dont-forget-to-be-human #1: Life as a Collage of Vivid Moments

Eggs—an animated short film for SAND Journal #21

A few months back, I had a chance to work with a fantastic collage artist, Paulina Domínguez. Her work is full of complex, vibrant images that will set you soaring. I was excited when she agreed to bring my short story Eggs to life in an animated film.

Punctuated Imagery

Eggs is a piece of magical realism, a vignette in the lives of semi-orphans after an unnamed apocalypse in a fictional West Bengal. When I had written it, I imagined the vignette as vivid imagery strung together.

The story lives in SAND Journal’s 21st issue, which I recommend picking up because of its editors’ incredible curation. At the issue’s launch event, they premiered the film, which you can watch here:

Paulina’s collages were perfect for Eggs. She pointed a spotlight at the story’s essence—that change presages personal growth, a theme highlighted in the piece:

Fish spend their entire lives in water, he said. They live in a medium that we’ll never know. But we can learn from them.

He collected all the jars into his arms and waddled over to the well. He put the jars in the bucket, lowered them into the water and brought the empty jars back up.

You don’t need to be in the same medium your whole life, he said.

Imprinted Moments

Vivid moments imprint our minds. If moments are paintings, intricate strokes compose these lucid moments. Strung together, they form a collage known as Life.

There are images in our lives we would never trade.

Sometimes—hopefully more often than not—they’re vibrant and beautiful: the first dance at a wedding, driving from Boston to Vermont to adopt a Siberian Husky puppy, an overwhelming tide of laughter while drenched in the rain on a night out.

Their imprints are everlasting.

Other times, the images are spirited and haunting. We may not want to share them. When Life hangs a light on them, we would instead look away. We may think it’s impossible to escape their rendered medium.

Eggs is about finding a new medium. Sometimes we choose to escape. Other times someone helps us. But, either way, when we have a new medium to work with, we can paint vibrant and beautiful images again.

Final Thoughts

If you enjoyed Eggs, you might like some of my other writing.

Please share this with anyone who might find it interesting. Thank you for supporting my work.