Identified

“It’s what I’ve always thought of myself as, I just... eventually, you have to figure out how to be who you are, you know?”

The woman sat back defensively, her chin up defiantly, her arms crossed over her chest. Carlson met her eyes with what he hoped was warmth and compassion, but she looked away.

“Okay,” he said, “Talk more about that. Tell me about when you first felt this way, when you began...”

“I don’t understand why I have to go through this,” she said. “I mean, it’s what I want, and I’m willing to pay, so what’s the problem?”

Morning

The first customer of the day walked in about ten minutes after I opened and ordered something cheap and hard in a nasal east-coast accent. He sat at the end of the bar and sipped it quietly while I futzed behind the bar; I’d gotten all the pre-opening crap done for once, and frankly I had been hoping to have that magical hour or two after opening when there weren’t any customers and I could get my homework done.

Fuck it, it wasn’t like the guy was needy. I whipped my backpack up onto the bar and pulled out the post-structuralist novel I was supposed to be enlightened by before Tuesday. I found it really difficult to read with distractions, but then I also found it really difficult to read this stuff without distractions, so really, it was a wash; and like I said, that one guy wasn’t being distracting.

The experience of that novel may help me later on with being able to understand the structural underpinnings of a postmodern society, but it set a surreal tone for the rest of the morning that made things just a little bit... well.

The guy at the end of the bar finished his drink and slammed the glass down on the bar; I jumped. I hate it when people do that, it’s like this I’m-a-badass flourish to finishing a glass of cheap booze, like it’s something they accomplished, rather than a sign that they might need to spend some time thinking about the underlying causes of their alcohol dependency.

Then he did something else that irritates me: he set money on the bar and walked out. Some people really like doing this; it says something about being a regular or able to do basic math or whatever. I didn’t know this guy; he was just another morning alcoholic to me, so the fact that he decided to skip the payment ritual just made me nervous that I was being stiffed.

I let the book flip closed, letting go of my fear that I’d never be able to find my place again because I had no idea what was going on anyway, and hurried down to have a look at the money.

Which was fake. It was some sort of bank-issued note: payable at something called the Fifth Hibernian Bank, valued at five of whatever currency it denominated; it had a picture of Mark Twain on it. It was red, for Christ’s sake. 

“Hey,” I said, almost conversationally, and then, “Hey!” The door was just closing on the guy’s heels. I ducked under the bar flap and ran to the front door, wondering the whole time whether the price of a drink was worth a morning sprint. Hell, though, I’m a bartender; if I don’t collect money for the drinks, what the hell am I doing, anyhow?

I flung the door open and looked up and down the street. The guy was about halfway down the block, walking fast on the... moving... sidewalk...

Rubber Fork

“Super powers.” She leaned way back in her booth; I couldn’t tell if it was an expression of skepticism or an attempt to be as far away from me as the seating would allow.

“Yeah,” I said, looking away. “I know.” I carefully resisted the urge to reach for my coffee; after the laptop incident this morning, I had no idea how to interact with things in my environment.

“So... you can show me these superpowers, yes? They’re not just something that only happens when you’re by yourself?”

This reaction was why I called Jill in the first place; skepticism and level-headedness are assets when you’re trying to come up with explanations.

Waking Up

The dude was wearing some sort of hard-sided pack on his back with lots of blinky lights and a thick tube coming out the bottom that connected with a thick wand he held in both hands. He wasn’t wearing a costume or anything, just jeans and a t-shirt; the pack made him look like he’d just mugged a ghostbuster.

Getting closer, it was obvious that the pack was homemade -- parts if it were held together with duct tape, especially around the joints that connected the tube to the wand; and it was also clear that it wasn’t just an art piece. There was a level of complexity in it that somehow made it obvious that this was a working device, that all the little bits of it were there for a reason.

He was walking down Market street, just sort of meandering. So was I; it was my day off, and I had been trying to figure out what to do today and of course if you just meander downhill long enough you end up on Market, so there I was, following this guy through the weekend crowds of tourists and shoppers.

PROMPT: You woke up this morning with superpowers.

PROMPT: An unexpected catalyst of the evolution of humanity

PROMPT: A guy tries to pay you in money you don't recognize

PROMPT: You're cured of a mental illness you didn't know you had.

