B-Sides: Abandonalia

Boy Eats Rat

It was already a week into the month of Ramadan, but all Afiq could find in the dark corners of the sprawling town built on the back of the humongous beast, Buraq, was water to break his fast every evening. The water, whenever it was found, was not clean, and Afiq often had to lick it off the most repugnant of surfaces, such as the walls of an abandoned hut, rotting away, as walls made from the skins of long ago deceased tics were wont to do after a brief period of time; or in huge acrid beads of sweat in between the the beast's fur, where ever he could find it growing –sometimes in between buildings, other times in between blades of the beast's fur, growing like tall blades of grass in patches very much like small fields, on the outskirts of the vast decaying Town.

It was the beads of sweat that kept Afiq going on. He had no doubt the odious and vile liquid excreted from underneath the beast's back contained some vitamins and minerals – though perhaps limited, it was enough to keep his body alive. His, and other food scavengers, as well.

The problem with the fur patches outside the Town was that it was getting harder and harder every day of Ramadan to find a big enough bead of beast sweat to last until the next breaking of fast. Competition was stiff. Fights often broke out amongst the scavengers and the militant Jayshists. Afiq had no intention of getting himself mixed up in any of these squabbles. He knew that in his weak state, he would most probably die if ever he got into a fight. That was why he kept his searches mostly within the confines of the Town.

But that was before he stumbled into the house of the Imam. In his stupor, brought on by his extreme hunger, he had clumsily dragged himself into a district of the Town where he had not gone before. In this part of town, the houses and buildings were made of a different material, something more rugged and longer-lasting than the skins of tics. He did not know what it was but as he slid his palms on the walls while walking between the buildings, the walls felt coarse and slightly elastic, very much unlike the brittle and smooth qualities of tic skins. Even the ground felt different. In other parts of the Town, the ground was soft and springy, as a Buraq's back should be. But here it was solid and hard and shiny.

The musty stench in the air quickly gave way to a fragrant aroma, something Afiq's nostrils had not had the luxury of smelling before. His nose clearly could not cope with this new sensation. Small streams of blood flowed out of his nostrils. He wiped the blood with his grimy wrist and licked it. His mouth started watering. He quickly swallowed the saliva produced. He was not one to waste moisture. He followed the aroma to an open doorway. Inside he saw a sparse room, decorated only with a table and two accompanying chairs, as well as a small black stove in the far corner. On top of the stove, there was a wok, and it was being used to deep-fry something. Attending to the wok was a tall man wearing a white skullcap. This was the Imam.

The Imam turned around and saw the skinny figure of Afiq standing in the doorway. If the Imam had any change of expression, he did not reveal it. Afiq expected the Imam to burst into a rage, a reaction he was used to getting whenever he appeared in strange doorways. But the Imam did no such thing. He turned his back once again to Afiq and resumed giving his full attention to the wok.

Ted's Commentary

This story's genesis was originally due to an odd writing contest run by Weird Tales sometime in 2008, where the writing prompt was: Choose a title from your spam folder in your email inbox and write a story out of it.

One of the first titles that jumped out at me was, "Boy Eats Rat". Unfortunately the contest was for flash fiction of under 1000 words (if I remember correctly) and this story was heading dangerously into post-1000 territory so I stopped writing it and started writing another story for the contest.

I didn't know what to do with the story, half-formed as it was, so I chucked it, warts and all, on my blog. And when poet Leon Wing came calling asking if I had anything for his literary journal that he'd just started, I gave this story to him as well. And so the story is also available to read on The Malaysian Poetic Chronicles.

Now where did the seed of the story itself come from?

At the time, I was fascinated with the legend of the Buraq in Islamic mythology, a creature said to actually be a horse, that could fly and had the ability to traverse huge distances with a single step. Like a pegasus, but with considerably more horsepower (heh heh) under the hood.

The Prophet Muhammad described the amazing creature as thus, "The animal's step (was so wide that it) reached the farthest point within the reach of the animal's sight."  Or at least he is quoted to have said such by Muhammad Al-Bukhari. The prophet then mounted the beast and used it to travel the vast distance between Mecca and Jerusalem, where he made his legendary ascent into the Heavens.

I took this idea and ran with it. Made it grander. Bigger. Fantastical. I imagined a creature that could take one step and immediately transcend a vast distance. Such a creature would have to be huge, gigantic, like the titans of Greek mythology. And so for my own Buraq, I imagined it to be like a land-bound whale, with gigantic feet, crawling over the Earth, like a crocodile crawls through a muddy swamp. And on that Buraq, God had placed Man, who had built multiple sprawling civilisations across the Buraq's back.

I imagined a backstory of how this could have come to be and decided that perhaps when the Prophet had ascended to the Heavens, he had asked God to reduce the number of prayers Man had to perform. According to Islamic tradition, God agreed and so Muslims now pray only five times a day. Some may find this blasphemous but in my version, God had refused to lessen the amount, and in His anger, had once again cursed mankind, just like he did with Adam. God cursed mankind to forever live on the back of the Buraq, an unkind world that forever changes mankind's destiny.

With such a backstory, how could I have written merely a 1000 word flash fiction? It demanded a novel-sized narrative at the very least to truly give it justice. However, events during that period and beyond my control took over my life and I left the idea stored safely in the recesses of my mind, as well as a deeply buried folder in my Dropbox account.

Buried however not forgotten. I'm still somewhat fascinated by the idea of Mankind Stranded On the Back of the Buraq, and in fact, years later I did attempt to write another story based on this idea I had developed. But that's one to share for another day.