By Eugen Bacon
Stories are everywhere. The muse can whisper from the most unexpected crooks and turns. I often find inspiration in a passing news broadcast, where my mind clasps onto a single word, an unusual person, or a strange event and simply refuses to let go. Other times, a small juxtaposition of words acts as a creative trigger.
As writers, we are professional thieves, stealing from our everyday. Not too long ago, I suffered a severe bout of nerve pain that demanded MRI scans, potent painkillers and a cortisone injection that, finally, calmed it and brought semblance of normality to my life. Gone were the heat pads, sleepless nights of pacing the floor to calm the agony, whispering and humming to it as if it were a wailing child. I channeled the anguish into a short story “The Scent of Truth”:
It wasn’t fun, until it was.
The ‘situation’ with Tumaini’s hand was a whole question mark, really. The pain started as a tingle, first on the back of the neck where a guillotine typically fell, all those nerve endings feeling everything. Then the discomfort sharpened and travelled to her shoulder blade, right along her left arm, all the way down to her fingers.
In the story, a journalist’s chronic pain translates into a bizarre form of sentience: a festering arm that insists on writing its own stories. Plagued by missed editorial deadlines, the journalist loses control over what her putrefying hand types:
She sits at her keyboard, closes her eyes and centers herself. She doesn’t know what she wants to write, and her bad hand is numb. But something is happening, despite its numbness. The fingers are crawling on their own to the keyboard, and she lets them. Her head is empty but the article writes itself, as if her limb is possessed.
The story’s outcome astounds both Tumaini and me. In another observance, I stumbled across the phrase “flame water” in a prose poem, and it sparked an immediate response that became the foundation for my story “Flame Water Turns” published in Witchcraft: Folk Tales & Horror Stories, an anthology by Flame Tree and edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane:
yellow moon still high—
she wades into black waters
its malice too big
Her face is veiled. But everyone can see the wattles on her throat. Well, you can. There she goes, black-clad through the trees. Step, step, steppity step, glide-o-glide in a dance of the woods. The stars look on with shiny eyes, winking at the dark forest and its invitation of a folktale. This is where the story begins. With a witch on a solitary dance-walk-glide that is a mistake to follow.
The unusual nature of it makes it a fun Afro-surreal story with quirky characters, including a shape-shifting witch’s familiar sometimes manifesting as a dingo. It’s an African Australian story that mirrors my own hybridity.
As you can see, the oddest inspiration can come from distorting the ordinary into the extraordinary. A creative spur can also strike in academic spaces. While attending the annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference, I listened to a presenter discuss their fascination with “fungalfunk”, and I was enthralled to learn there were more “funks” in addition to those I already knew, such as cyberfunk and spacefunk.
I was going through my own “situationship” at the time, and my mind conjured images of creeping fungal blooms in a body horror concept, where a broken hearted woman jumps into a car, drives to the farthest place from her lost love:
Her grief didn’t have a pattern, which was annoying, so there was no anticipating it. Sometimes she felt numbed, cold and indifferent, and sometimes she was endlessly collapsing from within. She forced herself into a shower, no point stinking up the place with her misery, but the damn thing wasn’t that much better than a drip, drip, and it took a few minutes for the trickle to leak out dirt water from unused pipes and for a semblance of tepidity to kick in. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt that looked better on Zed with his guns and gym bod. She tied the tails at her waist, tucked her feet into walking shoes and strode out to the river’s fog whose fingers already touched the cottage.
That was the onset of my story “Kindredhood in Medieval tongues” published in Three-lobed Burning Eye. On a walk that day, the woman in my tale stumbles upon a fungal patch. Right there, in the remoteness of that site, a relentless infestation begins to consume her outer being, even as she finds inner healing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She is a Solstice, British Fantasy, Ignyte, Locus, Foreword Indies and BSFA Award winner. She’s also a twice World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a finalist in the Philip K. Dick Awards and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was announced on the honor list for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
CRIMSON IN QUIETUS by Eugen Bacon
GENRE: Science Fiction | Horror | Afrofuturism
BOOK PAGE: Crimson in Quietus – Meerkat Press
From the queen of genre-bending speculative fiction, comes the newest Sauútiverse offering, a mystery like no other, where the investigator is not a detective, but a sound scientist.
In a world where sound is a tangible force, Muso’mi is a maadiregi—an expert in the art of consuming it. At the prestigious Mahadum, she researches the language of silence, seeking to master the gift her mother calls theft. But academic intrigue turns to deadly peril when her friend vanishes after unearthing a hidden truth. Pursuing clues through pools of quietude across worlds, Muso’mi stumbles upon a horrifying discovery: a pattern of carnage left in fields of harvested silence. Now, the hunter becomes the hunted, as her unique expertise draws her into the orbit of a serial killer who understands the power of sound all too well.
Includes a glossary of Bantu, Afrocentric and made-up words from this cross-cultural tale written in gorgeous lyrical language packed with emotion.
BUY LINKS: Meerkat Press | Bookshop.org | Amazon
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