PROMPT: The life you woke up in this morning is not the one you went to sleep in.

A More Traditional Exorcism

When Theodora re-entered the room, the scar designs all over her body had mysteriously vanished, and replaced. They had been replaced with new ones, still wet with blood, and they were still chock full of tribal art and archaic symbols that looked like they belonged more on the walls of some dead religion's temple than on a person.

"What the hell?" Jack asked, "You've changed."

"No, I'm still the same person as yesterday," Theodora said absently. Her eyes seemed focused on the empty spaces around him rather than directly on his person, and this sent a chill through his spine.

"Who did this to you? How did-" He was silenced by her delicate index finger being placed softly on his lips as she approached him.

"It's magick," she said.

"Okay, now I'm absolutely convinced you need professional help."

"I already have professional help. That's where I got these."

He wanted desperately to help her, but he was more and more keenly aware of the fact that he was in way over his head. "I'm sorry," he said, "I can't do this."

"I know," she replied, "That's what these were for. They help me see your demon."

"I'm sorry, my demon?"

"Yes, I have to be able to see him to remove him." That's when he saw the knife. It must have been some sort of ceremonial dagger, and it was well-polished, and recently sharpened. He had a difficult time breathing, at first, because the air seemed to be sucked out of him at the terror of seeing her pull the knife out. But his breath slowly began to return along with a deep sense of calm as she began to thrust the blade repeatedly into his abdomen.

Uncomfortable

“So... You remember yesterday when I complimented Jack on the big ass squid on his shoulder?”

“Yeah, he seemed really uncomfortable talking about it.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not a squid anymore, it’s a skull with a snake in it.”

“Oh. Um. What?”

“No shit, man, there’s no squid on his shoulder today, it’s a skull now.”

“You know...”

“What, man? Isn’t that weird, that a guy’s tattoos change overnight?”

“Yeah, but...”

“But what? You don’t think that’s weird?”

“Dude, Jake doesn’t have tattoos, he has a skin condition. We all thought it was really awkward of you to bring it up.”

“What? No, it’s this amazing set of abstract monochrome...”

“It’s eczema. And he’s really self-conscious about it. He has all these creams...”

“Dude. No way.”

“Way.”

PROMPT: The new person's extensive tattoos are different than they were yesterday.

Moral Imperatives

This one connects with this one. With any luck it almost seems coherent; I didn't read the old one before I wrote the new one.

PS, apologies to both of my readers; stuff has been going on Outside My Head this last couple of weeks which has made writing spotty. Hopefully it gets back to regular soonish.

“Evil fucking clowns.” Jack muttered it under his breath, but it had the curl of lip and emphasis of enunciation to make it sound like a passionate curse nonetheless. I looked up from what I was doing.

“What?” I asked, just to see what he said. I knew what he was looking at, I just wanted to hear what he was thinking.

“Gamma team. They’re working on some sort of intramural vendetta; some bureaucrat pissed them off and they’re exacting revenge...”

“Sanctioned, though.”

“Just because Galambos signed off on it doesn’t mean it’s not an intramural vendetta.” Jack hit some combination on his keyboard with enough force to leave dents in it. “Evil fucking clown.”

PROMPT: Evil clowns who travel through time

Farm Labor

Sixteem months of unemployment is as long as I ever hope to go without a job. It was in the middle of the Great Recession, and at the time it seemed like everybody was out of work, but the fact that I was in good company didn't prevent it from breaking my spirit, just a little bit. The end of that slog also meant that I was maybe a little more willing than I otherwise would have been to take the first thing that came my way, which is how I ended up working on The Farm.

The ad was forwarded to me through a friend of mine, along with a very tentative sort of recommendation: 'Hey, heard about this, not really your thing I know but if you're really desperate...' It offered a low hourly wage and a profit share in exchange for hard labor, no farm experience necessary, and included a link to an organic dairy in a little coastal town about an hour's drive from where I lived.

PROMPT: The job description of your new job is accurate... but not what you expected.

Somebody's got to...

