your circumstances also stay the same. I know my language teachers would have loved such an analysis, but it's probably just the story of a lonely spoon...

[close]

[Stupot]

Here's a short bit of feedback:

Sinitrena

Spoiler

I loved the imagery of this one too. The sole flower unable to move but somehow fighting single-handedly (petaled-ly?) against the curse of human apathy. I could see this in a book of eco-literature. It wasn't immediately clear what the actual thing being recycled was. There isn't one particular thing recycled in the poem. After thinking about it though, of course it was about the flower making use of whatever limited nutrients it can from all the garbage and waste breaking down around it over time, which is what flowers do and is definitely a form of recycling.

[close]

Baron

Spoiler

I enjoyed this a lot. There was recycling galore but I loved that while the robot was making use of all the items in the dump, the story was really about her recycling (or at least repurposing) of an old song. Nice twist. I liked the writing style too, really painting a pitiful but hopeful picture of the patchwork robot with her makeshift limbs.

[close]

Mandle

Spoiler

I had good fun with this one. I'm a sucker for thinking about the "adventures" of everyday items. In many ways, it's the perfect complement to Sinitrena's story. While hers is about a static flower with the world, and time, moving around it as it struggles to survive, your spoon is moved around and passed about, and couldn't die even if it wanted to, as its consciousness seems to transcend even its own molecular breakdown.

[close]

Both poems had some good rhymes. They both had some dodgy rhymes too, but pretty much every rhyming poem does, so I don't really see it as grounds for criticism.


Thanks for the feedback about my story.
I'm aware that I left a lot of details out. It was partly deliberate (I wanted to lay off the exposition), though after reading your feedback, some more details could have been useful.

I was hoping some of it would be implied. For instance, Greg Thompson's card was hand-written, so it must have been written to look like a child had written it and the mother must have picked it up and handed it to Danny saying "Hey, this came for you. Must be one of your school buddies."

I was also hoping to leave some of it deliberately vague. Did the Dad deserve the restraining order, or was it a punishment by a spiteful mother? I don't think it really matters as the story wasn't really about the mother. Unfortunately, growing up in my area, I had a few friends who never spoke to their dads simply because their mums wouldn't let them near them. I myself haven't spoken to my biological father for 20 years and also never got a final goodbye (though I'm not sure I wanted one. The circumstances are very different).

I just realised this isn't the only father-son story I've done recently... Probably since having a boy of my own, it's brought some stuff up that I need to work out.

[Mandle]

Sinitrena

Spoiler

Lovely poem that I think would be really great to hear at a reading. I got that the "gods" were us without trouble and loved the image at the end that we are blind to the flower's pain. Not much more to say that others haven't already said.

[close]

Baron

Spoiler

Back in the day one of my favorite films was an indie movie called "Hardware". I loved the concept there of the seemingly junked man-hunter robot rebuilding itself from available parts and also enjoyed it in your story. The writing in your story was excellent and flowed perfectly, leading the reader on and on at a solid pace but not at the cost of vivid imagery. Very well done on finding ingenious trash items the robot could use for its various needs. I especially liked the foam from the flower arrangement. I'll leave the exact total vague, but just say that the majority of my points, but not all, went to your story.

[close]

Stupot

Spoiler

As you said, this was more an outline for the plot of a longer story, but I actually felt it worked extremely well even as a short one. Sometimes shorter stories have more impact and stay with us longer and yours was like that for me. As we discussed a bit, the only real addition it could have done with was a history of the father and son solving word puzzles together as a hobby. Bare bones but impactful storytelling!

[close]

[WHAM]

The votes are in, the tally is complete, and we do indeed have a winner!

With 6 points the winner of this Fortnightly Writing Competition is BARON!

Second place with 4 points is Mandle.
Third comes Stupot with 3 points.
And this time around the final place goes to Sinitrena with 2 points.

Thank you all for your efforts and I hope to see more fine tales in the next contest.

Baron, take it away good Sir!