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Prompt:
"If you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's always its own form of intoxicating buzz." —Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Author: Zach
Requested feedback: Something honest
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They were doing it all wrong.
Knives. Guns. Bombs. Breaching fences. Rockets that caused that sophisticated system to go off, caused the others to bunker down until they were allowed to come out, ten minutes later. And for what?
It wouldn't be that hard to make the traffic just a little bit worse, every day. Just bad enough to not even be noticeable. They would complain about the government, and not him.
A terrorist.
He laughed to himself. He was mostly just a kid in the basement, cooking up schemes that no one else knew about. While the others died for God's name he knew he could make it by doing something much more simple. By making life intolerable for the people who lived in this place.
Some might have branded him an erstwhile left-winger. That was exactly what he wanted. Eating a salad with corn and ranch dressing and arugula leaves.
But he was a terrorist. He was, in fact, happy to say it. That was what he wanted to be, and that was what he was. Just a different kind of one. One who knew the intricacies of urban planning, who didn't deal in violence or pointy edges. He was a terrorist in the most practical of ways. He wasn't on the payroll yet. But he knew that results spoke, and when they saw what he was doing, they wouldn't be able to say no to him.
Traffic barriers that looked like an accident. Car rammings that looked like mistakes. It was all possible, and it was all there right in front of him.
The familiar buzz started to course through his body. He was totally clean. It would all work out.
Knives. Guns. Bombs. Breaching fences. Rockets that caused that sophisticated system to go off, caused the others to bunker down until they were allowed to come out, ten minutes later. And for what?
It wouldn't be that hard to make the traffic just a little bit worse, every day. Just bad enough to not even be noticeable. They would complain about the government, and not him.
A terrorist.
He laughed to himself. He was mostly just a kid in the basement, cooking up schemes that no one else knew about. While the others died for God's name he knew he could make it by doing something much more simple. By making life intolerable for the people who lived in this place.
Some might have branded him an erstwhile left-winger. That was exactly what he wanted. Eating a salad with corn and ranch dressing and arugula leaves.
But he was a terrorist. He was, in fact, happy to say it. That was what he wanted to be, and that was what he was. Just a different kind of one. One who knew the intricacies of urban planning, who didn't deal in violence or pointy edges. He was a terrorist in the most practical of ways. He wasn't on the payroll yet. But he knew that results spoke, and when they saw what he was doing, they wouldn't be able to say no to him.
Traffic barriers that looked like an accident. Car rammings that looked like mistakes. It was all possible, and it was all there right in front of him.
The familiar buzz started to course through his body. He was totally clean. It would all work out.
1 comment:
I like this one a lot. I feel like with character sketches like this, my immediate reaction is something along the lines of "is this someone I agree with." And I don't know for this one! There's not enough to be able to say for sure, but there's definitely enough to hook me, to make me want more. And that's the sign of a success creative writing piece, that I'm hooked. I think it's difficult to write a character that straddles that line, between sympathetic and unsympathetic, but I think you got there, even in a short amount of time. Thanks for writing, man!
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