Story of the Story, Day 10 - "The Bricks of Gelecek"
In which the forces of construction and the winds of annihilation fight the perennial battle
For my ongoing “Story of the Story” series, I have been discussing the stories in my debut collection, Histories Within Us. Today, we’re talking about my story “The Bricks of Gelecek.”
The Bricks of Gelecek
The “no-things” live out in the black desert of the Jeen, where even the hated demons of Fintas-Miel dare not tread. The Jeen is a place of emptiness, of dissolution, of nothingness. And the no-things that dwell there delight in destruction. They sweep into cities of men and their offensive constructions, and with the merest touch they accelerate the winds of time. Before the sun rises again, where the city now stands, tomorrow there will be only dust.
Yet there are strange forces in the world, and some that run counter to this power of dissolution. Agna is a girl who delights in song and poetry. And when she sings, her music coils into the smoke of the burnt offerings to the goddess Mollai, and her voice is carried out over the desert into the far-off ears of a no-thing.
The no-thing hears Agna’s song, the music of creation, alien to everything he is, and he grows obsessed with finding the source. He will destroy everything and anything in his path to find the power within this haunting music. But by his nature, the no-thing is a being of destruction. He cannot have the thing he seeks without destroying it.
I wrote “The Bricks of Gelecek” for the Naked City anthology. My only prompt was that my story be about cities. I began to think about what a city is: a monument of sorts, a bulwark against time. We make cities as places of stability, security, and refuge against the violent and chaotic forces of nature. We think of them as solid and secure. But how many cities have come and gone over the millennia? I imagined a creature who embodies this entropy. A creature who by his very touch can in hours dissolve the structures and creations that we labored for years to build.
Art and literature are no different from architecture and masonry. Both are efforts to make our mark in time. They are creations of our hands and our wills, and they are what makes us uniquely human. Entropy will eventually turn all our works to dust. Our creations will be forgotten. Our structures will fall. Yet still we build. Still we create. There is a force is us that cannot be tamed, a force that drives us to create.
“The Bricks of Gelecek” probes this force and answers the perennial question, Why? Why do we create? And the answer always is: Because we have to.
You can read “The Bricks of Gelecek” in my short story collection, Histories Within Us, which is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Kobo and Indie Bound, and elsewhere.