Before I sit down and write, there’s one word on my mind: snow.
Beep!
“Chunks of snow and frost tumble down from the disturbed hillsides. They’re sloped like mountains and could just as well hatch one. Like an egg tooth bursting from the rounded peak of its shell. Egg teeth are probably white, like snow. So, there’s egg teeth and frost tumbling down from cracked nests that are convex instead of concave. Not a very good nest, mama bird. Unless you’re looking to have them soar. The hillsides, I mean. The mountains are dead with that. But the hillsides reach higher than dead mountains, likely because the dead mountains are dead. You think a hillside could fly as long as it kept breathing?”
Dr. Faraday opens her mouth to speak, but she’s quickly cut off by the beep of an input and an automated voice.
Beep!
“—Don’t answer that. These are my words, the thought of you speaking makes my mouth itch. Prickle. It’s not going away. It’s like a tickle with nails but soft like a buzz, like the feeling from a fly zipping across your ear minus the fly inside your mouth, and you don’t flinch so much as cringe, which could make frost and teeth fall off your shoulders, which would make your shoulders hillsides. I don’t want birds on my shoulders. Those are mine. These are mine. I’m gonna sprout mountains from my hillsides to punt them off. Choke on the teeth in the sky.”
“Shut off the audio both ways.”
Beep!
“The s-”
The laboratory goes silent as a collective, save for the shuffling of individuals subconsciously moving closer to one another. The shuffling brings them further away from their creation, and it would be laughable if not for the enormity of the subject. A human brain, lab grown, hooked up to walls of monitors and tubes, sits in a small, square, see-through containment unit upon a pedestal. It is labeled ‘The Terrarium,’ by a fancifully penned sticky note. Dr. Faraday wrote it, and placed it, herself.
Still, nobody speaks. Someone in the back brings up a transcript of the brain’s conversation onto a large monitor. It is read, clear as day, silently, by all present. All at once:
“That’s a bit aggressive, right?”
“It’s making up sensations for itself.”
“Absolutely none of that made sense.”
“That sure is some data.”
“We made that.”
“Interesting…”
“Oh, man.”
When I finally take the time to look up from my mind, I see a hundred different words alongside the simple starting point of ‘snow.’
Boy, did we drift off from snow. But I don’t dislike it. It’s raw, and might not make sense, but it was freeing to write, and likely influenced by the absolutely freezing air conditioner in front of me. It’s probably laden with other little bits like that. Little bits of me. In any case, it sparks ideas, and it was fun, and I think everyone needs to have some fun with their writing. There are the agonizing bits of writing, the joyous bits of writing, and what you get when you start off with the word ‘snow,’ then get paragraphs leading up to an ethical dilemma. Maybe the next time I simply want to write, I’ll sit down with the word ‘brain,’ and see where I’m taken.
