Have you ever seen haiku intermingled in a story? Joseph Ficor demonstrates that in his “Tales of the Chawnsa Corps: Beginnings.”
This short story is fitting for a high school and adult audience, as it shows a character undergo a major operation to become a cyborg. It isn’t too graphic, though, and the story overall contains engaging emotion, a right amount of tension, and out-of-this-world battle action.
This is the first of an experimental series of stories written in the haibun style. Haibun is from medieval Japan in which a haiku was written after a section of prose. I learned of the style when I read an English translation of the book Oku no Hosomichi (“The Narrow Road to the Deep North”) by the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.
I have taken more than my share of liberties in writing this style in this work, but I hope that you can enjoy it nonetheless.
The Kwanje Galaxy has been terrorized by the dreaded cyborg race, the Daregei, for centuries. The six-tentacled monsters of mysterious origin send their “harvest groups” to gather children to be converted to Daregei. The Kyasan Empire fears that they will be next. Their scientists have developed a desperate and bold plan to halt the monsters, but the individuals volunteering must forfeit humanity itself.
Beginnings
View original post 1,699 more words
K.A. Ramstad 