Don't title it until it's done Ideas/revisions slaves who don't think they're slaves change main character into a woman? intend as much as possible and write such that you are not going to make the story into a kind of artful 'misery factor' piece, to be consumed—do not be condescending to the subjects  If you were an exploited laborer who got famous and in your afterlife you got to read a biography/true to life story written by some literary figure, would you feel disrespected or dignified   humor in what sense **Title (Provide a title, even a tentative one):** ~~Dust and Ashes~~ **Protagonist (Who is the “hero” of the draft?): An unnamed poultry worker** **Point-of-View: Third person** **Synopsis (What is the story? Do not be shy about spoilers):** An unnamed poultry worker who has worked for his boss for two years catches wind of a scheme hatched by two other workers during the month before Christmas season: selling the chicken feed. The boss and his family, who live with the workers are seemingly unaware of the ongoing theft that has now branched out to other workers, and if they do seem to have suspicions that the chickens weigh less than they're expected to, excuse the incidents away as natural—the losses are accounted for, to an extent—because they are poor people who do not make much for their living. One of the children of the workers gets sick, and one of the only honest workers (the main character) attempts to convince his other innocent workers to speak up about the incidents that have now escalated to stealing young chickens. None of them gain enough courage to complain, afraid of being accused of making up stories so that they get more favor in the boss's eyes, the possibility of being outcasted in the village, or have their families targeted for reporting.  One day, two months after the schemes started, the boss's young son gets the disease, as he frequently hangs out with the children of the poultry farms. The boy, who is an only child, dies of the mysterious disease, the only casualty in the village, and this causes a change of disposition in the boss in a matter of a few weeks. He becomes cold, treats the workers with contempt, and, while he does not reduce their salaries, he no longer treats them with any kindness and the occasional feasts that he holds that includes buying so many jugs of tuba and decadent food from the city delivered by his relatives. After witnessing yet another death of a diseased chick, (a disease that has afflicted the chicks in greater numbers in the past few weeks even with intervention) who was placed in the quarantine section of the facility to the point that the sections have become overcrowded, the main character ponders on the nature of God's "uneven kindness." He goes at great lengths to live uprightly until he is brought news by his wife that his daughter has eloped with the son of the schemer whom he has always secretly pinned the blame on for the irreversible events in their livelihood and his friendship with his boss. In the end, the main character, before relaying the facts that the boss had retired from managing the poultry farms and was then replaced by a close relative who was no different than him in the sense that he is cold and treats them as such, recalls that after the boss’s son’s death, he had more than once witnessed him tending to the sick chickens and feeding on the same chicken feed that they consumed and drinking from the same water tubes. A year later, the daughter comes home with news that she has given birth and that her live-in boyfriend has died of liver cancer.  **Why are you writing this story (Aside from the need to submit something to class)?:** I want to be able to portray how grief in all its forms (death, crumbling of relationships, longing for the past) manifests in a rural poultry setting, and how grief, however invisible it is to the main character in his nostalgia for better past circumstances as he questions what he knows about justice in his relatively peaceful and quiet way of life, manages to work its way in the bedrock of conflicts—dishonesty, scheming, cowardice, infighting, and class-based differences. --- Change ending. Old testament? Consequences. Balance. Don't change ending. Try to write a positive ending for once. Pyrrhic victory ending You don't need to change plot ending, just make the main character accept and welcome daughter back. Third person POV requires more objectivity --- Research:  Call Dad about poultry specifics, like how he found out they were stealing chicken feed. Was there actually a quarantine area or were you misremembering "Water tubes" --- November 16 Attempt: On the evening when Edgar got drunk and cursed us workers on his poultry for his son Joseph's death, Hannah and I could only exchange pained looks, and Hannah could not have anticipated it when Edgar lunged at me, his fingers coiled around an empty dark bottle, dealing a heavy blow to my left temple and eye, and I had felt as though I had lost more than some growing sense of goodwill. I could never forget it when he said that he would have rather had my son die than Joseph, for what did the bird flu disease know but give out curses of shortened lives? As he had said, did God bring deliverance to all at the expense of one? Not one child in the poultry families died, as the bird flu variant had been weaker, and had only affected young children, and Edgar must have seen a sort of evil malaise he could not help but let out. It had taken me quite a while to understand that with the death of Joseph, my son Alfonso had been naturally what Edgar's mind was set to cast blame on, as I had remembered all these years the things that had led Edgar to close down his poultry. --- Only the distant sounds in the far edges of the fields were my company as I put one foot after another, aside from the sounds of the wet ground. The partially leveled paddies, almost promising relief to the waves of ache in my legs and lower back as they flattened. The blistering heat I grew to endure even as the stale smell of the earth mixed with the carabao's own heat and sweat. As a boy falling from a tree, it had not been to my mother's pleasure to find me covered in dung. And I knew whatever animals ate that made them seemingly more able to withstand the labor had not made them able to understand why they were put to work in circles, hauling levelers or plowing without question, and why they had been cursed to do so until they were fit for butchering. For me, the long hours on the fields I had understood to be my family's only way to avoid starvation, and though I could see the striking difference between myself and the carabao, it was only when my house had been destroyed by Yolanda that I could not help but cry out to the heavens as to why no God had cared to spare my family's dwelling, even as I had been grateful that not one of us had perished.   