Habeas Corpus
The air hung heavy on a cold morning or night in mid July, depending on whether or not you were able to sleep. Most people had stopped a few years back, instead choosing to watch the news channel which ran twenty-four hours a day. Everyone watched the same channel; it was the last one left. The newscasters were a thin and sallow-skinned species whose eyes were falsely colored, whose faces were hollow, whose lips were pale; they forced smiles while reading from teleprompters just out of view of the camera. Regardless of the fact that most people knew how inaccurate the news reports were, they watched anyway. Caffeine pills were a necessity and became a commodity within a few months of their sudden popularity. Most people tried to keep them out of the hands of children, but every so often even the children were incapable of sleep. Even children became addicted, and one such child walked alone through the heavy air on a cold morning or night in mid July.
She was not cold, yet she shivered. It was snowing above her, yet she was unaware of it. In one hand she carried an electric lantern, and its dim bulb lit only a few feet ahead in the tunnel where she walked. Her fingers were caked in black ink, and when she brushed a strand of hair from her face her fingers left a black streak smeared across her cheek. She was tired; she had not slept although her mother had tried to get her to; she was weighed down under a bag and a lantern and a coat and gloves and boots and expectations she did not know how to live up to. She had been walking for three hours, and behind her were miles of dark empty tunnel, thirty feet below the forest. The ground under her black rubber boots made no sound as she walked over it. There was silence enveloping her like a suffocating blanket, and she had no way to throw it off of her. She picked up her pace, walking with heavier footsteps. A light thud could be heard with each stride.
Up ahead were lights, yellow in color. They looked ancient, but were only months old. The girl reached the lights which had been hung from hooks in the walls of the tunnel. They were the old fashioned lights from mining tunnels, with the crossed wire stretched over the lightbulb, exposed wires connecting the string of them. This went on for about a quarter mile, until a dark brown door could be seen in the side of the tunnel. The girl adjusted the bag that she carried across her body, and opened the door with her blackened fingers. As it swung open with a grandfatherly groan, dust cascaded down and covered the girl’s brown curly hair.
She scrunched up her nose and shook her head, most of the dirt falling to the tunnel’s floor. The girl stepped through the open doorway, behind which was a small chamber containing an intercom box and a thin rickety metal ladder that led upward into darkness and nothing else. With her hand that was not holding the lantern, she pushed a button on the intercom where a red light flickered on, and for a long time there was silence. Then the red light went out, and a green one came on instead. The girl leaned toward the box, whispering “The hill’s in shadow, take cover in the woods.” She pushed another button and the light went out once again. She stepped back through the door and stood waiting. A metal clang sounded through the tunnel once, followed by metal creaks at even intervals. After only a few brief moments a man exited the chamber behind the door, and said “Hey Lucy―been a while, hasn’t it.”
The man towered above her like a skyscraper to a mouse, but she felt tall nonetheless. “It’s been two days Mr. Harrington, that’s all.” Her voice came squeaky in the tunnel, whose walls were soft enough to absorb any sound. While this was good for business, it was not good for making Lucy seem any older or bigger than she was. Mr. Harrington smiled down at her, but before he could crouch down to meet her gaze, Lucy had already begun pulling tight rolls of newspaper out of her satchel. She handed a great number of them to Mr. Harrington, who stood very still and asked with a smirk, “There any crosswords today Miss Lucy?”
“No one’s got time to make ‘em,” she replied, slightly put off by his question. “It’s to survive, not to have fun, Mr. Harrington.” She looked behind her to where the tunnel’s end could not be seen, and her little figure paled in comparison to the huge darkness. She clutched her lantern tighter.
“Your mother tell you that?” He demeaned her with his smile, proving that he did not take her seriously. He crossed his arms and held the newspapers in one hand, challenging her to answer him. Her answer would not have changed his opinion of her.
“No,” she looked him in the face, her eyes darting between his, unsure as to which one she chose to stare at would appear less suspicious. She gave in, “How did you know?”
“Easy,” he said, “kids never say stuff like that.” She furrowed her eyebrows at him and he continued, “It’s not how a kid sees things―all dark and twisty like the world’s gonna end―they see things all bright and shiny, the world sparkling with promise. That’s how a kid sees it.”
