Welcome all to another fun writing experiment!
As you will have seen in Saige’s post from Sunday, we done did a thing.
Saige’s idea (of course) was to write some short fiction together. Literally. Like, we each started a piece with 100-150 words. Then the other person would take over for about the same amount of words, then we’d switch again, and so on.
On Sunday you saw the one Saige started, a tale of revenge and love under a cursed tree. Today, you get the one I started.
And it’s a little different from the other one.
Just a little.
As before, our sections will be differentiated by font.
My writing will be in this font, EB Garamond.
Saige’s writing will be in Figtree.
Enjoy!
Karma
By Ava Christina and L. Saige Johnson
Content Warning: gun violence, gore
David gasped as he startled awake, struggling against the iron grip around his lungs and throat.
My throat, he thought with confused alarm. It burns! Why does my throat burn?
Then the rest of his senses returned to him, and he cried out with shock as he looked around himself.
He was flat on his back, chained by his wrists and ankles to some sort of metal platform, which was cold as ice against his wet skin.
Wet skin? Yes, David was wet to his chest. Submerged in freezing water just enough so that his toes and fingers were already numb. He coughed, expelling ice-cold liquid from his burning lungs.
It was salty. That explained the burning, or maybe just enhanced it. His mind raced as he tried to recall the events that had brought him here. He remembered salt and sand and…
The beach. That’s right, he had been by the beach, using his metal detector to comb for any lost jewelry or relics that he could pawn off for some extra cash. He’d been combing and…
He’d found something. Something big, by the cacophony of beeps that came from the detector. He’d used the special sand shovel to scoop deeper and deeper, washing the sand away without risking losing his prize. David had dug the shovel in for what he hoped was the final scoop, and he’d struck something big when…
When his memory went blank. He couldn’t remember anything beyond that. Not what was under the sand, not what had imprisoned him here, not even where the fuck he was now.
David had started to struggle by the time the voice spoke to him.
The voice was garbled and coarse, like the scrape of sand between his toes. It rubbed against his brain like salted sandpaper.
“Are you comfortable, male human being?” it rasped, the words accented like nothing David had ever heard before.
The voice was coming from somewhere behind David, and he realized his head wasn’t strapped down to the cold metal like the rest of him. He jerked his head upward and rolled his eyes as far back as he could, straining to see the person just outside his view.
But it wasn’t a person.What the flaming fuck? David screamed in his mind, and began to struggle against his bonds despite the lack of feeling in his limbs.
David was familiar with crustaceans. He loved the little things, how they scuttled around and pinched shit. He loved to pull them apart and see how many chitinous pieces it took for them to stop moving, starting with leg segments before moving on to antennae and mandibles and whatever little gaps he could snap off. This was nothing like any of the critters he’s tortured.
Huge and rusty red, even just the upper half he could glimpse was horrifying. He spotted at least three sets of limbs, the appendages ending in small pincers. They seemed to move independently, pinching mindlessly at nothing. It had no neck, but a head was segmented from the main body. Its head most resembled that of a lobster, coming to appoint there two huge thick stalks rose from the top of the carapace. Worst of all was its mouth, which had dozens of hairy toothy…things coming out, which fluttered rhythmically as the creature continued to speak.
“Male human being,” it said again, and David cringed. “Are your sound receptors functioning properly?”
David began to cry, struggling against his bonds even harder. “Oh Jesus please, please let me wake up, please.”
“Male human being,” it said, “According to our knowledge of human brain activity, you are currently in a waking state of consciousness.”
“Please,” David whined, cringing away from the monstrosity looming behind him. “Please, where am I? What is this?” Snot dripped down the sides of his wet face.
The monstrosity made a horrible clicking noise as its mandibles snapped together several times. David couldn’t help but twitch in alarm at the sound.
“Male human being, you are on board the ——” it said, the last word utterly incomprehensible to David. Hearing the word made his head ring like a gong, and he couldn’t smother a cry of pain.
“My crew has examined you and your kind for a considerable time,” it continued, “And we have seen the way you harm our Earthly cousins.”
“We are in need of a human for our mission, and you have been selected as a bit of…” it paused consideringly, antennae twitching. “Poetic justice, I think your kind says. We call it ——” another awful sound from his abductor. “Which I won’t even bother explaining to you, as your tiny brain likely wouldn’t be able to understand, no matter how hard I try.”
The creature leaned down then, bringing its god-awful mouth closer. David gagged at the smell of rotting fish and salt. “As I was saying. The poetic irony is that we want to study humans. And you will be doing the hard work for us.” It raised one of its pincher appendages, which held what looked scarily like a syringe. A giant one. “This contains a genetic code that will allow me to communicate with you directly. It also will help you to follow orders and be… agreeable! We have observed that sometimes humans do not like to follow orders, but you will not have this problem.”
David shook in the freezing water and screwed his eyes shut.
“Wake up, David. This isn’t real. Wake up, David…” he whimpered.
“My name is not David, male human being. I have not given you my name because you would not be able to pronounce it.”
David continued to cry and struggle. A bubble of wet snot expanded out of his nostril before popping, the slick fluid splashing down his upper lip.
