Wild, Wild West – Supplementary Doc.

The following is a supplementary document to the story Wild, Wild West. Its purpose is to illuminate certain unclarities introduced by the narrative and the way it was written, to allow for a more complete understanding of the whole story and my intentions when I was writing it.

To begin, I will first say that the story itself was written based on a prompt from the Reedsy Blog. This blog publishes a selection of prompts every week based on a general theme. I have a couple of stories based on such prompts, and for this particular story, on week 353 of the publication, the theme was Wild, Wild West—hence the title of the story, despite its contents not really resembling a gunslinging western. The prompt was then the following:

Write a story about someone coming to town and shaking up the order of things.

It took me a little time to gather inspiration for this prompt, but eventually I decided that I wanted it to be in the form of a letter from a concerned citizen to his town’s mayor. My approach to this letter was to make the story cohesive enough to read, but also to make it resemble as closely as it could an actual letter that David Blaire might write to Mayor Gleeson about his neighbours. As a result, certain terms—such as many of those with a capitalised initial to denote importance—are not explained, and might even look like typos in the story, since they are mostly based around the customs and beliefs of the town of Erene, and I didn’t think that a citizen would explain these terms to his mayor who should already know them well. This of course came at the cost of some exposition, which doesn’t make for great reading, but I believe that for the plans I had for the narrative it worked quite well, and I’m happy with the result. That being said, it can’t hurt to have a place where these exact matters are clarified, for those who are curious about the bigger picture of it all.

Overall Beliefs:

The overall beliefs of the town of Erene (at least the interesting ones) centre around the consumption of human meat: cannibalism. Like many cultures, the original reason for many of these beliefs is intended to be placed in ancient, unwritten history, and only a translation of those practices persists in the story’s modern world. Therefore, while the townsfolk might have a vague understanding of the reasons as to why they do what they do, for the most part they are driven by fear of alienation and abandonment of their roots, so they look upon anyone who doesn’t openly support the practises with apprehension and fear.

The root for their cannibalistic traditions lies in the aforementioned ancient history. In those days of yore, people recognised that the consumption of food transfers energy, and since this energy comes from one living thing to another, they believed that eating was a vital means of transferring life forces between beings. Furthermore, these ancient peoples believed that this life force was a signature of the life itself which it moved, and therefore the identity of that being. So whatever characteristics that being might have—strength, wisdom, perseverance—were considered to be stored within the lifeforce. Therefore, by consuming the lifeforce through eating it and transferring it to one’s own body, they also transferred those characteristics, absorbing them into themselves and becoming stronger, wiser, and more persevering as a result.

Fast forward to today, where these basic principles still apply, but have also been warped by ideology over time. People moved on from the transfer of lifeforce from typical livestock, which they would have been used to eating, to a more substantial source of energy, coming from that creature which was regarded as the strongest among all others: the human. By eating another person, it is almost as though the person eating has the power of two people, combining both their strengths into one.

However, eating is not the only possible transfer of energy that can occur, for there is also the other direction, distribution, which has to be considered: childbirth. The Erenites of old believed that when a woman gives birth, she is distributing her own lifeforce to create the child, while simultaneously not weakening her own, and thus creating more energy into the world and the tribe. Therefore, if the woman herself is stronger, the child too will be stronger, and so, to tie this in with the cannibalistic tradition, a woman who has eaten another human and gives birth will give birth to an inherently ‘better’ child than one who has not cannibalised another.

But this can be taken a step further, as the Erenites have done. Since it is the lifeforce of the individual that the person is consuming, and that life force is a fingerprint of their identity, not all life forces are equal, just as not all people are equal. Eating someone who in their life was stronger, i.e. had a stronger lifeforce, will be more advantageous than eating someone who was weaker. As a result, if one eats a person who has themselves eaten another person, and as a consequence has become stronger, that will be more impactful on their overall lifeforce than if they had eaten someone who was not a cannibal. It is from this chaining of lifeforce energies that the custom central to the story is based around.

The Erene system can be described in a few steps:

1. A couple, man and woman, get together and give birth to a child. 

2. The sex of the child is recorded, and from the first moment they can, the couple tries for another baby.

3. Assuming the couple succeeds in conception, the sex of this child is determined as quickly as possible. If the sex is not the same as that of the child they already have, i.e. if it is a male and they already have a female, or vice-versa, then it is born and raised alongside their sibling. This is to help ensure that the population of the town can at least remain equal, with the odd increases from anomalies to this system and immigrants, as we see in the story.
   