The city was as quiet as it always was at five in the morning. The Finance guys had been at work for an hour already, watching markets open up on the other side of the country, and the barristas were just rolling out of bed for six o'clock opening times; everybody else was still asleep. It made for an easy commute. One of the perks of being a garbage man.

I was late because my alarm clock hadn't gone off. At some point while I was sick, I ended up turning it off, because I was having trouble sleeping, and then when I was feeling better I hadn't remembered to turn it back on. So I drove in on Thursday morning feeling stressed out because I'd burned through my sick time being sick, of all things, and I really couldn't afford another day off. I expected my super to take a look at me, an hour late and disheveled, and tell me to go home.

PROMPT: The revolution happened while you were out sick.

Out of prompts

I'm going to take today's writing time and come up with some more prompts.

Fucking Florida

Carlos’ Spanish was rusty. You wouldn’t think that would be possible, even; it was his mother tongue, the language of his cognitive categories. But here he was in a bodega in south Florida, struggling to pass the time of day while he ordered pupusas.

“Listen,” said the guy behind the counter, his big American gut resting on the surface, “I can speak English, don’t trouble yourself.” His wife smiled from where she was working the grill. Carlos gritted his teeth.

He hated Florida; had hated it when he first came here, all alligators and swamps, and he had not stopped hating it for five hundred years while every horror of the godawful place was successively conquered and supplanted by fresh horrors.

PROMPT: Civilization ended while you were at Burning Man.

PROMPT: In 1514, Ponce de Leon found the fountain of youth. Every couple of decades they have to go back to Florida and have a sip.

Retirement

I was standing on a street corner in some city in America. It was early evening, and as I stood, people flowed around me, heading home from their jobs. I had been walking for... as long as I could remember; this wasn’t the first time I’d stopped to take stock, but I was having trouble remember what conclusions, if any, I’d reached before.

My suit was a little rumpled, but it was a very good suit and seemed to have stood up to the day reasonably well. It didn’t have any monograms anywhere. I had a wallet with money and a set of identification and payment cards, a nice watch, a large phone with a touch-screen, and keys.

I had no idea what the keys went to. Some of them looked like house keys, some like car keys. There was a touch-access card in the wallet, the kind you see used in office buildings and garages, but it was blank white.

PROMPT: Someone suffering amnesia slowly realizes that they're a famous villain that the world thinks is dead.

Nuts

Author's Note: For some reason I kept getting distracted while writing this. I just remembered I was writing when the alarm went off telling me I should go to work. Knew there was something.

It stuck with me the entire day, that feeling that I was supposed to do something. I stopped on my way to work and got coffee, thinking I had forgotten some stop I was supposed to make; but I sat there for maybe half an hour, eating a muffin, and nothing came to me, so I just went on to work.

I checked calendars when I got in; nothing but my regular meetings. I sat at my desk and wondered for a second, then started going through my email from overnight.

It was a regular day. There were problems and solutions; there were questions and answers; there was laughter and tears. A work day. And all the time, I was haunted by that sensation that something... something I was supposed to be doing.

There are lots of techniques for teasing something loose from your memory. You look at it obliquely, you follow the sensation; when it strikes you, you

PROMPT: There's something important that you were supposed to remember to do today.

Naked

Yes, the latest entry had me discovering the website I was looking at; it was the first thing I checked. It had logs from the web server, updating in real time, and it had stills from the camera on my laptop of me looking at the stills from the camera on my laptop on that website.

To be honest, that didn’t freak me out so much. I am a reasonably paranoid and cynical person, and somehow I’d always assumed that someone was watching what I did on the internet. when I was a new internet user, I regularly imagined someone on the other end of the connection clicking their tongue reprovingly at my choices of content, more or less as I clicked them. Now I just assumed that everything was being logged, that somewhere a record existed of everything I did online.

Mostly, I took comfort from the fact that the Internet is a big place and that my logs didn’t all exist in the same place. Recently, it’s become clear that the truth is more complicated than that, but still, I had been able to imagine that nobody had the whole picture. This website made it clear that, indeed, someone had the whole picture.

I even had an index number: 5ea75-cc9df-9a413-0098d. I guess they didn’t feel the need for a full SHA1 hash space; after all, there are only 7 billion of us. The record of my life went back all the way to the beginning, though everything from before the late eighties was obviously culled from my parents’ Facebook walls and similar sources: a picture here, a reference there, meticulously compiled but not exactly comprehensive.

