Any narrative must have a beginning, and it doesn't matter if that's at the middle of the action or in a sleepy little village of crumbling houses and empty rooms. A start has to be made or else the whole narrative is thrown off kilter. Tossed in the electric storms of dust or the rotting milkweed in the river, that's where those stories go. Stories can easily have their centres plucked and thrown up. The syuzhet -- the order shown -- can be disrupted from the literal sequence. I could call it the literal sequence the “fabula,” if you wanted to get all fancy about it. Would that make it more fabulous, I wonder? Nah. Course not. Pulling a story apart at the seams seems to me to be the fastest way to have an empty courtyard.
But tell me this. What is the point of a beginning? To set the scene, to develop, is it not? Yet when your beginning is the end of the world it is somewhat difficult. Technically speaking the very beginning of the narrative lay a few years before then, but who wants to know why the end of the world happened in the opening paragraphs of a tale?
You do realise that was a rhetorical question, don't you? Impatience. You do realise that if I outright told you, in this instance, you would have no motive to continue onwards? Who am I kidding. You're barely directing your attention this way. I suppose when the narrator sets out to insult you and mock you and pull apart the threads of their own tale an audience should hardly be expected to pay them any of their time.
Fine. I'll give you some motive.
Approximately eight hundred years after the world ended, a sleepy little town named Brishwood was founded. It was named after the land it had sat upon and the stalagmite trees around it. What a fantastic name! Truly, the creative minds were stunning! And I suppose that the bandits who turned the town to flambé had a similar mindset.
Approximately fifty years after that, the Brishwood that I think should have been renamed Burntwood had little people in their little hats cowering in their little walls, trying to make their little lives make a little sense.
Approximately twenty nine years after that -- we are at eight hundred and seventy nine years now -- Hollam Drew Andley had set up a shop called “Anything Under The Sun,” except she didn't know her letters very well so it was actually spelt “squiggle with a line in the middle, squiggle, squiggle, cartoonish drawing of a literal sun.” I'm surprised she didn't even manage a homophone. I shouldn't be. All things considered I shouldn't be surprised at the lack of literacy given, you know, the end of the world eight hundred years back.
Actually I should be surprised. Approximately eight hundred years (drawing closer to nine hundred years, good grief) should be sufficient time to establish or make anew a writing system. Humankind did it once after all.
The reason why I say “approximately” is because time went funny after the world ended. It cracked jokes and put on the makeup of clowns, creeping into the broken spines of cities to scare the living daylights out of children. That isn't a metaphor. Actually it is, but only the makeup part. Time is a dick. That isn't a metaphor either.
Returning to Andley, she looked a lot like what would happen if you took a pretty young lady and then smashed her face into a wall several dozen times. It probably happened a fair number of times. Her nose was her identifying feature, you see, and it was so large it was like she had painted a target screaming “this is the spot you should aim when you are punching me” on it. Except she hadn't, because Andley as we established was a poorly painter. No wait, we established she couldn't write, but at least now we have established how she was worse at painting than an elephant.
I'm sorry, that is a terrible comparison. Elephants are perfectly fine painters and I deeply apologise for the insult. Andley was a worse painter than me. There, that is a great comparison.
Andley is where I have picked my beginning to begin. Now my problem is this: when should I set my beginning?
I could bring up a day of Andley’s childhood. Once upon a time Andley found a frog in a dried up pond and, wanting to save its croaking life, Andley ran several clicks to the river Drei (which to my surprise at least was a haven of trees with heavy fruit and plump animals, due to it being the meeting point of three other rivers on route to the sea). Andley gently lowered the frog to the river bank, where it hopped forward and was promptly eaten by a crocodile.
“And from that day forward Andley vowed that she would work to save the weak from the evil demons of the world! She, in all her ten year old glory, became a paradigm of righteousness and being good!” Blah blah blah.
Of course that's not what happened. She burst into tears and ran home, only for her mother to raise her eyebrows and point out that the river Drei is full of crocodiles and she'd been told many times not to go there, come here sweetie, Morron from across the road had ordered too much chocolate from the city factories and he needed help finishing it off.
So no, starting the story with an anecdote from Andley’s childhood would be foolish beyond measure, because children are like molten rock and constantly reshape themselves as they roll over their experiences. A child who tries to save the life of a chicken could easily grow up to raid villages and cackle at the top of his lungs, much like the leader of the bandits who burnt Brishwood in the first place. Childish actions do not denote their futures.
In fact anyone who does try that method should be hung, I say. It is pathetic, cheap and shit I did it too. When I said hung, I meant hung from a bungee cord and allowed to leap off a bridge in a perfectly safe manner to reward their writing prowess. Never mind that, I need a different point to start this story.
“Establish Andley,” check. “Establish the Agency,” check. “Establish the end of the world,” check. “Establish life afterwards…” well I've established that there was, indeed, life afterwards, but I've been a little sloppy about telling my lovely audience about it. “Complement audience to offset how I am definitely going to insult them,” should now have a check mark but knowing me I'm going to keep needing to check that one. “Get on with the gods damn story you idiot, stop scene setting and delaying and write the thing” is apparently the last note that I left me. Thanks, me, could you at least have given me some blather for your future self to build off?
Of course not. Fine. Like most days, it was raining in Brishwood. It was generally agreed upon that it was a Tuesday and it was December the fourth, but people in the city who build telescopes and the like probably had different opinions. Because it was raining Andley’s agency was supposed to be closed. In practice, she already had been asked to help patch the roof of Madam Fallcic and was completely drenched when she got to her house. Blonde hair plastered to her forehead, but at least she had at one point had the foresight to chop it short. Cockroaches in those days liked to make off with bales of hair in the night for their nests, and preyed on those with long hair more than the short. Andley knew many cockroaches. She, like many, were familiar with waking up with tingly scalps, a breeze where it shouldn't lie, and a scatter of claws and the ends dragging out some hole somewhere.
Fresh clothes came from reformed factories in the city. By the time the caravans reached Brishwood, there were only scraps. Unless, of course, they were ordered. Jon Hefty Morron, lover of chocolate, often ordered. But that was to be expected. He ran the only “official” shop in Brishwood. Currency wasn't very there given the world ending (even though eight hundred years had passed and one would expect it to have reformed by then), but Morron had made little tokens that others could use to purchase items. In this way, Morron controlled the entire economy of Brishwood.
(But not the world, I must stress. A rich person in Brishwood would be a beggar elsewhere, especially without any hard goods or services to trade).
Back to the point. Fresh clothes were difficult to acquire, as Birshwood was a small town and thus there was little sense in ordering clothes that often. Furthermore clothes came in multiple sizes. Andley got around this issue through the cunning use of recycling. Belts, I mean. She made belts out of her old, shredded clothes. Andley stripped off her old belt and lay it over a beam, soon followed by the rest as they were exchanged.
Andley then felt around her neck. There wasn't anything there. No, no, there were clothes, she got changed, but there wasn't anything other than that. She felt an absence around her neck. Her attention shifted from water wet need warm ahhh, to:
‘Fucking Bradcoc.’
And she walked right back out into the rain.
Guess who forgot to start National November Writing Month? I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with this. Nor am I going to race towards completing this by the end of November (or try to do a thing per day because of Exams). But I'm going to have some fun with it, hence the use of a narrator. Title's from a typo when I was giving this a temporary title so apologies aren't really going to be the focus. I'll think of a better title later when I discover what this story is actually about.