“Doctor Boyle, I am Major Neal Moser, MD, United States Army,” said another masked man. His slightly muffled voice made his perfectly reasonable title sound faintly preposterous. “There has been a terrorist attack at Fort Benteen. And we believe they have released weaponized smallpox. The young man was stationed there.” He gestured toward John Doe.
Young indeed. As in, not born yet.
“They didn’t realize that when they brought him here. A big mistake. We’re going to have to quarantine this entire facility. Please come with us.”
Please. The two fellows lurking behind them had not said anything. The pistols on their hips did all the talking for them.
“Okay,” she said. “I had just gotten started on the external. Then this artificial limb fell off of the subject, as you can see. Probably served in Iraq or Afghanistan.” The metal rod seemed to tug down her hair at an unnatural angle—it felt like that—but no one appeared to notice.
If any of them had been gay, she knew, she’d have been sunk.
“Well, we’ll gather up all of that,” said the major who was a doctor. Bet you will.
She stifled any visible sign of contempt or rage. She was a doctor. And they were seriously attempting to pass off their hasty Rube Goldberg-style cover story on her? There were two extant smallpox samples in the world. It would have been easier for terrorists to steal a hydrogen bomb, as there were more than two floating around.
And their “protective masks” had only small carbon-filter canisters; rated for use against chemical fumes, in other words. She could tell at a glance that they weren’t adequate to protect against biotoxins; the best of those had a closed-loop rebreathing apparatus.
The masks were nothing but props grabbed from some storage locker, to go along with the cover story.
But I’ll pretend I am fooled. Whatever hoops they have me jump through in the next several days—unnecessary tests, unnecessary antibiotics—are nothing compared to what I have now and will always have from now on. The knowledge of magic.
They kept her and the others in a special wing of Raytown Memorial, until the “quarantine” ran its course: people who had touched the disaster in a peripheral way, such as the sheriff’s deputies who had taken first control of the body. They were really trying to determine what she and the others knew. And of course, plant the cover story in the guise of questioning them.
Horse manure. But horse manure with very high production values. Even the President had a cameo in it, looking grave and concerned in an Oval Office TV address and vowing to “strike back.”
Finally, they were all let go.
Every night, for the rest of her life, Molly took a nondescript metal bar, no more than two inches long, out of a junk drawer in her kitchen. She touched it, held it close, cradled it to remember that she had touched the future. No matter that she had not found any in the drab present; in the future, there would be magic.
“Abracadabra,” she would murmur, with a sweet smile. “Abracadabra.”
The Sport of Writing
BY NNEDI OKORAFOR
Nnedi Okorafor is a speculative fiction novelist of Nigerian descent. Her novels include Who Fears Death (winner of the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel), Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (winner of the Parallax Award). Her novel Akata Witch 2: Breaking Kola and her compilation of short stories Kabu Kabu are scheduled for release in 2014. Her children’s book Long Juju Man won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. Nnedi’s short story “Windseekers” was a Writers of the Future Contest finalist in 2001 and published in volume 18. Nnedi holds a PhD in literature and is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University.
Visit Nnedi at nnedi.com.
The Sport of Writing
When I was sixteen years old, I learned one of the greatest lessons I could learn as a writer. This was four years before I wrote my first creative work, so I didn’t know this at the time. I was barely paying attention, really. I was too busy trying to win. I was in San Diego, California on the hot tennis court, Wilson tennis racquet in hand, Reebok tennis shoes on my feet. These were from my corporate sponsors, but I loved their products, too.
I was playing in one of the United States Tennis Association (USTA) junior national tournaments. These were where the top young players in the country battled it out. I wasn’t a top seed. Neither was my opponent. I don’t even remember her name. However, she and I were evenly matched and for this reason, our match was long. Where most tennis matches took about an hour, ours had stretched to five and a half.
I’d lost the first set 6-7, won the second set 7- 6 and because of this we had to play a third. The score was 6-6 and we were playing a tiebreaker. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky or a person on the sidelines. We had no audience. Both of us had flown to California alone, so neither of us had parents there to watch. Regardless, we were two teenagers at war, slugging that ball back and forth, diving for drop-shots, acing serves, really digging into the root of the sport.
All the other girls had finished playing their matches. Everyone but the officials at the front desk had gone home for the day. Finally, after about five hours and forty-five minutes, I won the match. There was no burst of applause. I hadn’t advanced to any namable position like the finals or the semifinals. I didn’t scream or fall to my knees with elation. And if I had, there was no photographer to catch that moment.
