I performed at a #spokenword event last night for the first time in a long while. I was really nervous, but it was good. The theme was World War III Literary #Cabaret.
My #story, #Balls, is below. It's a performance piece, not sure how it'll come off reading it from a screen. So just picture me turning to stage right, waving my fist and shouting "Plonkers!" at the right moment.
#WritingCommunity #writers #WorldWar3
BALLS
My grandparents grew up in caves. Granddad says it wasn’t safe to go outside most of the time. Some people who did got sick, some even died.
My parents remember it too from their childhood: they were taken to shelter in the big underground spaces when the burning rain came, or the choking clouds that often followed it.
They say it was because of the wars. World Wars, they call them. They say there were three of them.
But they were all over long before even Granddad was born. There are stories, but I think nobody really knows what happened in the before times.
It all sounds scary, but really – people causing burning rain? It doesn’t seem very likely, does it?
What I do know, is that we’re doing better now. Better than when I was a child, and even better than when the elders were. We’re growing more food and we’ve recovered lots of machines and books and stuff from the before times.
There are a lot more people in our valley than when I was a kid, both from growing families and from strangers who have come to join us. We’ve explored more of the ruins and fixed up homes. It seems to be the same all over the land. We’re in a period of prosperity.
Now, even though we understand some of the old technology, there are still lots of machines we find that we can’t get to work. Mum says they need something called electrisss— something...
She’s in the science team, so she should know. They make a little electrisss in big boxes called batch-reez. Apparently they used to have lots of it, judging my all the machines. No idea what they needed so many machines for.
I think that was one of their ages, in the before time. They had a stone age, and a bronze age, and a plastic age. Maybe also an electrisss age. I wonder what that makes us now.
But even though we’ve figured out so much, it’s not all good news. Since there are more of us, the land is getting crowded. There’s only so much wood to gather, so many animals to hunt. The people in the next valley are getting jealous of us. Plonkers!
There have been some fights over the past couple of years, and it’s getting worse. There were some bad clashes, and a few people were killed just last week.
We’ve had no choice but to build up our defences. We do have some weapons, even some guns from the before times, although the powder is hard to make.
I heard some of the elders talking, saying there were tensions all over the land, with clans grouping together. One of them said it would lead to war. She thinks people are just built that way. We’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
I think she’s wrong. I’ll tell you why.
We’ve recently recovered a... carrnon? Conan? Cannon. A cannon.
A big old metal thing. Our weapons team got it to work. It shoots big metal balls. It’s not the most accurate thing.
Apparently they found it in a museum. Maybe in the before times they didn’t know how to use it properly. But some of our fighters worked it out. You load it with these big metal balls filled with the fire powder and use more of the powder to send it flying. Something like that.
The cannon balls explode when they land or hit something.
I watched a few days ago. They tested it out on an old building. The devastation!! The whole house collapsed, rubble and dust flying everywhere. And the noise of the explosion!
Imagine – if these cannon balls were fired on people. We could annihilate each other. Surely that fear will cause all civilised people to recoil in horror and end all fighting. Surely with these cannons, there can never be another war!