4. If, on the other hand, this child’s sex is the same as the child they already have, then the first child is killed and cannibalised by the mother before the new baby is born. This allows the energy from the first child to be transferred to the next at childbirth, thus creating a baby that is ‘superior’ to the first.
   
5. Once again, as soon as they can after giving birth to the new baby, the couple tries to conceive another, with the same intentions as for the first. This time, since the child they already have is a stronger one, the third baby in the line will be even better still. The process therefore revolves around the repetition of these steps: producing as many offspring to create resulting ‘stronger’ children, so that by the time the woman can bear no more, they will have produced the optimal offspring possible, thus bringing prosperity to their family line, as well as the future of the town.

This is the universal system that operates within Erene, and only in rare exceptions, such as that of the Blaires (the family of the narrator of the story,) is it not maintained.

Because the lifeforce is a reflection of the human that it comes from, if that human were to be sick and then killed and eaten, their lifeforce would be tainted by the sickness that possessed them in life, and thus the energy acquired from them would be toxic, likened to the sickness itself. This is what happened to the Blaires, and why the whole matter with Jackie, David’s daughter, is the first to be mentioned in the letter. While Rebecca was pregnant with their next child, Charlie, Jackie became terribly sick, and was thus unable to be cannibalised before Charlie was born. This is not all that devastating, of course, since she can still be consumed once she gets better, but in Jackie’s case the illness persists for many years, and she grows to be unusually old for a first child in Erene. Combine with this the fact that the couple has trouble getting pregnant, and you get a family which has not gone through all the usual steps that families endure in the town.

An interesting note that I tried adding to this bit of the story is that, considering their difficulties with conception, it is unlikely that Rebecca will even have another child, and so it doesn’t entirely make sense to consume Jackie even when she gets better, since, as specified above, the whole reasoning for consuming people to begin with is to transfer their lifeforce onto further offspring, strengthening the family line. Instead, the family is only expected to eat Jackie because that is the Erene thing to do: it is considered very strange and frowned upon if a couple with a woman still before menopause has more than two children. The custom therefore has developed as a bastardisation of its origin (which, I’ll admit, wasn’t all that glorious to begin with,) and now the cannibalisation of your own children is seen as a duty to the town rather than to one’s own family.

To further contribute to their duty, the family is also expected to share the meat of their offspring with other people in the village. This is where the meat for the feasts comes from, and where the Blaires got their meat for the brisket despite never killing any of their own children. This, in their minds, allows for the greater distribution of the lifeforce, and the general betterment of the town’s strength as a whole.

Here is a quick glossary of the unexplained terms in the story:

• Flesh:

Generally I use this to refer to human meat as opposed to any other kind.

• Fourth Feast of Autumn:

One of the town’s feasts. They have four per season, and the last one is considered Culminary (from culmination), where, to celebrate the end of the season, the town serves human meat at the feast.

• Mensum:

Latin word for table. Simply the official name the townsfolk use to refer to the long tables at which the families sit during the feasts. The use of a latin name here is supposed to suggest a sort of antiquity to the town’s traditions.

• Daisy’s pregnancy:

It might at first appear a little bit weird and rude that someone would ask whether a family is trying for a baby, but in this case it is tied to the Erene tradition of continuing the family line. With a child as old as Maisie, Daisy should be long pregnant, expecting to eat the firstborn. However, she is not, and this surprises David.

• Provide:

This is the name of the duty of the Erene people to distribute the flesh of their killed offspring to the rest of the town, sharing the lifeforce.

• Supply:

The store of a family’s human flesh, reserved for special occasions.

• Know:

The word used to describe when the couple learns a child’s sex in the womb. Traditionally, before ultrasound came to Erene, the townsfolk used mixes of herbs to divine the sex of the child. It is a euphemism for those who do not want to say the word ‘sex’ in polite conversation.

• Endowment:

The term used to refer to the transfer of lifeforce from the mother to the offspring, also partly including the process of consuming prior offspring to enhance the lifeforce.

• Ellen’s fall from the stairs:

Combining different elements of the overall traditions explained above, Ellen’s child, Elaine, learns that her mother is pregnant with a girl. As such, she knows that she will be eaten if this girl is expected to be born, and therefore takes the drastic action of trying to kill her sister in the womb. Hence, ‘maybe she didn’t want to be eaten.’

Pages: 1 2