Nevertheless, I felt I’d reached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro; I experienced the purest form of success. This had nothing to do with winning and everything to do with loving the game and playing it well after being blessed with a formidable opponent. She and I shook hands and then sat in the shade and drank lots of water. We didn’t talk. We had nothing to say. We went to the front desk and reported our score. That was it.
Nearly a decade passed before I realized the lesson in this experience. Just as in sports, when writing creatively, if you don’t love the craft and art of it, you’ll never experience this pure form of success. Yet when you do have this love, you realize that pure success does not come from fame or fortune, it grows from that love.
Too often athletes and writers are seen as being on opposite sides of the spectrum, culturally, socially and in practice. The seed of this separation is planted early. In elementary and high school, there are “the jocks” who are the athletes and “the nerds” who are the academics (this group more often than not includes those who seek to and will become creative writers). Writers are stereotyped as sedentary people who loathe exercise; their movement is in their heads. Athletes are stereotyped as being anything but academics and thinkers. It is brains versus brawn.
Both groups miss out on valuable lessons by being so separated. The fact is that there are many parallels between the worlds of sports and creative writing. In my experience, they are nearly interchangeable. They are both forms of craft and art. Since I am speaking to writers, I’d like to share some of the lessons I learned from sports that are perfectly applicable to writing.
One of the greatest lessons is how to gracefully, bravely face fear. I remember vividly those matches where I had to play against someone ranked just below me. These were matches where I had nothing to gain and everything to lose. One of the unique things about tennis is that it is a very mental sport. The best player does not always win. All it takes is a small distraction and next thing you know, you’ve lost.
For example, I was playing a girl in a tournament when I was about fourteen. I was winning easily. I’d won the first set 6-2 and I was up 5-3.
I was about to wrap things up. Then during one of the changeovers (every two games you switch sides), I noticed her left hand. It was prosthetic. I was only about fourteen years old and this killed my concentration. I went on to lose the match because I couldn’t stop looking at her hand and marveling at the fact that she could compensate so well.
Loss of concentration is not the only type of mental struggle when playing someone ranked below you. I was immature and highly competitive and such matches sparked sharp nervous fear. Despite this, I had to go out there. The walk out to the court was like a death sentence. The warm-up was torture. When I began playing the first point, I would find that I had to either curl up and lose or stand up and fight.
This is a battle I fight when beginning a new story, when facing the dreaded blank page. There’s a voice in my head saying, “There’s nothing there! How can you create something from nothing? Where do I begin? There’s no instruction manual or guide I can Google.” That blank page is like the opponent who has everything to gain from me and nothing to lose. Though I feel this fear every time, I have never walked away from it. I stand and face the monster, then I dance with it and it is exhilarating. “If you fear something you give it power over you,” says a North African proverb. And if you conquer that fear, you are rewarded with power and joy.
For one year, between the high school tennis season and my first (and only) year playing college tennis, I joined my high school’s track team. I went on to win over twenty-two medals and compete and place in the state championship in multiple events. My best event was the 400M. This race was once around the track; it is the longest sprint. Whenever I ran this race, something peculiar happened. I’d black out from the hundred-meter mark to the three-hundred-meter mark. Then I’d return to myself in that last hundred meters. The sound of the crowd would burst back into my ears as if it had been on mute and I’d speed up all the way to the finish line.
At first I was disturbed by this blacking out. These were moments where I had no control of what was happening. However, after winning a few races, I learned to stop questioning and just trust in it. This is something I’ve applied to writing many many times. Practically every successful story I’ve written grew from a “blackout” moment where I would fall into a creative zone. During these times, no matter how hard I try, I cannot recall how I came up with what I wrote. When I first began writing, these moments scared me. I didn’t like the idea of not knowing precisely where something came from or how I wrote it. Nonetheless, many novels and short stories later, I’ve learned not to question, fear, deconstruct or try to remember these blackouts.
There is a side of creativity that defies logic. This is the side that is no longer craft, but art. Imagine driving your car. Now, remove your hands from the wheel. Or imagine running. Now, shut your eyes. Now trust that you will not crash or fall. These are mystical moments for a mystical practice. Both athlete and writer are better off accepting these moments, welcoming them, even seeking to evoke them.
When life happens, certain emotions can cripple progress…like rage. There is one particular tennis match where I was being eaten alive by rage just before I went out onto the court. It was the state championship and I was tired of everything—the constant matches, nosy reporters, trash talking and pressure. I felt burned out and generally angry at my existence. I just wanted to go home and sleep.
Instead, I had to play a girl who was just below me in rank, one of those “everything to lose and nothing to gain” situations. However, instead of letting that hold me down, I went out there and focused my rage to a razor-sharp edge. Then I used this weapon to demolish my opponent in a half hour. I beat her 6-0, 6-0, acing nearly every serve. I didn’t care about winning; I just wanted to get off the court so I could go relax.
