Zig's Boars: A Short Anime in Prose

by Salik Shah

Trapped in a post-apocalyptic radioactive world, Zig and his animated boars seek freedom. Written as a short anime in prose immediately after Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, "Zig's Boars" is set in a world uninhabited by humans after a nuclear war destroyed all organic life on Earth.



Zig flickers against the static wind, resisting the strong pull of the Furnace, a dark skeletal figure sucks the blood off the horizon. The contour of Zig's body vibrates like strings. All around him the phantom city falls to eerie shambles while the wordcreatures feed on the radiation off the glowing abyss down where the asphalt road ends and the heart of the Furnace begins.

Awakened like wrath of the god with a million eyes, the Furnace rumbles and shakes the earth like a kamikaze bomber. A spear of black light, emitting hatred, turning into radiation, rise to pierce the starry veil of the night sky, followed by an ear-splitting boom. The first wave of the dark light cracks Zig’s chest, knocking him off his feet on the charred ground. Hungrily, the Furnace scorches everything—man obsessed with his machines, women with their décor magazines, children working on models of rockets and spaceships—that lay on its path, extending from its reactor-heart to edge of the island coast, a dead mass unmoored from its orbit, drifting aimlessly until it settled in a new course, if not worse.

“Come, Kid,” says Boar, the leader of the sounder. His body a smooth bump against the raggedy landscape. “Offshore safe and pretty, let us go.”

7 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 30, 2017

About the author

Salik Shah is the founding editor of Mithila Review. His poetry, fiction and nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Juggernaut, among other publications.