“You’re wrong, the world’s not bright or shiny. It’s just broken,” she shifted uneasily on her feet, “I don’t know if that makes it sparkly or dark but either way that’s what it is. We know it just like you do. The kids don’t wanna come home, Mr. Harrington,” she looked up into his shadowy face, “not anymore.”
They looked at each other for a long second, and in their eyes they came to some unknown understanding. In her eyes she carried a fire that had been previously unseen by him, and in his there was an emptiness, a melancholy denial that little Lucy may have called haunting. They said goodbye, but Mr. Harrington called her back. He crouched down to her height and wrapped her in his arms. He kissed her forehead and ruffled her hair, then waved her off with the newspapers she had given him. He quickly disappeared in the darkness behind her, and she shook the smile that he had left her with from her face.
She stopped eighteen more times, and the conversations that she engaged in with the Dealers were shallow and fervent. The term “Dealer” had come about in the vernacular mere months ago, because it had become safer to sell drugs than newspapers. There was no new word for journalists, no code name of any kind, for they were long gone―or so it was thought. Code names become suspicious when the wrong sort of person starts using them, and so the journalists were called the “illegals” because that could mean any number of people that had been rounded up and thrown in jail.
The tunnel ended abruptly in the darkness, and Lucy held her lantern tightly in her small fist. There was no intercom near this door, just a lock, for which Lucy carried the key. She took a ring of keys from her jacket pocket and used a small brass one to undo the padlock on the door. She hung the lock through the latch as she entered, so that she could close it again when she left. She ascended a tight wooden staircase and came out in a crowded kitchen, where at least fifteen people were huddled around a rickety table. A man who helped her out of the stairwell announced “Miss Lucy’s here,” at which point the many adults gathered around Lucy with various scraps of paper.
“We’re runnin’ low, I’ve got to go sneak some from the store tomorrow,” said a portly woman in response to Lucy’s raised eyebrows at the sight of the scraps of paper. She started to take them from the people’s hands, glancing briefly at a few words that had been scrawled on each one. “Government in crisis,” “speaker furloughed,” “national state of emergency,” and “suspended… habeas corpus” littered the papers, and Lucy shoved them all into her satchel, from which all the newspapers had previously been removed. Lucy made to close the bag but stopped short at a stack of three full-sized papers being thrust under her nose. She traced the paper to the hand that was holding it, a slightly reddened and calloused woman’s hand, which she followed up to the woman who was attached to it, who was a tall and professional-looking woman in a pantsuit that may have once been classy. Instead it now looked dreadful, with dirt all around the pant cuffs and something that looked like blood dotting the white shirt. The woman’s lip had been split, but apart from that her features were all kind and forgiving. She looked as though she wanted to smile but could not find it in her to do so. It was in her eyes―the optimism―but her body shrunk into itself and the power that may have once resided there had been replaced by fear and solitude and an unhealthy amount of secrets.
“Lucy?” Her voice was comforting, almost some familiar undertone that suggested honesty. She could be trusted, and so the other illegals had let her pass. Quietly, she held her papers out for Lucy to take.
“Yes ma’am, that’s me,” came Lucy’s high-pitched reply. The woman did smile then, allowing it to cover her face with color where it had been previously sallow and unfeeling.
“I wrote down what I remember―” still holding out the pages “―and I daresay that I remember all of it.” She gestured for Lucy to take her pages, and she obliged.
“If you don’t mind,” Lucy began as she thrust the woman’s pages into her bag, “what are they about?” Lucy’s eyes were wide mysterious moons as she stared up at the woman in wonder.
The smile faded from the woman’s face and eyes as she said “Washington,” and that was all. The illegals behind her looked to one another, knowing full well that the woman had no desire to speak of Washington, and knowing full well that she was brave for even daring to write it out in ink.
Lucy went on prying, “What happened there?” Starting to pull out the pages and read them she added, “we don’t print national news too often―” The woman grabbed her wrist and put the pages back into the bag so as to prevent her from reading them.
“They’ve thrown us all in jail, god knows it’s the deathiversary of democracy.” Lucy remained staring up at her with furrowed eyebrows. “I made it out,” the woman finished.
The man who had helped Lucy out of the stairwell placed his hand on the woman’s shoulder, and she leaned into it as though it were the only thing keeping her from collapsing altogether. Lucy looked around at all the others with a sentiment that she was far too young to be wearing, before turning to exit the house. She made her way down the stairs, before turning to look over her shoulder one last time. Most unlucky people gathered there wore vacant expressions that could not belong to a specific emotion, yet the woman from Washington smiled down at Lucy and nodded silently.
