Short Story!

  “‘ Get up there, Bill,’ Mrs. Hutchinson said, and the people near her laughed. ” - Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery,” pg. 297.  We meet Tessie Hutchinson early in “The Lottery,” much like many other characters - Jackson does a good job of making the town seem small and personable, something that adds a layer to the dark turn the narrative takes as friendly townspeople ultimately turn on one of their own. This is powerful, because it allows us to contrast people’s opinions of the lottery before and after the drawing is made. In Mrs. Hutchinson’s case, she first appears in the story as the final person to arrive for the drawing, having forgotten which day it was. Once she remembered, though, she “came a-running” - notably without any hesitation, fear, or ill will towards the lottery system. Later on, though, the people’s level of anxiety rises as everybody remembers that they could be the person chosen. During the drawing on page 297, the townspeople’s tension is so thick you c...

First Person Shooter Alternate Ending -------- “Gotta go.” Janine can hear in my voice that something’s very wrong. “What’s happening?” she says. “Our friend just discovered House of the Dead Two .” I never played zombie shooter games when I was a kid. “Too violent,” my mom always said. Plus, the first person view always made me a little queasy. I stuck to Madden. I always make fun of Janine for how much she loves House of the Dead Two - it’s a bad sequel to a terrible game. But of course we sold it at Worldmart. We sold everything at Worldmart. I approach Pretty Zombie Lady carefully, and stop a few feet behind her. We both stand there watching the demo for a while, limbs being blown off, exploding heads, and when she turns around I see that, in her blank-eyed kind of way, she looks hurt. Betrayed. Which, I suppose, is understandable. She started off tonight excited for a date, and then she comes in here and sees this game, and now who knows what’s happened to her self-image. C...

  Dystopian stories are often inspired by the author’s fear of how changes in their world that they are uncomfortable with will ultimately result in society’s undoing. In reality, I believe that it is far more common for technology to be seamlessly integrated into our world without horrifying side-effects, and as such, we should not put too much weight in one author’s pessimistic view of a future they do not recognize. As such, I often have little patience for apocalyptic or dystopian literature. Too often, stories like “The Machine Stops” (or Brave New World , or 1984 , or any of the plentiful other examples of this style) cause modern-day readers to marvel at how much the author correctly predicted, thereby leading us to irrational fears that the world depicted in the tale is not far off. One passage of “The Machine Stops” that exemplifies this trend is Forester’s frightened depiction of Vashti’s lecture where “neither [she] nor her audience stirred from their rooms.” True, the t...