Writer's Friday, Week 5

Welcome back!

The 5th Writer's Friday is a little more special than the previous ones, as it introduces a whole new chapter in Writer's Friday's history!

I have reached out to some really amazing indie & small authors and for the next few weeks, each prompt will be one they created specifically for this challenge!

This week's prompt comes from the lovely Danai Christopoulou, the mastermind behind Vile Lady Villains, a sapphic horromantasy bringing together literature's most famous Lady Villains, Lady Macbeth & Klytemnestra! You can check out and preorder her book here!

A huge thank you to Danai for being so lovely and supportive of this little project of mine.

This week's prompt is:

To retell is to rebel

Now, let's write!

---

Ria looked at the open notebook on the small table, where white ribbon marked the last entry. She gazed at the figures sketched in it, a first draft of what would have been two women holding hands while smiling at each other. One of the figures had a signature scarf wrapped around her neck, colourless in sketch but a soft sky blue in real life. The other figure didn't have her features drawn yet, but Ria could picture them in her mind, clear and vivid, like the expanse of cloudless skies above her. Pink, heart-shaped lips. Curly black hair that barely reached her shoulders. Eyes the rarest of blues. A small dimple on the left side of her cheek. Freckles adorning her skin in constellations unique to this world.

A loud horn interrupted her daydreaming, and she leaned closer to the balcony's railing, searching for the cause of the commotion. In the intersection below, a car had abruptly come to a stop on the left turn, a traffic warden unmoving in front of it. It was a new model, version 6.0 or something, that was installed but a week ago. She saw a man get out from the driver's side, cursing at the warden for stepping in the middle of the street while the light was still green.

"Damn thing must have malfunctioned again," said the neighbouring granny, whose balcony stood so close to Ria's, she could have jumped right to it if she wished. Her husband nodded, noting how it was the third time in four days, and thank gods nobody was injured.

From inside the house, she heard a notification going off from her computer. She could already guess what it said.

"There was a car accident in your area. File a report to help us understand and resolve the issue."

She would ignore it, like she had the previous ones.

Ria took her coffee cup. She had brewed a single shot of premium espresso, the one her mother had shipped in last week from Italy. Ria brought the cup to her nose, closed her eyes and allowed herself to travel all the way across the continent to her hometown. The grassy hills were still there, and so were the sheep and the cows roaming them, and her grandmother's chimney breathed smoke from freshly baked pies and the best lasagna she would ever eat. All of those memories from a place that no longer existed, concentrated in a single shot of espresso.

It was almost enough to make her smile. Almost.

Her watch notified her of an incoming call, and she pressed the earphone to answer, interrupting Billie's melancholic high note.

"Hi Freddy."

"Hello Ria! Still game for the movie tomorrow?"

She didn't hesitate.

"Of course. I wouldn't miss it for the world.”

"That's great to hear. Remember to dress tight."

Freddy ended the call, and her eyes travelled to the horizon beyond. There were grey buildings as far as the eye could see. Traffic lights and city lights, cars, shops and people. It had been overwhelming once, those first months of her moving to London. The noise, the number of bodies bumping into each other on the sidewalk, the tight schedules and pending deadlines. Now it was all dull, soundless.

Only the sketchbook was singing. Its melody was one of promises and never-ending potential, of a future so bright she wouldn't be able to look at it directly without going blind. In a heartbreaking twist of fate, though, it wasn’t until last week that Ria was able to see the true colours of this world.

In the page next to the sketches were five words, etched so deeply into the paper it would have reaped from just one more stroke.

To retell is to rebel.

The evening Anesha had brought the sketchbook home, Ria had almost thrown it off the balcony.

"There is no need for one!" she kept saying, knowing the trouble that poorly bound keepsake would bring.

The other woman was unyielding.

"I want my thoughts to be for my eyes only.”

Anesha stopped writing on her phone then, choosing the paper instead. It was no more than a line or two each day, as she strived to remember the small pleasures of holding pens and forming letters. If only she had taken the warnings of her Destino account a little more seriously...

'What is on your mind today? Write your thoughts and ideas on Destino, your lifelong companion app."

"Did you see the full moon last night? Write about your experience on Destino, your lifelong companion app."

"We have missed you. It's been a whole week since your last entry! Tell us all about it on Destino, your lifelong companion app."

"Your account needs attention. There has been an unprecedented lack of activity, and our team has suspended it. Click on the link below to retrieve it."

"Action required. Log in to your Destino account in the next 42 hours, or the emergency protocol will be automatically activated."

The emergency protocol was nothing more than another trick of the system. Under the guise of 'civilian protection', governments all around the world introduced a new technology linked to the civilians' IDs. It networked with most social media and wellness applications, matching them to government IDs and sending an emergency signal to the authorities in case of prolonged account inactivity. There used to be a pre-requisite of at least a month-long inactivity, but just forty-five days ago, an international bill was passed, shortening the time frame to two weeks.

It wasn’t long before the police waited for Anisha outside the city hall's building. After finishing her shift, she was asked to have a brief conversation with the policemen and explain the reasons behind her lack of online activity. Ria could very well see the scene unfold in her mind’s eye. Anesha had worn one of those heart-stopping smiles of hers, blushing just enough, and thanked the men for doing so well by their duty of civil protection. She’d have assured them it was nothing more than an error on her part, an omission. She was too consumed with her studies for a newly assigned project and would often stay up until the first morning hours. She wouldn’t bore them with details, but the subject was entirely new to her, so she did her best to familiarise herself with all related material before her next day at work. The men would believe her, of course. Anesha was very popular among her colleagues, hard working, an excellent team player, the very definition of kindness according to her peers.