Lucy made her way back through the tunnel with her lantern tightly held in one hand and her satchel, now significantly lighter, over her shoulder. The journey to make it back home always appears far shorter than the journey to leave it, and so Lucy arrived in a matter of minutes, though it was closer to several hours. She skipped part of the way until she was out of breath, at which time she slowed her stride and whistled instead. The soft walls soaked in the melody, and the ladder on the wall to home arrived quickly for her.
She placed the lantern precariously on her bag as she made to climb up the ladder. She reached the trapdoor about twenty feet up, whereupon she pushed, to yield her entrance to home. Her head was not fully through however, when her father came rushing toward her. She saw something dark burning in his eyes. It was not the fervent courage which had previously existed in hers. It was not the fire of rebellion that burned there, it was that of fear instead. He looked her dead in the eyes. “They’ve burned the press and all the papers.” Silence. “They’re here.” He took Lucy’s head in his hands, looking over his shoulder for a split second before turning back. “Don’t come back here,” he whispered, “promise me.” Lucy nodded. “Please,” he muttered between uselessly frozen lips, “hide.” He gazed into her eyes for a brief moment before repeating, “hide.”
He shoved her head down below the floor, and slammed the trapdoor above her. She fell down to the bottom of the ladder and rapidly got to her feet and ran. The lantern fell from its position in her bag, shattering on the floor of the tunnel. She did not go back for it, and the light within it fizzled out, leaving nothing but a cold, dark tunnel in her wake.
© Miriam Silver-Altman 2019
The air hung heavy on a cold morning or night in mid July, depending on whether or not you were able to sleep. Most people had stopped a few years back, instead choosing to watch the news channel which ran twenty-four hours a day. Everyone watched the same channel; it was the last one left. The newscasters were a thin and sallow-skinned species whose eyes were falsely colored, whose faces were hollow, whose lips were pale; they forced smiles while reading from teleprompters just out of view of the camera. Regardless of the fact that most people knew how inaccurate the news reports were, they watched anyway. Caffeine pills were a necessity and became a commodity within a few months of their sudden popularity. Most people tried to keep them out of the hands of children, but every so often even the children were incapable of sleep. Even children became addicted, and one such child walked alone through the heavy air on a cold morning or night in mid July.
She was not cold, yet she shivered. It was snowing above her, yet she was unaware of it. In one hand she carried an electric lantern, and its dim bulb lit only a few feet ahead in the tunnel where she walked. Her fingers were caked in black ink, and when she brushed a strand of hair from her face her fingers left a black streak smeared across her cheek. She was tired; she had not slept although her mother had tried to get her to; she was weighed down under a bag and a lantern and a coat and gloves and boots and expectations she did not know how to live up to. She had been walking for three hours, and behind her were miles of dark empty tunnel, thirty feet below the forest. The ground under her black rubber boots made no sound as she walked over it. There was silence enveloping her like a suffocating blanket, and she had no way to throw it off of her. She picked up her pace, walking with heavier footsteps. A light thud could be heard with each stride.
Up ahead were lights, yellow in color. They looked ancient, but were only months old. The girl reached the lights which had been hung from hooks in the walls of the tunnel. They were the old fashioned lights from mining tunnels, with the crossed wire stretched over the lightbulb, exposed wires connecting the string of them. This went on for about a quarter mile, until a dark brown door could be seen in the side of the tunnel. The girl adjusted the bag that she carried across her body, and opened the door with her blackened fingers. As it swung open with a grandfatherly groan, dust cascaded down and covered the girl’s brown curly hair.
She scrunched up her nose and shook her head, most of the dirt falling to the tunnel’s floor. The girl stepped through the open doorway, behind which was a small chamber containing an intercom box and a thin rickety metal ladder that led upward into darkness and nothing else. With her hand that was not holding the lantern, she pushed a button on the intercom where a red light flickered on, and for a long time there was silence. Then the red light went out, and a green one came on instead. The girl leaned toward the box, whispering “The hill’s in shadow, take cover in the woods.” She pushed another button and the light went out once again. She stepped back through the door and stood waiting. A metal clang sounded through the tunnel once, followed by metal creaks at even intervals. After only a few brief moments a man exited the chamber behind the door, and said “Hey Lucy―been a while, hasn’t it.”