Rage and writing can be enemies or friends. One can be so angry that she walks away from the page because she can’t focus enough to write. The words fall apart when she looks at them. Her eyes cloud with tears so that she can’t see them. The angry throb in her head is too loud for clear thinking. Or one can use that rage to sharpen her pen. Rage can be a great blade sharpener. It doesn’t feel good but it’s burning inside you, so you might as well use it. Don’t let it stop you from producing; channel it into your work instead. Let it serve a purpose. Produce something positive.
Possibly the greatest lesson that I took directly from sports and brought to writing was stamina. The stamina needed to practice day in, day out and then prove one’s worth in a tournament or track competition is the exact same stamina needed to navigate one’s way through the mental and physical obstacle course of finishing a novel. My days of training for the nationals and state championships helped me tackle the challenges of my first novel, Zahrah the Windseeker. Right after I sold this novel to Houghton Mifflin, my editor asked me to change it from third to first person.
On the tennis court I’d tell myself, “One point at a time.” When writing, I tell myself, “One page at a time.” One of my favorite Nigerian proverbs is, “Little by little the bird builds its nest.” I used this proverb to create Nnedi Rule Number One: Don’t look a novel in the eye until you are done with the first draft. Focus on the journey, not the destination. This is the best way to reach your destination. Understand that the journey will be tough, perilous and sometimes painful. Never give up, but be willing to change and listen. Finish what you start. I’ve written over twenty novels and there has only been one that I have not finished.
The body and the mind are deeply connected. Writing is a mental and spiritual art but there is a physical side to it, too. One must have the stamina to sit and focus for long periods of time. There’s the physical act of the fingers flying across the keys or the hand holding the pen as it dances across the paper and the mouth moving as it exhales the story. Part of my own writing process includes working out at the gym. My muse sends me many of my finest ideas while at the gym, sweating and breathing hard, blood pumping. Exercise keeps my body fit and I therefore have more energy to burn writing.
It’s all connected.
Vestigial Girl
written by
Alex Wilson
illustrated by
JACKIE ALBANO
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Wilson is a writer and actor in Carrboro, North Carolina.
Earlier in 2012, a dark fantasy comic he wrote won an Eagle Award, the longest-running of the major comic book industry awards, and a short comedy film he co-wrote and starred in premiered at an international film festival in Germany. Alex then signed with a film agent for acting and finished the year by winning third place in Writers of the Future.
“Vestigial Girl” is Alex’s third professional science fiction sale and his twenty-fifth entry into the contest. Locus identified him as a “promising new writer” and Publishers Weekly has called one of his stories “a clever idea executed ably; lots of laugh-out-loud moments and offbeat humor pepper this fun, inventive romp.” He’s had work appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction and elsewhere.
Alex is currently shopping around a full-color crime graphic novel, figuring out the difference between stage combat and stunt fighting, and performing in two indie feature films: Box Brown (based on the true story of the man who shipped himself out of slavery in 1849) and Bombshell Bloodbath (based on the theory that audiences enjoy movies about zombies, guns and women). He’s originally from Ohio.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Born and raised in Miramar, Florida, Jackie Albano has been teaching herself to draw since the age of nine. She grew up watching cartoons and listening to stories (o
ften adventurous), which were read to her every night. Jackie knew then that all she wanted to do in life was to show the fantastical worlds brewing in her imagination. She decided to do this through illustrations, concept art and comics.
In middle school, Jackie discovered Japanese animations director Hayao Miyazaki, who creates beautiful animated fantasy films. Upon watching them, she decided that she would follow Miyazaki into the world of animation.
Now at the age of 18, Jackie has started her first year of art school at New World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida, where she plans to study digital media in the visual arts. At New World she hopes to create animated shorts and work on projects with fellow animation students.
Vestigial Girl
The cartoon butterflies were sleeping along the pushlight nursery wallpaper as Charlene fumbled with her cradle’s locking mechanism, using fingers too large and uncoordinated for anything so practical. She blinked away the fuzziness of the low light—clearing her eyes for less than a second—and fought against the calming scent of lavender wafting up through her mattress. She flexed the monster in her throat. She didn’t love the feeling, but would miss such control over at least this one part of her body.
She heard muffled voices in the next room, beyond the transparent gate of her cradle, beyond the sleeping butterflies. Her fathers were fighting again, and they’d forgotten to activate the night muffler to hide the sounds. This was a good thing, this night. Of course they usually didn’t check on her again after nine o’clock, but it usually wasn’t so important that she hear them coming if they did.
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