Back at the university we had to write 5 line stories based on a random word given to us. I found three of them a few days ago but one was really bad I’ll only publish the first two.
Playground
I see them laugh, I see them cry. The children are playing cheerfully at the playground. No sorrows, no worries. If only they knew the state of the world, corrupt and deceiving. Suddenly in the background there’s a flash followed by a huge explosion. An unstoppable force breaks through the playground. An instant later the shockwave from the bomb turns everything to dust as the mother screams through the fence, when the machines roam the earth.
Cuboid
The long forsaken landscape has nothing to give to the earth. It is nothing but a leech of its pure beauty. As the trees wither in the dead and desolate ground the monstrous vehicle hovers above the ground. The surface of the large floating cube shows no expression, it only reflects the outer world, grey and pale. No one knows how this thing came to be, the cube that walks the landscape. It was created by us, by our fear and lies. We are the cube.
These stories are, as you can tell, very simplistic. This is simply because they are so short. I cannot remember why we wrote these. My guess is that we had to learn to write about anything and learn to tame and use our imagination to generate fiction. The reason for the stories to be so short is because we didn’t have a lot of time and when writing short stories (not novels) one needs to express oneself in a very short and simplistic manner. Every word weighs gold. If I wrote them today I am positive I would be able to add more depth and imagery to them and still keep myself to the 5-line limit.
The first story, “Playground,” was inspired by the scene from Terminator 2 where Sarah Conner sees the world fall from behind the fence of a playground. This scene is also used, and referred to, in the opening credits of the movie.
Re-reading “Cuboid” it seems it is set in a similar setting. Yet I did not have any direct inspiration for it. A blank silver cube hovers over a dystopian, probably post-apocalyptic, landscape. The setting and tone of this short story is similar to the one I use in project 2.
– F H Hakansson
F. H. Hakansson 