The man towered above her like a skyscraper to a mouse, but she felt tall nonetheless. “It’s been two days Mr. Harrington, that’s all.” Her voice came squeaky in the tunnel, whose walls were soft enough to absorb any sound. While this was good for business, it was not good for making Lucy seem any older or bigger than she was. Mr. Harrington smiled down at her, but before he could crouch down to meet her gaze, Lucy had already begun pulling tight rolls of newspaper out of her satchel. She handed a great number of them to Mr. Harrington, who stood very still and asked with a smirk, “There any crosswords today Miss Lucy?”
“No one’s got time to make ‘em,” she replied, slightly put off by his question. “It’s to survive, not to have fun, Mr. Harrington.” She looked behind her to where the tunnel’s end could not be seen, and her little figure paled in comparison to the huge darkness. She clutched her lantern tighter.
“Your mother tell you that?” He demeaned her with his smile, proving that he did not take her seriously. He crossed his arms and held the newspapers in one hand, challenging her to answer him. Her answer would not have changed his opinion of her.
“No,” she looked him in the face, her eyes darting between his, unsure as to which one she chose to stare at would appear less suspicious. She gave in, “How did you know?”
“Easy,” he said, “kids never say stuff like that.” She furrowed her eyebrows at him and he continued, “It’s not how a kid sees things―all dark and twisty like the world’s gonna end―they see things all bright and shiny, the world sparkling with promise. That’s how a kid sees it.”
“You’re wrong, the world’s not bright or shiny. It’s just broken,” she shifted uneasily on her feet, “I don’t know if that makes it sparkly or dark but either way that’s what it is. We know it just like you do. The kids don’t wanna come home, Mr. Harrington,” she looked up into his shadowy face, “not anymore.”
They looked at each other for a long second, and in their eyes they came to some unknown understanding. In her eyes she carried a fire that had been previously unseen by him, and in his there was an emptiness, a melancholy denial that little Lucy may have called haunting. They said goodbye, but Mr. Harrington called her back. He crouched down to her height and wrapped her in his arms. He kissed her forehead and ruffled her hair, then waved her off with the newspapers she had given him. He quickly disappeared in the darkness behind her, and she shook the smile that he had left her with from her face.
She stopped eighteen more times, and the conversations that she engaged in with the Dealers were shallow and fervent. The term “Dealer” had come about in the vernacular mere months ago, because it had become safer to sell drugs than newspapers. There was no new word for journalists, no code name of any kind, for they were long gone―or so it was thought. Code names become suspicious when the wrong sort of person starts using them, and so the journalists were called the “illegals” because that could mean any number of people that had been rounded up and thrown in jail.
The tunnel ended abruptly in the darkness, and Lucy held her lantern tightly in her small fist. There was no intercom near this door, just a lock, for which Lucy carried the key. She took a ring of keys from her jacket pocket and used a small brass one to undo the padlock on the door. She hung the lock through the latch as she entered, so that she could close it again when she left. She ascended a tight wooden staircase and came out in a crowded kitchen, where at least fifteen people were huddled around a rickety table. A man who helped her out of the stairwell announced “Miss Lucy’s here,” at which point the many adults gathered around Lucy with various scraps of paper.
“We’re runnin’ low, I’ve got to go sneak some from the store tomorrow,” said a portly woman in response to Lucy’s raised eyebrows at the sight of the scraps of paper. She started to take them from the people’s hands, glancing briefly at a few words that had been scrawled on each one. “Government in crisis,” “speaker furloughed,” “national state of emergency,” and “suspended… habeas corpus” littered the papers, and Lucy shoved them all into her satchel, from which all the newspapers had previously been removed. Lucy made to close the bag but stopped short at a stack of three full-sized papers being thrust under her nose. She traced the paper to the hand that was holding it, a slightly reddened and calloused woman’s hand, which she followed up to the woman who was attached to it, who was a tall and professional-looking woman in a pantsuit that may have once been classy. Instead it now looked dreadful, with dirt all around the pant cuffs and something that looked like blood dotting the white shirt. The woman’s lip had been split, but apart from that her features were all kind and forgiving. She looked as though she wanted to smile but could not find it in her to do so. It was in her eyes―the optimism―but her body shrunk into itself and the power that may have once resided there had been replaced by fear and solitude and an unhealthy amount of secrets.