“Kindly hold still so that I do not cause unnecessary injury during the injection,” the monstrosity said.
David doubled his useless efforts, the cold manacles cutting into his wrists and ankles. He couldn’t feel it.
The monstrosity made another gut-wrenching clicking noise. The appendage holding the strange syringe plunged down toward David, and he remembered no more.
When David awoke next, things were better than they had been, even if there were more huge holes in his memory.
He was on a bus, which was, if he had to calculate, one bajillion times better than being chained up in a freezing salty dish about to be injected with alien crustacean juice. The ache in his arm among the signs that proved the nightmare had been real. The injection site hurt more than any vaccine he’d ever gotten. His wrists and ankles also stung from where they’d been rubbed raw, but these had been wrapped at some point during the haze of then and now. He was in fresh clothes, unstained with saltwater, that he didn’t recognize.
Good morning, male human! Spoke a familiar voice in his mind. The creature. I have released you from my control, so you should have bodily autonomy again, yes? Yes.
“What the fuck?” David muttered, confused and disoriented. The bus seat vibrated beneath him. “How can I hear you? Where… Where is this bus going?”
The chatter on the bus was low enough that several of the passengers closest to him turned to stare, vague fear and anxiety on their faces. He realized they probably thought he was crazy, talking to himself on a bus.
They’re probably not wrong, David thought with grim amusement.
Male human, the voice continued, The destination of this bus means nothing to our research purposes. We desire to see the natural human response to danger.
“What… what the fuck does that mean?” David said aloud, ignoring the increasingly frequent glances in his direction. Whatever this is, it definitely isn’t good.
You have enjoyed placing us in peril, the voice said, a surprising calmness considering what David had done to dozens of little crustaceans in his life. And you got something out of it, male human. Call it morbid curiosity, but I want the same. But not with many different human subjects. Just with you. Now, brace for impact, and be ready to describe the feeling to me.
Before he had the chance to scream, something exploded into the side of the bus, mere feet from where David sat. The vehicle rocked and skidded, throwing David from his seat. His head cracked into an arm rest as he was thrown and tumbled with the bus. For the third time, he was knocked unconscious.
And thus, the terrible cycle began. He’d awaken in a new place, great holes in his memory, and he’d be asked by the voice to describe his pain. Then another freak accident would happen to him. Rinse and repeat. And the worst part was that he was unable to resist.
David had thought he understood what torture meant. Medieval machines designed to crush bodies slowly, to poke holes in the skin, to rip limbs from the body were always what came to mind. He knew about Chinese water torture, the slow drip of water on skin driving a man mad.
But this, what became of his life, was pure agony. Thrown into places like an actor entering an improv scene, David would cower behind bank counters as a shooter sprayed the walls around him with a sub-machine gun. He would find himself at the top of a ten-story building in a wind storm, no railing or safety ledges to secure him. He would jolt awake laying on the cold asphalt of some country road just as a silver semi-truck bore down on him.
He felt all of the pain. Every time. Somehow, the monstrosity healed him after each “test”, despite the limbs torn from his body by truck grilles, despite the stinging, somehow cold burns as he tried fruitlessly to escape a burning building, despite the broken-watermelon mess he guessed his skull and brains had become after falling ten stories to the concrete below.
He awoke, head in his hands, after his fall. He screamed, drawing attention from passersby. He was on a side street, and not the only bundle of human and clothes on the side of the road. He fit in with the other crazies there. Or maybe he was the only crazy.
Exquisite! Cheered the voice of his tormentor. Tell me, did any part of you feel the fracturing of your skull? I counted at least 24 different skull fragments. Quite impressive, based on my calculations.
“Fuck… off…” groaned David. “I get it now, can this stop, please? Your karmic justice or poetic irony nonsense. I swear I’ll never touch another crab or lobster as long as I live. Hell, I’ll spend the rest of my life worshiping you guys if that’s what you want.”
The creature chirped. I’m afraid I can’t let you go so easily. By my count, at least 1,739 of my kin have died by your hands. You’re barely a dozen deaths into our experiments! To have met poetic justice, you have a while yet to go.
Look out!
This exercise was really fun, but it definitely had its challenges. The uncertainty of knowing where the story was going was both a fun edge and an interesting challenge. I would laugh after reading Saige’s sections, because she would take it in directions that I wasn’t anticipating. Fun fact (yes I’m outing her) she’s the one who said, “Hm. Crab monster?” And I said, “Hell yes.” Here’s what Saige had to say about writing this piece.
I really knew that I wanted to go into more of a humorous direction from the other story, which was intense from it’s inception. I truly had no idea what Ava’s initial concept even was, because when I read about her little character tied up on a wet, metal platform, I immediately thought about aliens and probing and …lobsters? Somehow we made it work, and I’m so lucky that Ava is more than willing to follow my silly brain wherever it goes.
Overall, I had a great time with this exercise, and I really got a good taste of Saige’s writing style and process from up close. If you’ve got a writing partner, I highly encourage this exercise for fun.
This content was written and created by a human, without the use of any artificial intelligence tools. The authors do not authorize this article’s usage in training AI tools. We proudly support the original works of creators and individuals over technology that steals and manipulates original content without consent of creators.
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