Assignment 1 Repackaged

Image:

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Story:

Suddenly he was awake. His consciousness was shocking, and although he remembered what it felt like to be alive, he had lost any semblance of who he once was. Like trying to remember a dream from a sound nights sleep, visions of the past seemed to allude his mental grasp. In this blur he could not tell much, except this had been the first time he had been conscious in a long time.

He had no name. If he had one once, it had long disappeared into the recesses of his mind. He had not opened his eyes yet, he didn’t feel he had too. Lying on his stomach, he could feel the cold cement floor below him and was almost comforted by its familiarity. His mind was silent for an instant, until he realized the fact he was familiar with his surroundings was curious; he had no conscious knowledge where he was, let alone who.

Cautiously he opened his eyes. Rolling onto his side, his vision was immediately obstructed by white fur falling into his line of vision. His first instinct was to brush the fur away from his eyes, however when he tried he was unable to move his arms to his face. A wave of panic washed over him, and as he rose to his feet he realized he stood upright on four legs. Despite his inability to remember details of his past, he could not shake the feeling that he was human, or at least once had been.

Gazing around the room he realized he was in a cage of sorts, a cement cell with no door...only a glass ceiling. One spot light dangled from the cages steel frame, shining enough light only to illuminate the center of the cage, leaving the corners dark and damp. He could hear water dripping and puddling on the floor. He could smell the damp which surrounded him, a smell which was permeated by a faint and metallic oder which seemed to permeate his entire being. It was a crimson smell, faint enough that a mere human could not detect it, however he could almost taste it in his mouth. He could not help but think that perhaps he was not somewhere familiar after all.

Again a wave of panic washed over him. A new determination seized hold of him to figure out exactly why and what had been keeping him here. Cautiously, he walked to the corner of the room. As soon as he entered the darkness one of his legs bumped into a wet object in the corner of the room.

“ Finally! some clue” he thought to himself. Again, he was surprised when his arms refused to grasp. Left with no other choice, he grabbed the strange object with his jaws, and began to carry it back into the light. As he was walking the short distance back to the center of his cage, he happened to begin to taste the object which he was caring in his mouth. My goodness! how delicious he thought It was. The taste was familiar, yet not one he could place ( as was everything he seemed to encounter). He was slightly relieved at this. If his captor had been feeding him, and so well at that, then he must not be in someplace terrible at all.

One cannot describe the horror he felt when, upon putting down his foreign object, he realized he had been carrying, tasting, and enjoying, what appeared to be the lower part of a human arm.

“ What beast could have done such a thing!” he screamed aloud, staring at the arm laying limp on the ground. He began to wonder if perhaps he was the next victim. His horror was almost blinding and when he thought he could take the mental anguish no more, he heard a noise coming from one of the cells dark corners. Terrified, he waited silently for the beast which had done these terrible things to enter. A door, which he had no seen before, seemed to appear almost out of nowhere . Opening just a crack, he could hear the muffled voices of some humans and then a faint cry. The door slams. Out of the darkness walks a child; a little boy of maybe five or six. The boys terror is palpable as he stares into his eyes. Trembling the boy asks

“ What are you?”

taken aback, a moment elapses before he simply answers

“ I...I don’t know”

then, as suddenly as it had happened, he is lost again. All consciousness regained is gone. He feels it happening, but suddenly does not mind.

“ We all need to eat” he thought to himself,

“ and it was, after all, delicious”

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Analysis:

What an absolutely well written short. It is true not only to the ambiguity of Dracula, and what may have been in that struggling sack which screamed like a child, but it also follows the criteria for the horror genre.

By that I mean that it's set up in such way we initially ask the question "what's going on here?" and by the second, certainly by the third paragraph we almost have a set of rules in which this realism can exist. By that I mean the ambiguity of our narrative suddenly has a reason. There is the exposing sentence of our character's predicament: "Rolling onto his side, his vision was immediately obstructed by white fur falling into his line of vision." I would say very undoubtedly this suggests he is a dog, and he doesn't exactly seem to know he is a dog.

Now, is the question ever answered? Is he dog? Yes. But the question of how is not, and there lies the ambiguity. Is it a work of magic? A sudden dark transformation like that of a man into werewolf? The audience doesn't know, however, in the end the dog seems to be consumed by a blinding and overwhelming animalistic urge to kill, to feed.

This story started with a picture of a dog. The dog in question, however, looks amorphous, blob-like almost. It could be a carpet, a pile of blankets, or something eeevvvilll. Annie took the idea contained in this single photograph and really ran with it in a magical realism/horror direction which worked really well I think.

Image: Dylan
Story: Annie
Analysis: Brandon