As per protocol, the men would then request to verify her account history on Novelsky. A simple procedure to which Anesha was more than happy to oblige. After all, she had foreseen this very visit and had meticulously left her tablet open every time she picked up pencil and paper. Luck would be on her side, too; if the policemen left with no suspicions, they wouldn’t even bother to check her device’s camera backups.

So Anesha opened her bag and grabbed her tablet. And her pencil flew right out with it.

Ria knew Anesha wouldn’t have had any time to run. Her body had been slammed on the floor, her hands cuffed behind her back, and she was pulled out of the building before any of her colleagues could do anything to help.

The following day, they searched her office and apartment. In a drawer of her desk, they found paper she had sketched on. Her apartment, on the other hand, was in pristine condition, as if Anesha hadn’t lived there in quite some time.

With the evidence stacked against her, there wasn't even a need for a trial. In less than forty-two hours after her arrest, Anesha was already transferred to a correctional facility in the northern part of Europe.

Her family never had the chance to say goodbye.

To retell is to rebel.

And that left Ria alone in their now-empty apartment. Anesha’s notebook and the scarf she had gifted her for their 2^nd anniversary sat idle on her desk, the sole remnants of her first love and the life they had dreamt of. The first three days felt like hell on earth. Ria raged against the ifs and the whys, and the police questioned her tirelessly about Anesha, as she had been her emergency contact. The paper notes, the login history, the pristine apartment downstairs.

In a moment of weakness, Ria had been tempted to tell them Anesha hadn’t been living in that apartment for more than a year now and show them the trap door leading from her bedroom straight to the spare room downstairs. Ria’s father was a little too good with his hands, having retired from construction, and her building was new. Instead of brick and concrete like the old English homes, the new ones were wood-framed, like in the US. It took some time and a lot of patience, but there wasn’t anything a good father-daughter duo couldn’t achieve.

If she had given in to the urge, they might have shipped her off, too, and fate might have taken pity on her and led her to the same facility as Anesha.

But Ria had bitten her tongue instead and kept lying to every question, so convincingly they didn't even use the lie-detection machine, as per protocol.

Anesha was probably already dead. There had always been rumours about the facilities up north, terrible ones at that. In her twenty-eight years, she had never heard or met anyone that been rehabilitated into society after serving their sentence. All governments followed the same narrative on the matter, so people took their words for granted. But those who had lost someone to those facilities? They knew better.

And if Ria died too, who would retell her lover's story?

By the seventh day, her tears were dry and her heart numb. Ria decided to drag herself out of bed and visit Anesha's cousin, the only family she had had in town. Varun welcomed her with open arms, and so did his wife. They wept together over bowls of turmeric rice and well-cooked lamb and drank in Anesha's memory.

That's when she was invited to movie night the following Friday. To her horror, during dessert, Priya put pen and paper on the table, as her husband explained the movie's plot to her. Her writing was well practised, more fluent than Anesha’s, and it told a story very different from the forbidden romance Varun was describing.

Ria accepted their invitation.

She was ashamed it had taken her so long to find the courage within herself, even though she had known for a long time that Anesha's story wasn't the only one ought to be retold. It was Remi's too, her friend from college, who made a makeshift guitar and played a few notes one afternoon at her home, instead of opening Liberio and requesting a guitar solo just for her. It has Antonio’s from back home, her ex-boyfriend, who wrote a poem for his newborn daughter, instead of using WriterScript and requesting a unique and emotional three-verse poem with keywords: unique, life, light, father, baby girl, future, love. It was Miss Andela’s from around the corner, who taught her son how to sew by hand instead of importing a ready-to-go pattern from Kitski and having her Raftis 3.8 create the suit for her. It was her grandmother’s, who baked fresh pies instead of using the newly installed KitchenChef 4 pro and simply selecting the number of people she wished to feed.

It was people’s Ria had never met, from all around the world, and those who would take their first breaths into it, and all those already lost.

It was Ria's duty to make sure their stories didn't fade with time. She was a writer herself, after all. And what a writer used to be was a person capable of weaving epic tales of heroes and dragons and evil sorcerers in their minds and then pulling at each thread until it became an unstoppable string of inky words on paper. That was her dream ever since she was a child, before her whole future was turned to ash when Amadon bought her family's farm to build its new operating centre.

Before pens were permanently replaced with keyboards, instruments with online music generation applications and paintings with stolen, auto-generated images.

She had never wanted to be a scripter, a keyword expert.

Ria was a writer. From her first scribbles at the age of six to her finished manuscript, dusting away at the lowest drawer of her cabinet. She was a writer, and she would retell the stories of those she loved and lost until her lungs caught on fire and the world caught along with them.

She stood and glanced at the clothes hanging on her closet door, which Priya had provided two days ago. The movie premiere would be held at the Royal Albert Hall, and she and her friends had to make sure they’d dress appropriately. Last thing they needed was to stand out in the crowd. There was a tingle of excitement in Ria’s chest. Having never been in the presence of so many important people before, she wondered what kind of masks they would wear, what kind of script they would follow. What kind of role had they chosen to play in this tragedy the world had become?

She took the notebook inside and sat at her desk, turning the page. She took the pen Priya had gifted her, a little ashamed she didn’t remember how to hold it. Flipping back and forth, she copied Anesha’s letters, a silent promise to make the world remember her story until, one day, there were people unafraid to put theirs on paper.

To retell is to rebel.