“HEN AP PRAT GETS SMACKED IN THE TWAT: THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD” by Larissa Janus
Tangent: Last night I read “A naughty boy” a non-interactive short fiction written in 1883 by Anton Chekhov. This was from a 1950s collection of short stories I recovered from my mother-in-law’s estate when we cleaned her house last summer. Previously I had only known Chekhov as the author of the Chekhov’s gun principle, advice to playwrights which recommends, if a gun appears above the mantle in the first act of a play, it must be fired at some later point. Remove all unnecessary elements from a short story. “A naughty boy” begins with a pair of young lovers who are observed making-out near the river by the woman’s little brother. Little brother coerces them into paying him a ruble, then continues to follow them and blackmail them for months after. Eventually the couple gets engaged, The now engaged couple chase the little blackmailer out to the garden where they pull him apart by the ears.
The last sentence of the story was striking and weird (warning spoiling an 1883 short story you’ll probably never read) “And afterwards they admitted that the whole time they had been in love with each other they had never once felt such happiness, such breath-taking bliss, as during those moments when they were pulling the wicked boy’s ears.”
I described this story to my wife, who agreed “most short stories are kind of weird” but since she knows a bit more Russian history than I do, she explained that it was all a metaphor for the Russian experience. Russia was rife with criminal surveillance, corruption, and the suppression of human joy even before the communist revolution.
“HEN AP PRAT GETS SMACKED IN THE TWAT: THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD” by Larissa Janus is a modern non-interactive short story. It is bawdy, and funny, and sad, and politically incorrect, and inappropriate for all sorts of reasons. It reads like Roald Dahl on Viaqra (sic to avoid tradename). But it’s not interactive. “Hen AP” is better written than almost anything I’ve read in the interactive fiction comp. Like Chekhov, it reflects the zeitgeist of our time. Like Chekhov, it doesn’t include unnecessary elements. Like Chekhov it’s striking and weird. But it’s not interactive, and this is an interactive fiction competition.