“Lucy?” Her voice was comforting, almost some familiar undertone that suggested honesty. She could be trusted, and so the other illegals had let her pass. Quietly, she held her papers out for Lucy to take.
“Yes ma’am, that’s me,” came Lucy’s high-pitched reply. The woman did smile then, allowing it to cover her face with color where it had been previously sallow and unfeeling.
“I wrote down what I remember―” still holding out the pages “―and I daresay that I remember all of it.” She gestured for Lucy to take her pages, and she obliged.
“If you don’t mind,” Lucy began as she thrust the woman’s pages into her bag, “what are they about?” Lucy’s eyes were wide mysterious moons as she stared up at the woman in wonder.
The smile faded from the woman’s face and eyes as she said “Washington,” and that was all. The illegals behind her looked to one another, knowing full well that the woman had no desire to speak of Washington, and knowing full well that she was brave for even daring to write it out in ink.
Lucy went on prying, “What happened there?” Starting to pull out the pages and read them she added, “we don’t print national news too often―” The woman grabbed her wrist and put the pages back into the bag so as to prevent her from reading them.
“They’ve thrown us all in jail, god knows it’s the deathiversary of democracy.” Lucy remained staring up at her with furrowed eyebrows. “I made it out,” the woman finished.
The man who had helped Lucy out of the stairwell placed his hand on the woman’s shoulder, and she leaned into it as though it were the only thing keeping her from collapsing altogether. Lucy looked around at all the others with a sentiment that she was far too young to be wearing, before turning to exit the house. She made her way down the stairs, before turning to look over her shoulder one last time. Most unlucky people gathered there wore vacant expressions that could not belong to a specific emotion, yet the woman from Washington smiled down at Lucy and nodded silently.
Lucy made her way back through the tunnel with her lantern tightly held in one hand and her satchel, now significantly lighter, over her shoulder. The journey to make it back home always appears far shorter than the journey to leave it, and so Lucy arrived in a matter of minutes, though it was closer to several hours. She skipped part of the way until she was out of breath, at which time she slowed her stride and whistled instead. The soft walls soaked in the melody, and the ladder on the wall to home arrived quickly for her.
She placed the lantern precariously on her bag as she made to climb up the ladder. She reached the trapdoor about twenty feet up, whereupon she pushed, to yield her entrance to home. Her head was not fully through however, when her father came rushing toward her. She saw something dark burning in his eyes. It was not the fervent courage which had previously existed in hers. It was not the fire of rebellion that burned there, it was that of fear instead. He looked her dead in the eyes. “They’ve burned the press and all the papers.” Silence. “They’re here.” He took Lucy’s head in his hands, looking over his shoulder for a split second before turning back. “Don’t come back here,” he whispered, “promise me.” Lucy nodded. “Please,” he muttered between uselessly frozen lips, “hide.” He gazed into her eyes for a brief moment before repeating, “hide.”
He shoved her head down below the floor, and slammed the trapdoor above her. She fell down to the bottom of the ladder and rapidly got to her feet and ran. The lantern fell from its position in her bag, shattering on the floor of the tunnel. She did not go back for it, and the light within it fizzled out, leaving nothing but a cold, dark tunnel in her wake.
© Miriam Silver-Altman 2019
Narrated by Miriam Silver-Altman.
Narrated by Miriam Silver-Altman.
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Hello Miriam, welcome to The Strange Recital!
MSA: Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here.
TN: Was there any difficulty finding our studio, out here in the woods?
MSA: No, I’m from the middle of the woods too, so… not too much trouble navigating.
BR: Good. Well I invited you on the podcast when I learned that you won a national award for this story, Habeas Corpus. So tell us about that.
MSA: My English teacher last year told me about this opportunity and I decided that since I had a couple of short stories going at the time, that I could submit in the allotted time. It was kind of a time crunch though for editing but I think it came out okay. Basically the opportunity was that every public school in the country had the opportunity to select a student from their writing program and give their work to the National Council of Teachers of English—that’s the award, and out of the schools that decided to submit—I’m not sure how many there were, about a hundred of those students were selected to receive the award of superior writing, which is what I got. I think there was some confusion with the press release that the school did about it but… yeah.
BR: Well congratulations. That’s great.
