Split

A split in the news separated happy features about men and women overcoming their problems and tales of war and woe no one can do anything about. We wanted to mixed the two streams together, but our capabilities were not up to the task. A cat being shot out of a tree by army militia, a man who learns to walk again only to see his family members killed and buried in a mass grave, an astronaut who overcame his fear of heights only to be destroyed by a malfunctioning space weapon. The stories gave us headaches, were unstable elements in our molecules of narratives. Too much like real life, we thought, when every hot cup of coffee carries with it a young child with blisters on his picked-out fingers and each fresh flower holds the scents of sweetness and blood, the beautiful and the exploited.