Write a Story that Includes All Five Senses

The Human

The leather pad of the kneeler crackles as you shift and lift your head, just slightly, above the sticky varnish of the pew in front of you, above your clasped hands.  You miss the lull of skin-buzzing stupor as the priest makes his way from the back of the church to the tabernacle, the host aloft, the Latin rolling from his tongue on waves of sweet smoke and shivering bells.  You had once thought, at six, all in white, so easily stained, reaching-hands so much smaller, that you were doing something illicit that first time you sipped the watery, acidic wine, the cardboard wafer sludge still coating your tongue, still lodged in the absence left by the tooth you had tucked under your pillow for some lesser god of teeth. 

How foolish to think drinking the proffered cup of the church had been anything other than blind obedience.  And perhaps, one day, you’ll think this, too, is merely obedience to some other god—Eros or something.  But here, in this world of white robes and washed feet, you remember the salty, fruity taste of her, the feel of her hands under your pillow, her lips in every absence, and wonder if there is truly some holy spirit here or merely a draft through the windows. 

A last supper, a last something.

The AI

The Orchard Road

Mira found the apple stand before she found the town—just a wooden table at the bend where the highway narrowed to gravel, heaped with Cortlands and Macouns still dusted with orchard grit. The morning smelled of woodsmoke and something sweeter underneath, cider reducing in a pot somewhere out of sight, thick and dark as it boiled down toward syrup.

“First frost was Tuesday,” the old man behind the table said, not looking up. His hands, cracked at the knuckles, sorted apples into baskets by some logic she couldn’t follow. “Sweetens ’em right up.”

She picked one anyway—a Macoun, cool and slightly waxy against her palm, its skin a deep maroon shading to green at the shoulders. When she bit in, the crunch was audible even over the wind moving through the treeline, a sound like distant applause. Juice ran down her wrist, tart first, then blooming into a honeyed sweetness that seemed to open somewhere behind her jaw.

“Good?”

“Better than good.” She wiped her chin with the back of her hand. “I didn’t know they still had orchards out this way.”

“Been in the family since ’61.” He gestured with his chin toward the rise behind him, where rows of trees marched up the hillside, leaves gone the color of rust and butter. The wind carried their rustle down to her, dry and papery, mixed with the lower creak of branches bearing weight. Somewhere among the rows, a dog barked twice and went quiet.

Mira bought a bag of the Macouns and a jar of the cider syrup, its glass warm from sitting near the boiling pot. The old man wrapped the jar in newspaper, his fingers moving with the unhurried certainty of someone who’d wrapped ten thousand jars before this one. When he handed it over, she caught the smell of it properly—cinnamon threaded through, and cloves, and beneath that the plain good smell of cooked fruit.

“You want to walk up and see the trees? Won’t charge you for looking.”

She hesitated, then followed him up the dirt path, gravel crunching underfoot, giving way to soft grass silvered with morning dew that soaked through her sneakers before she’d gone twenty feet. The cold of it climbed her ankles. Up close, the orchard was louder than she’d expected—bees still working the last windfall apples, their hum a low static under everything else, and somewhere a chainsaw two farms over, faint as a held breath.

The old man pulled a branch down so she could see the fruit still hanging, and the smell that rose off the crushed leaves in his hand was green and bitter, nothing like the apples themselves. He let it go and it snapped back up, scattering a few drops of dew onto her sleeve, cold as the first real proof of the season turning.

“Come back in a week,” he said. “They’ll be even better.”

The Analysis

As someone moderately obsessed with apple orchards (I grew up and still live in apple country), I feel irrationally pissed about this one. First, a table by a bend in the highway? I mean, sure, if you use the term “highway” loosely. But also…where the fuck did the boiled cider come from? No mention of cider-making facilities, which, let me tell you, are no joke, and where, pray tell, is the stove coming from to boil the pot at this bend in the road? A camping stove? Unlikely. (Real talk for a second, boiled cider is fucking delicious and you can make it at home, which I highly recommend–also, pro tip, be careful buying non-pasteurized cider unless you plan to boil it; we all want to be crunchy until we’re shitting our brains out). And macouns, while crunchy and juicy, have skins that are quite tannic, and no one (clearly not AI) talks about that enough.

Okay, with that little rant out of the way, the real issue I have with this is the lack of an arc. What AI provided is a scene, not a story. For a second, I thought maybe we were going to get into some Christina Rossetti Goblin Market type stuff, but no. While the descriptions in this are vivid (some might say a bit over the top), we don’t know what this means to Mira. A story needs movement, change, however subtle. Maybe with prompting you could give the AI something about the character so it can assign some sort of meaning to the interaction, but assigning or describing meaning isn’t the same thing as experiencing that movement with the character. The chance to go on an emotional journey is one of the things we miss when we aren’t in-close with the characters on the page, deciding what to value. Mira hesitates before following the man, but why? What is the risk? What does she want enough to be worth that risk?

It is interesting to me that both I, the human, and the machine chose to write about desire for this particular prompt, perhaps because desire is, at its core, deeply physical and thus grounded in the senses. But a machine cannot know what it is to want. What it gives us is a highly saturated facsimile of pleasure, a satisfaction of desire before we can even want anything. And that, of course, is what AI does as it creeps into our lives: removes the struggle and robs us of that delicious state of longing.

I want to want.