TN: So you’re a senior in high school right now. Yeah? And I assume you’re making college plans?
MSA: I am. I’ve been playing violin for a very long time, since I was about three and a half, so I think that I’m going to go to college for violin performance but I’d really like to do a double major with violin performance and political science, so I’m mostly applying to colleges that have a music conservatory and are college affiliated.
BR: So writing will be more of a sideline then?
MSA: I think so but I think I can still use it.
BR: Yeah. Well let’s talk about the story. What inspired it?
MSA: Well this was written about a year ago when the political climate was a little bit different. It was mostly inspired by the fact that at the time our current president was very, very angry with different media outlets that didn’t share the specific political viewpoint that he did…
TN: I think he still is, isn’t he?
MSA: Yeah. No, definitely. So I decided to sort of explore the idea of… you know, what if he did decide to suspend habeas corpus and lock up all the journalists who didn’t agree with him. So that’s sort of where this comes from.
BR: Wow.
TN: Habeas corpus literally means “have the body.” The powers that be are required to have a substantial reason for detaining someone. So how does that fit in with detaining the journalists in your story?
MSA: Well basically the principle of habeas corpus is what protects people from being detained in jail or prison without having charges brought against them. So basically what I was saying was it’s sort of a way to forego the constitution if you want to lock someone up, or persecute someone for something which is protected under one of the amendments. So in this case there is precedent for it when Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, so technically if he wanted to, the president could suspend habeas corpus and then use that to just keep people in prison indefinitely. So in this case, that’s the journalists.
BR: So your story takes place in the future but how near is this future, anyway? Just how pessimistic are you?
MSA: I’ve been called a very pessimistic person. Because this was written like a year ago, technically I would say that it is supposed to be just about now but you know our current president has said that if someone else wins the next election he’s not leaving the White House, so this could be in the further future, in case he can’t be removed but…
BR: Next year at this time. Check back.
MSA: Yeah. I’m not sure you know… if we end up with a dictatorship at any point in history with this sort of political climate. Yeah… It’s about that I think.
TN: Well, if you’re pessimistic you might call it ‘creative pessimism’.
MSA: Thank you.
TN: Your story is really darkly atmospheric, creating a bleak dystopian world without showing anything but a few underground spaces and the people there. Were your writing choices influenced by any particular books or authors?
MSA: I think it definitely has a very Orwellian vibe but I don’t think the specific writing choices were really influenced by any other books. I think just the sort of literary genre of the speculative fiction, dystopian idea was what inspired me.
TN: And you know what? Just comes to mind. I have one question—that lady in the destroyed pantsuit—was that Hillary Clinton?
MSA: Yes.
TN: I thought so. Yeah, okay.
BR: You know, I never thought of that.
MSA: Yeah. The pantsuit, I thought…kind of gives it away.
TN: Yeah the pantsuit gives it away.
MSA: Yeah.
BR: Well I like the lack of resolution in the story—it doesn’t really end; in some ways it’s just beginning, you could say. A lot of people, especially young writers I think, are afraid to leave a story hanging like that. So what gave you the confidence to do that?
MSA: I don’t think it was so much confidence as fear actually. One of my biggest problems when I am writing… because I’ve tried to write several novellas—I’m working on one right now… and short stories, is that I can never finish them because I keep just adding things to the middle, even if I storyboard ahead of time, so I think it was just a crutch of : “Okay. If I say it’s going to end here when this happens… that’s all I have to do.” I don’t have to worry about the beginning and the middle and the end. I can just have that in this little thing and then people can use their imagination to say “Well what do you think would happen afterward?”
BR: Yeah I think that in short story writing that is a real strength. Just like they say “Begin in the middle of things”… end in the middle of things as well, in my opinion.
TN: There’s a lot of dystopian fiction being written today, which is not really surprising I suppose with the political climate globally and the environmental problems we’re having. What are your thoughts on that subject?
MSA: I have a special place in my heart for a lot of science fiction and speculative fiction—dystopian novels like The Handmaids Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Brave New World—things like that, but I think that a lot of those novels were written to warn, to expose a greater truth about human intelligence, human evil, politics etcetera. I think that a lot of the dystopian novels being written today are more targeted toward young adults and so a lot of the emphasis isn’t actually put on the point of the story but rather on… you know, some character dynamics that might… if it were to really happen those circumstances might not be able to exist to the level that they are portrayed in those novels, and so I think that a lot of the older fiction of that nature that was written by older people who have seen more and are a bit wiser, have a little more to offer in this kind of political climate—they have a lot more to say, rather than the young adult fiction, which in my opinion doesn’t have as much of a value.