PROMPT: A website that chronicles your life, up to the present moment. You didn't make it.

lint trap of the world

with apologies to shel silverstein and both of my readers

in the space between the shadows

where the lines are always soft

in the floors beneath the floors and

in the loft above the loft

in the darkness of the evening

when the dusk begins to break

there’s a space in time for dreaming

when you’re sure that you’re awake

if you’re walking down the high road

or you’re locked inside and curled

in bed, you’ll have a chance to wander

in the lint trap of the world

PROMPT: Where the socks that disappear in the dryer actually go.

Bottomed Out

I sat against the wall of the Oak Gourmet and listened to cars bottom out as they came off the hill and crossed Buchanan. My head hurt and my feet hurt and I didn’t have anywhere in particular to be until the last train to the East Bay at midnight or so; I cracked left eye just enough to look at my wrist without moving any more than necessary. Quarter to eight.

Boredom is a funny thing. When you’re just killing time, the most comfortable chair you ever sat in will start to feel itchy and uncomfortable after a while; you just can’t stay still... in Iraq, the seats in the Stryker could almost have been designed to be the most uncomfortable perch anybody ever devised, until you spent a day fighting your way through some crappy hamlet on the edge of nowhere and then the Sergeant said ‘OK, load up, we’re outa here’ and you crawled into the back of the vehicle and it was like being in the womb again.

PROMPT: Waitin' for a train / feelin' near as faded as my jeans...

Many Worlds

“So what is it that was worth bundling me onto a plane at oh-God-thirty?” He sounded crankier than he actually was, and she smiled, pleased that he was feeling good enough to play. Recently when she’d gone to visit him, he’d been too sick to pretend to be cranky, which worried her.

“It’s an intact mid-twentieth-century data facility.” She led him into the portable, temporary, climate-controlled structure erected over what had, until the last week, been an active construction site, right in the middle of the campus at UC Stanford. They went down a small flight of stairs and into a half-demolished elevator lobby.

The cars had been removed from the elevator shafts, but a temporary cage transport had been fitted into one of them, powered and secured by modern field technologies rather than the old cable-and-brake system. The ride down several levels was smooth and safe, but in no way disguised the frighteningly analog nature of the structure they were moving through; old trackways, crumbling and rotten ferroconcrete, and copious graffiti from generations of elevator surfers were visible along the way.

PROMPT: modern or futuristic technology found in an archaeological dig.

The Rockoon Racket

“So about the time it passes out of the troposphere, the boosting envelopes will burst, and  ascent will slow. Somewhere just before the top of the stratosphere, it’ll stabilize and basically bob at the point where the weight of the payload equalizes with the lifting power of the hydrogen in the thinned atmosphere.”

Taylor was standing in front of a whiteboard, having eschewed slides. He’d drawn thick black horizontal lines representing the separations between the various layers of atmosphere. Blue lines represented the path of the payload and its associated booster systems upward and outward.

“It’s at this point that primary ignition takes place.”

PROMPT: Someone asks a question you're not supposed to ask

First Day, Third Shift

An Author's Note: Cliff Ahead. This is not a satisfactorily self-contained snipped, but ends rather abruptly as there is a doctor's appointment this morning. My appologies.


This is it, I thought, I’m out of the boiler room for good. I bounced out of bed and did a little dance in the middle of my tiny cabin. I reached past the stained coveralls still occupying their hook and grabbed the pressed jacket/slacks/shirt combination neatly folded over a hanger.

Three seconds later I was dressed and in the corridor, a spring in my step and a whistle on my lips, shiny shoes on my feet and brand-new stripes on my shoulders. I could feel the hum of the turbines through the deck plates, and frowned just a little bit at the note they transmitted: something was out of alignment somewhere.

The frown turned into a grin as I remembered that this might, in fact, be my problem, as the new head of third shift in Engine Seven.

I was early for breakfast. The galley served twelve meals per day, evenly spaced around the clock, as each shift in turn cycled through breakfast, lunch, tea, and supper; third shift breakfast was not for twenty minutes, and first shift supper had ended forty minutes before; the dishes were done and something delicious was going in the galley.

