Shain Parwiz Vs. JWirrowac

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The authors are ready to fight.
Now their fate rests with you, the readers.

Read both stories carefully before casting your vote. Each author has responded to the above prompt, but their interpretations may differ wildly. Consider how they approach the challenge and which story leaves you with the stronger impression.

The poll will be active for one week. May the best author win.

It was broad daylight, yet the sky seemed filtered through a sepia lens.

I tugged at my pant leg because it kept catching on the soles of my boots. Typical. I should have gone to the tailor.

I was in Bali, and I had paid to watch a performance called Kuda Kepang ;a trance ritual with deep Javanese roots. I had seen it as a child back home, and it genuinely terrified me. I remember watching participants seemingly eat glass and wondering how any of it was possible.

This time, I wasn’t alone. I went with my partner, who had always wanted to experience it herself.

The air was damp and heavy with heat. We were ushered to the seats we had paid for, and the performance began. It told the story of Javanese warriors preparing for battle. Accompanied by the hypnotic rhythm of the gamelan musicians and the thick scent of incense drifting through the air, my hesitation slowly disappeared. I stopped observing and started immersing myself in the performance.

A few times, people in the audience began to wail or behave strangely. I assumed they were planted performers, there to maintain the illusion and add to the mystique.

Then the performance reached its peak.

The woman singing began to make me uncomfortable. There was something about the way her eyes rolled, the intensity of her expression, that made me uneasy. I instinctively reached for my partner’s hand.

But I couldn’t find her fingers.

I looked over at her. She was staring back at me with a confused expression, almost as if she was looking at a stranger.

I tried to speak, but I don’t think she heard me.

Then everything faded to black.

When I came to, my partner told me I had been twitching. She said I was speaking in Javanese, moving rhythmically with the music, almost as if I was part of the performance itself.

I remember none of it.

The strangest part was that, before I lost consciousness, I had been thinking about how ridiculous it was that they would use fake audience members to make the ritual seem more believable.

It never occurred to me that I might become part of it.

That moment stayed with me for the rest of the holiday. Certain places made me uneasy. Certain sounds felt different. I carried this strange weight that I couldn’t explain, and it only lifted once we returned to Singapore.

Nearly a decade later, it remains one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me.

I don’t know whether it was the music, the atmosphere, my own mind, or something I still don’t have a name for.

Maybe it wasn’t a horror story. Maybe it was something else entirely.

The unsettling part isn’t that I lost control.

It’s that, for a brief moment, I became someone I don’t remember being

I didn’t choose to leave.

In the night following a week of low, deep whispering— the one that pulled us barefoot onto grass, staring at the hills— I found myself slipping out my door. Beneath the moon others were emerging, too. Men, women, and children moving under the same hypnotic rhythm. The rustling spoke our names and drew us along empty roads, and up into the hills, until trembling brought me back to my body. Sweat had foamed over our skin as we awoke three miles north of our village, where the land had been stripped naked for construction. All I could see was exposed rock, mud and rusting machinery.

But a new forest was sprouting around us.

Something waxy stroked my ankles, then bit into my calves. Pain spiked through the sting, hot and wet, forcing my knees to buckle. Before I could scream, the saplings thrust deeper, shattering bones and forcing my thighs wider. I fell forward. Beneath the tearing of skin came a spreading warmth following shoots of greenery. Another vine slid past my forearms, burrowing in slow, deliberate pulses that felt like being filled from the inside.

With my palms locked to the earth, I tried to pull away. Instead, my back arched and my fingers split into the earth. All I could do was stare at them. Dark patches raced up my legs, roughening into bark even as branches wound through muscles, coaxing every nerve into surrender. More heat coiled low in my abdomen, forcing spasms that made me rock against the growth inside me. Every new root that tore deeper sent waves rolling through me.

Around me, the others were being taken the same way. I saw a man drop to his knees, eyes rolled back in their sockets. He managed to moan, “Oh god, I’m… I’m—” before his body erupted into roots and bushes. A woman bent nearly double, contorted with her chest bulging. Then she cracked as a thick trunk forced its way upward through her, the force of it grinding her open until she was crushed beneath her own transformation, still shuddering.

The forest we allowed to be torn down was inside us now, teaching flesh to surrender, how to its invasion. Before long, pressure had built inside me, too, until it threatened to tear me apart, just like in the woman. My eyes— teary but still able to move— watched a wanton nature growing through my neighbors, and I knew my time had come as well. When my mouth opened to scream, a veiny branch pushed out instead, forcing its way from my throat.

From somewhere deep inside me, under the heat and the roots and the bark, I heard the trees calling for more people to join us.