BR: Interesting. Let’s close with a three-part question. How much fiction are you writing? Is it mostly of the speculative variety, like this one, which I think you’ve already answered? And are you submitting your stories to literary journals and such?
MSA: Well to the first one—yes, I do write a lot of fiction but I also write a lot of poetry and that’s usually what I end up publishing because my fiction tends to get a bit longer than this—this is pretty short for me, and it’s not all speculative like this. Some of it is a lot more simple, about you know… a person’s life. But I do like to write about things that have a deeper meaning, so there is a lot of… you know—‘in the near future’, or even ‘currently’ but just like a different perspective of something you might not usually not see in literature.
BR: And what about your submissions?
MSA: I’ve been published in the Chronogram, I’ve had poetry there and short stories and poetry in some student publications like The Reservoir, which is Onteora’s literary magazine and The Battering Ram, which is Woodstock Day School’s literary magazine.
BR: Well that’s great. Best of luck with your writing, Miriam.
MSA: Thank you so much.
TN: Yes, congratulations on your award, and thanks for participating in our audio adventure. And I should say that wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age, as Brent will tell you.
BR: Yeah, yeah.
MSA: Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.
TN: It was.
BR: Yes. And you know, I have to say, you’re the only one of our guests that I first met when you were, I don’t know, two or three?
MSA: Yeah.
BR: Seems like just last year, which makes me feel pretty old.
TN: It’s not just a feeling.
BR: Hello Miriam, welcome to The Strange Recital!
MSA: Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here.
TN: Was there any difficulty finding our studio, out here in the woods?
MSA: No, I’m from the middle of the woods too, so… not too much trouble navigating.
BR: Good. Well I invited you on the podcast when I learned that you won a national award for this story, Habeas Corpus. So tell us about that.
MSA: My English teacher last year told me about this opportunity and I decided that since I had a couple of short stories going at the time, that I could submit in the allotted time. It was kind of a time crunch though for editing but I think it came out okay. Basically the opportunity was that every public school in the country had the opportunity to select a student from their writing program and give their work to the National Council of Teachers of English—that’s the award, and out of the schools that decided to submit—I’m not sure how many there were, about a hundred of those students were selected to receive the award of superior writing, which is what I got. I think there was some confusion with the press release that the school did about it but… yeah.
BR: Well congratulations. That’s great.
TN: So you’re a senior in high school right now. Yeah? And I assume you’re making college plans?
MSA: I am. I’ve been playing violin for a very long time, since I was about three and a half, so I think that I’m going to go to college for violin performance but I’d really like to do a double major with violin performance and political science, so I’m mostly applying to colleges that have a music conservatory and are college affiliated.
BR: So writing will be more of a sideline then?
MSA: I think so but I think I can still use it.
BR: Yeah. Well let’s talk about the story. What inspired it?
MSA: Well this was written about a year ago when the political climate was a little bit different. It was mostly inspired by the fact that at the time our current president was very, very angry with different media outlets that didn’t share the specific political viewpoint that he did…
TN: I think he still is, isn’t he?
MSA: Yeah. No, definitely. So I decided to sort of explore the idea of… you know, what if he did decide to suspend habeas corpus and lock up all the journalists who didn’t agree with him. So that’s sort of where this comes from.
BR: Wow.
TN: Habeas corpus literally means “have the body.” The powers that be are required to have a substantial reason for detaining someone. So how does that fit in with detaining the journalists in your story?
MSA: Well basically the principle of habeas corpus is what protects people from being detained in jail or prison without having charges brought against them. So basically what I was saying was it’s sort of a way to forego the constitution if you want to lock someone up, or persecute someone for something which is protected under one of the amendments. So in this case there is precedent for it when Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, so technically if he wanted to, the president could suspend habeas corpus and then use that to just keep people in prison indefinitely. So in this case, that’s the journalists.
BR: So your story takes place in the future but how near is this future, anyway? Just how pessimistic are you?