My wife and I brought home enough earnings to save at least one thousand per month, which had been a far cry to what we could earn years ago. Lucinda, my wife, who was a dressmaker, accompanied me to the cooperative in our barrio on a balmy Monday to open an account and deposit our savings of five hundred pesos. Lucinda prodded me to do this out of her concern that money is better stored in a place that gives you a piece of paper, something official like the certificate to the land which my amo owned. My son, Alfonso, ten years old at the time, was left to the care of my daughter, Belen, then eighteen. Lucinda had worn a red dress that in my memory seemed to cast an energetic glow about her dark hair and finely lined face, and on our way home we shared a kiss under a tree whose branches stooped low enough for shade.   Now I thought about the next season's harvest five months away. Another leveled portion of land, my arms guiding the carabao's left turn, and the cramp on my neck extended to my upper arm, repeatedly bringing my vision back to the last stretches of uneven ground. With the way it was the last five years, I would set out at dawn, for two weeks with my fellow workers plow the land with a carabao to prepare the soil after the previous crops have been harvested, harrow the fields using our force and the carabaos' plodding to ensure better growth on even land, level the land with carabaos attached to plows, and then distribute the seeds into the wet fields, and we would be working down against the sun's heat, strained forwards until the last rows of rice had been transplanted and harvested after four months. In between the work hours, I would often rest under a mango sapling.    I had been listening to the radio as I ate my lunch, when my phone rang. The voice on the other line was Lucinda's.   "Gideon," she said. "Edgar's visited."   My throat tightened when I heard Edgar's name. I had not seen my former amo in twelve years.     I closed my warm eyes and wiped my forehead with my labakara underneath my cap. The man had once treated my family kindly when I had worked for them in his poultry farm in Samar.    "Gideon," Lucinda's tone was weak, when it was normally even and melodious. It was as though she had been crying, "Hannah is gone. They lost her in the Yolanda flood and her body—"   Edgar's voice crept up in the background that I was back at the poultry again, and not in the rice fields. It was a year ago when Yolanda had its way with our house in the barrio, and it had only struck me then that help did not come when we had most needed it. It took us a long time before we managed to claim our former lives back, and our house, while not much bigger than the house in Tacloban we lived in when I worked for Edgar, had been built with even sturdier materials. It took me a while to come to, that Edgar himself was kind and yet he had not cared to offer to rebuild or repair our living conditions. He had given us incentives if the chickens met more than the required weight, and then the chickens themselves, my son Alfonso had said, were lucky to have warm floors above the dirt, and how they all seemed happy. I said it was not something to be sad about, as chickens, while they live good, will only pass through our mouths and stomachs, and he seemed to accept my answer, but patted his chicken, Tweety Bird, given to him by Hannah as a gift, and said sternly that she was not just any chicken to be dressed, or gutted, removed of feathers, and drained of blood and fat. Hannah had always treated Alfonso like a second son.   On the evening when Edgar got drunk and cursed us workers on his poultry for his son Joseph's death, Hannah and I could only exchange pained looks, and Hannah could not have anticipated it when Edgar lunged at me, his fingers coiled around an empty dark bottle, sending a heavy blow to my left temple and eye, and I had felt as though I had lost more than some growing sense of goodwill. I could never forget it when he said that he would have rather had my son die than Joseph, for what did the bird flu disease know but give out curses of shortened lives? As he had said, did God bring deliverance to all at the expense of one? Not one child in the poultry families died, as the bird flu variant had been weaker, and had only affected young children, and Edgar must have seen a sort of evil malaise he could not help but let out.   It had taken me quite a while to understand that with the death of Joseph, my son Alfonso had been naturally what Edgar's mind was set to cast blame on, as I had remembered all these years the things that had led Edgar to close down his poultry.   "Gideon, please forgive me... Everything I did and said—"   "It's good to hear from you, Edgar." A sigh of relief sprung out of me. Twelve years had passed and within those years it had crossed my mind more than once that he must have figured it out, and I could not tell him of my hand in his son's death, however any God would look at it, however small my part might have been. It had been Marlon, now my daughter Belen's father-in-law, and a good friend, who swore with me to never speak of what we saw the night