One of the first shift engine supers was sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room. My heart raced a little bit; I wasn’t sure of the protocol... it was possible he was there to speak with me, in which case I should sit down across from him. On the other hand, it was possible he was just enjoying his cuppa in relative peace, in which case I should leave him the hell alone.

As a fellow super, I should technically greet him... but I didn’t want to be presumptuous.

As I approached, tentatively, he solved the problem for me by hailing me.

“Carlson,” he said, “Sit down, I was hoping I’d see you before your first shift.”

I sat down across from him. I didn’t know the engines supers well; I’d been in boiler two for three years, rotating through the shifts, as was customary, and knew the boiler room supervisors as authority figures to be watched for and obeyed, but the engine guys were a cut above boiler people anyway, and the engine supervisors were completely outside my experience.

I knew them by sight, of course, but I’d never talked to one of them before I’d completed the round of interviews preceding this promotion.

A steward appeared with a cup of thick, spicy tea. I sipped it gratefully.

“So,” the engine super said, “First day.”

“Yes...” I paused. Supers technically rated a “Super,” not a “Sir,” but as I was wearing three stripes on the cuff of my jacket myself, I was not required to give the honorific.

“Yes,” I said, blushing a little bit. He grinned back at me, almost certainly following my thought process perfectly.

“I’m Dennison, I’m the first shift Super for Engine Seven. I wanted to talk to you before you started, give you a little background on the position you’re walking into.”

“Thank you, Dennison,” I said, a little formally. “I appreciate whatever you can tell me.”

He shifted a little bit, started to speak, then stopped. He took a sip.

PROMPT: First day at a new job

Breaking Down Barriers

This, she thought, was not how it was supposed to go. She muscled herself up and over the wall, easily chinning up and then extending her arms straight so that the top of the wall was at her waist; then she flipped her legs up and over and lowered herself down the other side. Obstacle seven, down.

She turned to obstacle eight, which was a long mud pit slung over with guy wires and cammy netting. As she flopped down in the mud, she despaired. This was all so depressingly familiar: it was exactly the same as every other obstacle course she’d ever been on in the Army; even worse, she was so far ahead of the other runners that she couldn’t even hear them struggling anymore.

This was supposed to be an elite unit. She’d struggled to be included, fought to be accepted, to what was supposed to be the most hard-core light infantry in the world, maybe second to the Seals but not if you asked anybody here. She’d overcome personal hardship, dyslexia, and, yes, femaleness to be here.

She made it through the mud pit with depressing ease, perfect form sending her gliding under the wire. There was a short run to a ridiculous rope swing, then a simple balance beam, and she was at the finish.

Maybe there’d been some sort of mistake. She’d arrived late; maybe she had joined the wrong group? As the only female participant, she’d had her own room, which was a blessing and a curse -- on the one hand, it meant that she had her own room; on the other hand, it made her responsible for getting her own sorry ass up and out of bed.

No, she’d checked in with the post commander when she’d gotten in last night -- he was out, but his adjunct was there... A suspicion narrowed her eyes. How sure was she, really, that this was real? That the whole thing -- the assignment here, the training -- could it all have been a, a setup? A practical joke?

She’d kill... no, Captain Barnes had talked to her about it, and if he was in on it, then she couldn’t trust anybody or anything in the world. So what the hell was going on?

The rest of the puffy, out-of-shape course-runners came into view, crawling out of the mud, huffing and out of breath. She watched them come toward her, and along side them, a pair of sergeants, one of them leaning forward and shouting... encouragements... as the men made their way through the last little bit. Three of them fell off the balance beam.

These cannot, she thought, cannot be Ranger school candidates.

The sergeants walked straight up to her, the big, loud one still yelling over his shoulder. The other one looked her up and down.

“That was a very impressive run.” Critical eyes traveled over her muddy uniform. “I can’t help but think you might be in the wrong place.”

She glanced over at the other men and couldn’t help but agree.

“I wonder,” the quiet sergeant said, solicitously, in a helpful and innocent tone that was designed to make every soldier who heard it glance around nervously for the other shoe, “I wonder if you might not be looking for the Ranger course.”

