The 909 FILM (it's your zipcode and/or your life? ) And Best Microfiction of 2021 (Pelekinesis' award-winning anthology)

 Bamboo Dart Press has done it again, confounded expectations of what they publish with The 909, a film by Mark Givens and Joel Huschle. David Scott Ewers, a Bamboo publisher and author of Ultimate Resort described the slender book.

“Like a plastic mirror, The 909 reflects an image of California life that’s both strangely attractive and not easy to look at. Unlike a plastic mirror, The 909 allows an even uneasier image to blossom in the shadow of the first. It is that of a sack being nailed to a shoe, forever. Funny and disquieting.”

This is a film that needs to be made, now that reality is catching up. It’s a road trip where all cars move in straight lines and destinations shift. Shopping malls were once old downtowns. Abandoned strip malls are ghost towns. Starbucks, Best Buy, Apple stores exist, though people are few. Is this terrain related to the changes in area codes?  Why did L.A.’s 213 area code become 714 and then 909?  And why are codes continuing to fragment, so some users are their own group?  What is the synchonicity between area code changes, deserted places, and isolated individuals?  Dissolving fixed places means meet-ups are harder to pin down, muses the protagonist, Joel. Even when a Starbucks is decided on, it’s moved inside a Best Buy. Description of the film:

The 909 is a sci-fi script for a movie set in the near-future and taking the form of a reality documentary. The plot centers on a group of people who discuss the implications of “The Mesh”, the technology that replaced the ‘Net. Conspiracies, intrigue, and good old-fashioned camaraderie occupy these characters’ thoughts as they try to retain a sense of individuality in an increasingly watchful society.

When did the Net become the Mesh?  How do people resist when they lose touch? Was this system invented by a tech genius to avoid government control, or the reverse? In this meditative action script, the Director asks the first leading question. 

                                                              DIRECTOR (VO)

                                                   Do you see Randy anymore?

                                                                    JOEL

                                Distant Randy?  No, I haven’t seen him since, what…2004?

                                                               DIRECTOR

                                                        What’s he Been up to?

                                                                     JOEL

                                        I don’t know. He’s not in the 909 anymore.

                                                                    ***************

     It’s 2022 already, and who knows where the time goes in this Covid zoom life with a brief interruption of normalcy, but just when we thought it was over and “safe to go into the shower…”  I missed this Microfiction anthology and am glad to keep up with a form that’s intense and vital. Every word counts in Microfiction.

The depth and variety in the bestmicrofiction 2021 anthology is astonishing. Pelekinesis (www.pelekinesis.com) publishes The Best Microfiction anthology series to provide recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer.  The series is 3 years old and now as diverse and international as the editors had hoped. The guest editor, Amber Sparks’ introduction is also a challenge.

“This is writing at its most daring, its most alive, and I feel lucky and honored to have been able to witness the future unfolding. All the writers I read were frankly fantastic, but the stories here often have that something extra, that ineffable quality that may be called inspiration, I suppose. I howled while reading some of these, so daring, and so new they felt. I hope they strike you that way too, and that you enjoy reading them as much as I did.”

Best Microfiction 2021

Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke, and Amber Sparks, editors

IPPY Award SealWINNER of the Bronze Medal for a book series in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards

WINDOWS by RANJABALI CHAUDHURI is a favorite of mine from this collection.

I love shop windows. Their colours, jewels, and mannequins sing the dulcet promise of possibility. They let me be anyone. Superimposed upon the clothes on display, my reflection can be a soldier in a red and gold jacket, a doctor in a white coat with deep pockets or even a gentleman in a gray suit, a red silk scarf and a cream hat. They take my imagination to places I am not allowed to enter. I wish they were the only windows I had to clean.

The pastries look delicious, but I cannot linger. The bungalow has ten windows, framed in painted glass. The sahibs and memsahibs inside do not like to keep them open for long. A servant follows me to keep my hands from straying inside. Everything native is banned within these four walls—the heat, the dust, the words, the people. I steal quick glances of this life made of pastries, pianos, and porcelain. These windows scream at me to work faster, to collect my wages and disappear. Wasps buzz over the white roses that grow on their sills.

It is dark when I reach the club. A man browner than me, wearing the club’s black uniform, points me to the only place where a brown boy with a bucket is allowed. I smile and run. I have been waiting for these windows all day long. Music from inside floats in the air. The sahibs have parked their cars in three neat rows. I use the cloth that hides the contents of my bucket to cover my shirt. Paint spills from a tin I open. I pick a brush and look at the English words our leader has written down for me, at the bottom of my bucket. One word for each window.

Quit India
Jai Hind

Ranjabali Chaudhuri’s (she / her) work has appeared in FlashBack Fiction, The Timeworn Literary Journal, and The Horla Magazine among others. She lives in London and is working on her first novel.

July 10th, 2022 is the publication date for the new Best Microfiction Anthology 2022. Great cover. Interested to see writing this year.

SW