The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
‘Genesis’ by Alejandro Bastidas
Elder Spirits called him Oliver the Allfarmer. Upon his birth amid a charcoal blanket of the cosmos, they assigned him the first Primordial Labor: the creation of worlds.
“F*** me sideways,” Oliver whispered, for he would have preferred another task like naming the stars, or dressing the Elder Spirits in kaleidoscopic gowns.
Oliver made himself a humble farm and painted his barn in all the colors that his mind could imagine. At the moment they were only two, but he was trying his best. The sacred principles of farming were engraved into his genetic code, so he decided that a decent planet could only be created through the noble art of growing tubercles.
His creativity remained limited and he had little motivation, resulting in small seeds which encased simple monochrome worlds, devoid of intelligent life. But the potatoes grew with admirable consistency. The Allfarmer, paragon of cosmic agriculture, sharpened his wits and watered the dry wasteland that was his artistic brain, until he expanded his repertoire of ideas worth pursuing. Elder Spirits sent the Namer to Oliver’s farm to baptize each potato and deliver it back to the vastness of the Universe, where they’d be submerged into a boiling soup of elements and assume their rightful size as planets.
The second batch of worlds met an abrupt wave of apocalypse, which the Allfarmer found amusing at first given his pyromaniac tendencies, but with every flawed world that transitioned into debris, forever condemned to navigate infinity, he became a more concerned with the preservation of delicate objects. Now his hands were swift, his mind more creative, and the next potatoes grew healthy and with a rather provocative smell.
The following morning, Oliver found his crops plundered by a three-headed wombat. He tracked the fiend for nine-hundred seconds (the equivalent of five Earth days) until he found it squatting beside a river basin as one of its heads devoured a robust potato. The creature defecated instantly. Brown pebbles stinking of road-kill and what would become Paris in the future peppered the ground.
“That was a world you just ate, you deformed beast! And now it is —”
“Now it is far better than what you had before,” said the wombat. “A beautiful world it was, but rather boring and uneventful. It required corruption, and that is what I have produced.”
“What have you done to it, eh?”
“I infected your world with humans. Puny little things, sensitive, and funny-looking. For some reason they will cause irreversible damage to their world until all the organisms wither save for bacteria.”
“How does that improve my masterpiece?”
“Humans are entertaining. I have seen their future and they’ll invent splendid fairy tales trying to decipher how they came to be. Adorable. They’ll wage wars over which ludicrous story is the truth, but none will realize that they came from a potato planted by a miserable farmer and later defecated by yours truly.”
“You’re saying they’re intelligent?”
Oliver the Allfarmer beamed at the realization. Perhaps the wombat’s interference had not been so negative, despite its vile conception.
Oliver thanked the wombat and returned to his farm with the brown pebbles which he molded into a single sphere. Seconds later, the Namer studied Oliver’s fresh batch of potatoes and commented on the pungent anomaly.
“I’ll call it… Earth,” said the Namer. “That’s where worms live, is it not?”
Eight generations passed on Earth (a week in Oliver’s world) and the Elder Spirits arrived to Oliver’s farm and banished him into the last planet he created. There he witnessed a biped disease forever multiplying and evolving towards doom. The world itself had the perfect conditions for life to flourish, which the Elder Spirits documented so future employees could repeat the process, and they did this with masterful craftsmanship. Intelligent life thrived in the universe while a primitive species walked blindfolded towards its own undoing. The Allfarmer knew this, but too influenced by the locals and their strange ways, chose to do nothing about it. Instead he retired to a quiet farm and spent the final ounce of his power creating a regular potato. The kind that humans would come to farm on their own.