“Ah,” she said, “Yes. That is...”

“A lost Ranger?” The big, loud sergeant had gotten his platoon lined up and made his way over to where his fellow non-com was quizzing the odd-woman-out. “Soldier, this is the Danger course, for the basic wilderness school. I believe that you want the Ranger course, which was straight ahead on the road.”

Panic seized her. How, she thought, could she possibly have fucked this up.

“Yes sergeant,” she said.

“Get going, you might make it in time to just get an ass-chewing.” She glanced up at him. “Move,” he said, loudly but not meanly.

She moved.

As she disappeared through the trees, the larger, louder sergeant grinned uncharitably. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You believe that? In the Rangers, too.”

“Shouldn’t even be allowed in the Army, if you ask me,” said the smaller, quieter sergeant. She turned her head and spat, as though getting something out of her mouth. “Going to get somebody killed.”

Her companion nodded. “Fucking dyslexics,” he said.

PROMPT: The exception proves the rule

A Small Mystery

Harold looked up from the magazine he was reading when a key hit the scratched counter. It was Lo Pei Chuan, returning the key to number seven. He absently reached over and flipped the checkout book back to last night’s page.

“I thought Chen had number seven,” he said. Chen’s name was in the book next to the number seven car. His eyes drifted back to his magazine; new Phillip Marlowe out this week, and he only half, at best, paying attention to the traffic of cab drivers checking keys in and out.

“I am Chen,” said Lo Pei. Harold threw a sharp glance at Lo Pei, suddenly paying attention. Lo Pei was wearing Chen’s stupid hat.

A lot of the drivers -- the newer ones, especially -- believed, he knew, that he couldn’t really tell them apart. They also believed that he didn’t understand Cantonese and that he was, maybe, just a little bit retarded. He hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to create what he thought of as the Myth of the Dumb Gwai Lo Dispatcher, but once he’d realized it existed he found himself going along with it, maybe playing it up a bit.

The older drivers knew him, of course, but they seemed to be in on the joke, so far. There’d been a big turnover last year, a bunch of guys leaving all at once, and the new guys... well, the new guys were young, all of them a bit rough and loud. The older guys didn’t like them much, and Harold was having a hard time liking them himself; so the atmosphere around the barn had been... weird, the last little while.

Lo Pei looked really unhappy. Something was going on; Harold tried to suss out whether it was some sort of serious intrigue, or whether Chen just had to go home early and got Lo Pei to cover for him and they were using the pretend-to-be-each-other gag because they didn’t trust him to be reasonable about it.

Either way, it wasn’t the best thing that had ever happened. Harold spit a stream of tobacco juice into the corner, absently, aiming at a brass dragon-stamped spittoon and missing it.

“Okay,” he said, “Sorry.” He hung the key to number seven on the peg board and watched Li Po walk away, looking back over his shoulder.

“Hey, Chen,” he shouted. Li Po did an actual triple take, stopping first because Harold had shouted, then relaxing because Harold had shouted someone else’s name, then tensing again as he remembered he was pretending to be Chen.

He turned to face Harold. “Yeah?” He didn’t come to attention, the way some of the drivers did, but he took his hands out of his pockets.

“When you see Li Po, let him know I want to see him,” said Harold. Then he went back to his magazine. Let him chew on that, he thought.

Somehow he had a hard time falling back into the story.

PROMPT: Intercultural communication

PROMPT: An unexpected or unusual talent

Fine

“Entirely unacceptable.” She planted her heel and spun back around. “It’s today, for God’s sake, you can’t just...” She paced back up the length of the room, head down and cocked slightly to one side, her fingertips white on the phone pressed against her face.

He watched from his chair, coffee clutched between two hands. He was trying to catch up with what was going on. It had started with a problem with the caterer, but that had moved on to something with the locally-sourced fish market; he was almost entirely sure she was currently talking to the captain of a fishing boat.

PROMPT: A disaster, first thing in the morning.

Improvised Solutions

I had just finished a routine shift, handing off the on-call baton to Ashley on the morning crew when the call came in. I literally had my jacket on and was walking out the door, but the first words out of Ashley’s mouth made me stop and take a seat to listen and maybe be helpful.

