Metal God Complex
Date: August 9, 2006
Distantly, beneath the deep haze of anesthesia, he heard the clinking of metal on metal. It was a tiny sound, so very far and near, all at once, but it was God. His life was in that clink, in the gentle hum of an internal computer, the shushing blow of fans. His flesh, that mortal, ever depreciating and wrinkling hunk of epidermis, was under the care of metal men.
They were machines he might have built once, left in labs overnight. Science projects, and there they were, fixing his ticker. He could only hope that they held no grudges now.
Details
As per the requirement of my fiction writing class, this piece is exactly 100 words, no more or fewer. For those interesting, the phrase I worked off of for this piece was “It was God.” I wrote three different things–nothing remotely similar–before coming up with this.
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Comments ordered from oldest to newest.
Peej Maybe
August 10, 2006 at 8:04 am
Interesting exercise…! Hadn’t really thought of doing anything like this before, constraining the writing down to such a rigid wordcount. Excellent scene setting and very cool idea (which I will no doubt steal for my own blog :)
Peej
Lelia
August 10, 2006 at 8:35 am
Hi, Peej! Thanks for stopping by, and I’m glad you like the piece.
I can’t say constraining writing like this ever occurred to me either, and I’ve tried a million and one exercises, it seems. My fiction writing teacher is pretty cool. He showed us some book examples of where that was the essence of the book–hundreds of pages of 100-word-restricted stories. It really makes you cram a lot into a little bit of space; I found it helpful. :)
