AnomalyCard FlashFic

As one of the Author Spotlights for AnomalyCon 2016, con chair Kronda Seibert invited me to participate in the AnomalyCards, a set of postcards distributed at random, to be traded with other attendees for the whole set. Writers would contribute a flash fic, and artists would illustrate them. This sounded like a fine idea, so of course I sent in a thing!

Here is the result!


Art by Sarin Tatroe
"The Bomoh’s Apprentice And the Tree Spirit"
I leap through the rainforest, on rotan springboots, to investigate the destruction of the white men’s settlements. The gibbons pull aside vines to clear my path. I do not need the gas-lit keris tucked under my songket. Soon I stand before a verdant messenger, face scowling with moss.
“Tabik, datuk.” I bow. “Anak cucu minta tum—”
“Your name?” the angsana tree demands.
I give it as surety for honest answers, despite the danger. My master, Tok Kadir, named me Saifan. “Are you a Chinese girl or a Malay boy?” human strangers ask me. The spirits know that this question is moot: I am the bomoh’s apprentice, and one day, I will be the bomoh who negotiates their desires with that of the rapidly-changing human world.
Sang Angsana, with a hacking cough, spits into my hands the piston it ripped from the tree-cutting machine. “Tell the omputeh to stop destroying us, or the worst will come. For all that their factories are made of steel and greed, they will fall, when Belum-Temenggor rises.”

~*~

Saifan's rotan springboots are based on Oscar Pistorius' running blades, except that Saifan isn't an amputee, so wears them as actual boots.

Keris like Saifan's do not exist.

Angsana is an actual tree. "Sang" is a prefix

Saifan's full sentence is "Tabik datuk, anak cucu minta tumpang lalu," which means "Salute, grandfather, this grandchild asks permission to pass." 

"Tok" is short for "Datuk," which you call your grandfather, or any significantly old man out of respect.

Belum-Temenggor is an actual forest. 

There is a much longer story about Saifan and Tok Kadir which has yet to find a home, which I call my "steampunk bomoh" story. I'm also spinning a larger story about their adventures. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Race in Cartoons

So I was moseying on to work this morning when I started hearing the theme song to 6teen in my head, and I was reminiscing on the time I used to have cable TV and I watched cartoons and the SciFi channel just about incessantly (okay, I also watched TLC). 6teen was an interesting show to me. The basic premise is that of six teens who hang out at a fancy lemonade stall one of them works at, and it follows their trials and travails as they figure out how to get by on their own, holding their jobs (or not) and how they work through their problems. It also happens to follow a very smart comedy formula, with multiple storyarcs within a single episode. The creators did a good job realizing that yes, a younger audience could indeed appreciate smart shows. The characters, being cartoon characters in themselves, are not exactly what one might call nuanced, but the creators certainly did try to explore different aspects of their characters. Jen, for example, works in the sporting goods store. She...
Read more

My Pidgin Does Not Signify Lack Of Intellect

I recently received in my inbox an email from my father, who likes to forward me a lot of things that he thinks will interest me. Except of course, he never really realizes just how easily antsy I can get, and how willing I am to pick apart an article. (I used to hit Reply to All whenever he'd send me an email to let all and sundry know what I thought and all the problems with whatever he sent me, so now he wisely BCCs people instead.) This article was about Miss Singapore, and I can't find the original article, but hree's another one about the same issue . While at the Miss World pageant in South Africa, she inadvertently slipped into speaking Singlish, the Singaporean creole that mixes English, Malay, Chinese and god knows what else. And this was a huge fucking deal because apparently, all beauty queens must be able to speak perfect English, the standard of which is probably set by the English-speaking world that is the UK and North America, I guess. And because Miss S...
Read more

May 13 Blogswarm Links Post

This is where all Malaysians and residents of Malaysia are welcome to leave links to their participation in the May 13 Blogswarm. For more information, check out LiveJournal and Facebook . Comments Policy:  Please note that moderation is turned on for comments older than 7 days. I try to check in regularly, but this may be hard as I will be traveling. Do not use this place to debate what others have said. If you do and you crash my site in due process, I'll get very irritated at you. That shit is rude. Don't do it. 
Read more