Ashley’s perfectly competent, but first shift is where new people go: absolutely nobody wants to be in first thing in the morning, so the new person gets the gig, and for most of their shift the senior staff is in to back them up.

For two hours, though, from six or so to eight, they’re mostly on their own; which is generally fine, it’s the lowest call volume of the day and it gives the newbies a taste of what it’s like to be on your own. But it means that first thing in the morning is the worst possible time for something to go wrong.

“NOC, this is Ashley,” said Ashley, and then, “Calm down, speak slowly, tell me what’s wrong.” She reached for a notebook and pen to jot notes with; I usually open a ticket at this point and type directly into the input field, but some people think better with a pen in their hand.

PROMPT: An unhappy ending.

Yadda yadda yadda.

Arrival

Carlin stepped off the boat onto the stone pier, turning to watch as the coxswain hefted his trunk up beside him. There were maybe a hundred people standing around on the pier, all seemingly vying for his attention.

One of the other passengers seemed to quickly strike some sort of bargain with some of the standers-around, who hefted his several trunks onto various shoulders and heads and then squeezed his not-inconsiderable bulk into a palanquin and off they went.

The air was muggy and smelled like something had died or sweated on it right before it passed into his nostrils. The heat was oppressive, but he’d expected that; the crowds were no worse than they’d be in a similar stretch of the city where he’d embarked, though they were more... uniformly exotic.

PROMPT: Getting fired.

This is a formatting experiment designed to drive Ian mad.

Payment In Advance

“Dude, I have always, always wanted to meet you.”

Dave nodded and smiled politely, wondering what the fuck the guy was talking about. He’d seemed a little bit... weird... when he sat down next to Dave at the bar, and now that he was drunk he was even weirder.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, “I’m a delivery driver for a bread company, if you want to meet me just hang around in back of a supermarket and eventually I’ll show up...” It didn’t sound as clever out loud as it had in his head. He’d heard a guy who delivered a keg to the bar say something similar, but it was funnier when the beer guy said it.

PROMPT: Someone learns the exact future date and time of their death.

This is a formatting experiment designed to drive Ian mad.

The Catcher at Dover

“What did he just say?”

“He said ‘Americans love to fight.’”

“No shit.”

The two men sat in the back of the big hall, watching as the General paced back and forth on the stage. Occasionally they generated glares from others as they kibitzed.

“Killed off like flies? Really?”

“Um. Yeah.”

Prompt for Monday, August 25

A Pre-Battle Speech

Faust Is Dead

“5cc of mouse blood?”

“I’m telling you, that’s all that’s required.”

“I don’t know, it sounds... chincy.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say, we can sprinkle gold flecks in it if it makes you feel better...”

“Just do the... the thing.”

There was a brief pause, then the rhythmic sound of chanting filled the low, dark space, and there was a brief flurry of action.

Prompt for Sunday, August 24

An incorrect way to summon the Dark God.

Making History

“What’s a reactionary?”

The two men stood beside the plaza, at the front of a large crowd watching another large crowd face off against a smaller crowd of police. The spectators were alternately cheering and jeering each side; the police were standing quietly in a two-deep line, looking impassive but radiating the nervous energy of people who are about to be in a fight.

The big crowd of protestors were chanting, but not very well. They’d get a chant going in one localized area, and it would start to spread, and then it would fall apart in an uncoordinated mess. It seemed like a metaphor for the whole exercise.

Prompt for Saturday, August 23

Civil unrest in the city.

How I Went To Jail The First Time

It was a lot of hot sauce. I could feel my eyes start to burn from across the huge room. I opened my eyes wide to stretch the skin I could feel puckering.

“Oh my God.” Carl turned around, as though he was backing into the wind. “I can’t believe...”

“I know, right?”

Carl and I were making our regular rounds; the complex was large and spread out over several acres of typical industrial wasteland, and we were supposed to go look at each building every hour, making sure that potential miscreants don’t have an uninterrupted night of pillaging. To that end, we were equipped with flashlights, keys, and a golf cart.

Prompt for Friday, August 22

A lot of hot sauce. A. Lot. Of. Hot. Sauce.

