Man v.s. Man

I wrote this piece as an exercise for my fiction class in the second semester of my sophomore year. The assignment was to use a magazine picture, that our professor handed out in class, as a prompt. My picture was of a metal or wire structure, that almost looked like a ferris wheel, located in what seemed to be the middle of a forest. It made me think about the juxtaposition between the artificial and the natural and how one day the artificial might seem just as natural to us.

Man Vs. Man

         They fastened the cables perfectly, wrapped the vines around the bars of the metal in decidedly wild patterns. They planted the bush just to the right of the tree to balance the composition. They were going for a long lost kind of feel, evoking the discovery of a relic in the woods. “An Existential Emptiness: Juxtaposing the Industrial with the Natural”, that was the title of the show. Once they took the photo they disassembled it all. It returned to the plot of land across the river where junkies and teenage lovers spent their afternoons, back to the broken bottles and Trojan wrappers. The camera crew covered their noses for most of the shoot, the place smelled like piss. She chose the location because it seemed deserted, there was no wilderness left. This was the closest thing.
          She had taken photos in various other locations. She constructed an steel crane on a beach, the waves lapping against it. Not a soul to be found on the sand. She had traveled to peaks and plains and rocky coasts. But they always had to erase buildings out of the background, fill in the naked patches of grass, and make the sky a bit bluer. They had to have a contrast after all. The show wasn’t called “A Spectrum of Industry”. Thank god for those computer programs.
          The final show would be held in an abandoned brick warehouse, on the edges of a fallen industrial area where most of the buildings were now occupied by specialty fedora shops and double shot espresso bars. She often thought about how amazingly defunct these buildings were now. How they had been replaced by glass and steel, that towered obnoxiously over everything. Weeds would spurt out of the cracks in the sidewalk, kids pointed at them, trying to pluck some of the feathery overgrown blossoms.    
             She vaguely remembered the parks. There used to be one not far from the apartment where she grew up. Her father would take her there to ride her bike. The hills were sculpted, rolling sweetly into an illusion of oblivion. The trees were strategically placed to block buildings. The little lakes were filled with ducks brought in from out of state and insects placed there to create an ecosystem.
          “When I was growing up we had a barn, and there were woods behind the house,” her father would tell her. He always had the most outlandish stories.
          When he died she spread his ashes over the ocean. Even though it was too chemically potent to swim in, at least from the surface it was pretty. The oil spills created beautiful iridescent blobs in vast swaths. She went back again and again to the place where he was from, looking for the woods. But she couldn’t find them. The shell of the barn was there. The red paint stripped off, initials and tags carved into the wood.
          The opening of the show was a relative success. People even came in from other boroughs to see her work. She received a fair number of nods, fingers cupping chins, viewers squinting and pointing at the pieces as they discussed them with their significant others, always a good sign.  But up against the wall with the lights shining on them, the shadows of the things that she erased were still visible. The hollowed out factories, the graffiti, shadows of them still lingered. She panicked, she thought of forcing everyone out into the street, ripping the photos off the wall and smashing them over her knees.
         The next day the reviews were published. She kept glancing at the stack of papers that arrived on her doorstep. She closed and opened the door a few times to make sure they were still there. The most common adjective used was “irrelevant”.