MSA: I’ve been called a very pessimistic person. Because this was written like a year ago, technically I would say that it is supposed to be just about now but you know our current president has said that if someone else wins the next election he’s not leaving the White House, so this could be in the further future, in case he can’t be removed but…
BR: Next year at this time. Check back.
MSA: Yeah. I’m not sure you know… if we end up with a dictatorship at any point in history with this sort of political climate. Yeah… It’s about that I think.
TN: Well, if you’re pessimistic you might call it ‘creative pessimism’.
MSA: Thank you.
TN: Your story is really darkly atmospheric, creating a bleak dystopian world without showing anything but a few underground spaces and the people there. Were your writing choices influenced by any particular books or authors?
MSA: I think it definitely has a very Orwellian vibe but I don’t think the specific writing choices were really influenced by any other books. I think just the sort of literary genre of the speculative fiction, dystopian idea was what inspired me.
TN: And you know what? Just comes to mind. I have one question—that lady in the destroyed pantsuit—was that Hillary Clinton?
MSA: Yes.
TN: I thought so. Yeah, okay.
BR: You know, I never thought of that.
MSA: Yeah. The pantsuit, I thought…kind of gives it away.
TN: Yeah the pantsuit gives it away.
MSA: Yeah.
BR: Well I like the lack of resolution in the story—it doesn’t really end; in some ways it’s just beginning, you could say. A lot of people, especially young writers I think, are afraid to leave a story hanging like that. So what gave you the confidence to do that?
MSA: I don’t think it was so much confidence as fear actually. One of my biggest problems when I am writing… because I’ve tried to write several novellas—I’m working on one right now… and short stories, is that I can never finish them because I keep just adding things to the middle, even if I storyboard ahead of time, so I think it was just a crutch of : “Okay. If I say it’s going to end here when this happens… that’s all I have to do.” I don’t have to worry about the beginning and the middle and the end. I can just have that in this little thing and then people can use their imagination to say “Well what do you think would happen afterward?”
BR: Yeah I think that in short story writing that is a real strength. Just like they say “Begin in the middle of things”… end in the middle of things as well, in my opinion.
TN: There’s a lot of dystopian fiction being written today, which is not really surprising I suppose with the political climate globally and the environmental problems we’re having. What are your thoughts on that subject?
MSA: I have a special place in my heart for a lot of science fiction and speculative fiction—dystopian novels like The Handmaids Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Brave New World—things like that, but I think that a lot of those novels were written to warn, to expose a greater truth about human intelligence, human evil, politics etcetera. I think that a lot of the dystopian novels being written today are more targeted toward young adults and so a lot of the emphasis isn’t actually put on the point of the story but rather on… you know, some character dynamics that might… if it were to really happen those circumstances might not be able to exist to the level that they are portrayed in those novels, and so I think that a lot of the older fiction of that nature that was written by older people who have seen more and are a bit wiser, have a little more to offer in this kind of political climate—they have a lot more to say, rather than the young adult fiction, which in my opinion doesn’t have as much of a value.
BR: Interesting. Let’s close with a three-part question. How much fiction are you writing? Is it mostly of the speculative variety, like this one, which I think you’ve already answered? And are you submitting your stories to literary journals and such?
MSA: Well to the first one—yes, I do write a lot of fiction but I also write a lot of poetry and that’s usually what I end up publishing because my fiction tends to get a bit longer than this—this is pretty short for me, and it’s not all speculative like this. Some of it is a lot more simple, about you know… a person’s life. But I do like to write about things that have a deeper meaning, so there is a lot of… you know—‘in the near future’, or even ‘currently’ but just like a different perspective of something you might not usually not see in literature.
BR: And what about your submissions?
MSA: I’ve been published in the Chronogram, I’ve had poetry there and short stories and poetry in some student publications like The Reservoir, which is Onteora’s literary magazine and The Battering Ram, which is Woodstock Day School’s literary magazine.
BR: Well that’s great. Best of luck with your writing, Miriam.
MSA: Thank you so much.
TN: Yes, congratulations on your award, and thanks for participating in our audio adventure. And I should say that wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age, as Brent will tell you.
BR: Yeah, yeah.
MSA: Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.
TN: It was.
BR: Yes. And you know, I have to say, you’re the only one of our guests that I first met when you were, I don’t know, two or three?
MSA: Yeah.
BR: Seems like just last year, which makes me feel pretty old.
TN: It’s not just a feeling.
