Maggie and the Exquisite Corpse

[ the first of four tangentially related short stories about Drew ]

So I recently Friendster-found Maggie, one of the Nexus artists and a genuinely nice person. We exchanged IM names and I found out about this art project she was working on — an Exquisite Corpse-meets-Telephone project in which she began with a single 79-word quote. Some artists illustrated the quote and then those images were passed along to writers, who wrote a 79-word passage about the image they received. And then those passages get passed on to artists and so on.

I wrote.

Although I’m not sure whether I wrote in an appropriate style, I did explain the images in the painting I received as well as I could. (I also turned it in late, which may have upset Maggie’s artistic plan).

My 79-word contribution:

The sun blinked — once, fatally — and in an instant became its own dark twin, a void of black and cold whose rays stretched over the earth. Like a shadow mimicking its solar sister, the earth also changed. Its seas swelled and its plains withered gray. Only the serpents, twins intertwined helix-like, could remember what life was like before. Only their stinging bite could charge the world pain with verdant poison potent enough to shock the living back into life.

I suppose it make more sense juxtaposed to the picture. But I got my words featured in a genuine art show in Echo Park. And Maggie tells me the whole show went well.