The Big Bang
Just before an explosion, everything is normal. The normality is only noticeable, usually, in juxtaposition to the big bang of the explosion and that can usually only come with advance notice. But that does not mean the normality is not still there. “It is the morning of the Killing, and I sit in my grandparents’ apple-scented living room, etching the image of Louda the pig in my sketchbook. My grandfather rubs the blade of his killing knife on the oval sharpener, taking a break here and there to bite into a thick slice of bread covered in lard. My grandmother waters her plants…while whistling to the rhythm of a ticking clock.” The imagery here presents a portrait of normality that is about to change forever thanks to the big bang of the Velvet Revolution on the participants. The smell of apples and the plants, the scratching of a pen in a notebook and a blade as it is sharpened, and the casual concert of water being poured, a clock ticking, and whistling keeping in time all serve to present the very essence of just another normal day. The mundane quality of the imagery lends an added chilling effect to the fact that none realizes by the next day such simple tasks will no longer be mundane.
Human Hubris
Almost every science fiction tale depends upon the hubris of the human species for making really questionable decisions. This idea is not original to science fiction, however. In fact, it goes all the way back to the origins of fiction: mythology. “I flinched. The sentence was a pure growl. The eyes opened. Its legs did not move. My eyelids pulsated, I couldn’t swallow…I plunged the blade forward, toward the creature’s back.” The growl is more terrifying than a lion’s because it is made by a spider-like alien creature with lipstick-red lips covering yellow teeth. The narrator will call upon allusions to Prometheus stealing fire and scientists who first split the atom as comparisons to turn his attempt to turn first contact with an alien life form into a showdown with an actual spider in a bathroom. Little wonder that the imagery presents a portrait of a terrified man overestimating his accomplishment and abilities against a creature secure in its supremacy.
The Post-Revolution Apartment
The narrator’s family enjoyed a relatively good life under the Soviet oppression of their country. This was due to the narrator’s father being a conspirator who kept his eyes open and his mouth shut until there was something to be gained. The fall of the Iron Curtain changes everything and the downfall of fortunes are reflected through the imagery of new living quarters.” The sink is small and flimsy, the walls thin, and the toilet seats plastic. Whenever a neighbor above us flushes, we hear the echo within the pipes…There is no history here, no legacy—everything we now own or rent seems to be made of plastic or tin.” It is interesting that the dominant image in this description is plastic. In the West, after all, plastic became and remains a symbol of style in design—often as a replacement for tin and aluminum. The narrator describes this apartment as a place he would not even bring a friend home to yet it is notable that the two building materials situated as symbols of cheaply made and aesthetically unappealing décor include both tins with its long historical association with rural flimsiness and history-altering plastic.
The Collaborator
The narrator’s father inevitably pays the price for being on the wrong side of a revolution. The very word “collaborator” conjures up all manner of images from Cold War movies and TV shows involving things like exchanges of inscrutable secret codes, James Bond high-tech spy gimmickry, and tense hiding places in the shadows. The reality presented here is significantly different. “I found my father holding a cup to the wall between our living room and the neighbors’, his ear inside the hollow space. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for me to come over. He lowered the cup to my height and I listened. A sharp voice carried through static, announcing that a shortage of potatoes throughout the Soviet Union was just another sign of mismanagement by Moscow.” The neighbors are furtively listening—inside their own apartment—to a broadcast by Radio Free Europe. An hour later they will be carted away for lengthy and brutal interrogation. The imagery of the pathetic spy listening through a cheap wall with a glass to hear, his only accomplice his young son, and the threatening menace to an entire system of the government taking the form of a barely discernible radio report about potatoes take the entire episode from absurd comedy to tragic drama in less than a hundred words.