The Hookup

“I’m up for it.” He sat back in the booth, sideways, and took a drag off his cigarette. “I mean, if it’s everything you say I’d almost have to be, right?”

“Dude, that’s what I love about you, always up for a new experience.” Carlo pulled out his phone and started tapping. “I’ll text the dude, and then we’ll wait for him to get back to us.”

“All right.” Freddy took another drag, then leaned forward and grabbed his empty coffee cup and looked around for the waitress. “How long does this dude take to get back to you?”

“I don’t know, man, this is the first time I’ve dealt with him. He’s a friend of a friend, you know?” Carlo set the phone back down on the table and leaned back against the padded back of the booth. “Jay says he’s OK, so...”

Prompt for Thursday, August 21

I want a new drug.

Treasure

“You’re kidding.”

“I... it’s good news, really. There’s a ferry from the other side of the island to Ponce, we just have to walk there...”

“What, all of us just walk out of the jungle?”

Josh shrugged. He’d gone from “we’re all going to die in a plane crash” through “we’re all going to drown” and “we’re trapped on a desert island” to “we have to walk to the ferry” and was pretty pleased with that progress, on the whole. Explaining how they’d gotten onto the island seemed like a detail, a minor problem, and not really to be compared with “how do we avoid being eaten by sharks.”

“I don’t think...” He looked around. “We swam,” he said. “We’re part of a race, or a rally or something, and we swam out here as part of...”

Carlos looked around at the soaking wet crew of computer security experts standing, sitting and lying on the beach. 

“Swam,” he said. “We. Swam here. In cargo shorts and...” He waved his hand in the general direction of other people. “Jason is actually wearing a pocket protector.”

Josh shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nobody’s going to ask. We’ll be dry by the time we get to the ferry, nobody is going to ask. It’s a tourist ferry, we’re on a nature preserve. It’s not like there’s customs.”

Carlos crossed his arms. “Fine,” he said. “What about that?”

He pointed to where Dave was sitting on top of an extra large duffle bag. It was the only piece of luggage they’d salvaged from the plane.

Obviously, they hadn’t swum here with it.

“How...” Josh paused. “Okay,” he said, “Everybody puts as much as they can in their pockets, and we stash the rest of it somewhere.”

“Stash it.”

“Preferably somewhere close to the damned road.”

“There’s a road?”

Josh looked down at the map he’d had in his pocket. It was wet, on the verge of becoming mush.

“It’s that way,” he said, pointing generally west.

“So,” said Carlos, “You’re proposing that we bury a bag of money on a Caribbean island, draw a map of where we buried it, and come back for it later.”

“Basically.”

“I expect there will be a big X where we buried it.”

Josh grinned. “I expect there will be,” he said.

Carlos sighed. He looked out to sea, and then at the group on the beach. The fact that they weren’t all about to die was finally catching up with him.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get everybody gathered up and start walking.”

Prompt for Wednesday, August 20

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest

Cheers

I looked up when it happened, but I didn’t see it; the sound was what made me look up. I was deep in whatever I was working on -- a paper for some class -- and by the time I’d registered that something was happening, it was basically over, and there was a car parked in the bar.

There was dust everywhere, and pieces of broken wall, and chunks of plaster and decorative artwork.

And, of course, the car. It was a nice car, too, something I didn’t recognize the make of except in a vague “it’s one of the really expensive ones” sort of way. It didn’t really look that much the worse for having driven through the wall, just covered in plaster.

Prompt for Tuesday, August 19

A writer sits hunched over a table in a bar, staring at a blank page, when suddenly...

On Scene

“Was he... eaten?”

“I don’t know, detective, I just secured the scene and called it in.”

“Huh.” He scratched his head, pushing his stupid-looking fedora back on his stupid-looking head. “Okay, run me through it one more time.”

Prompt for Monday, August 18

A policeman who's seen everything confronts something outside their experience.

Game Theory

“No, seriously, it’s running water.” Hector punched a series of buttons on his console. “In pipes,” he clarified. “Not like a stream. The audio signature is... pretty distinct, the computer puts it at above ninety-nine percent.”

“Meaning, it’s definitely water, and it’s definitely flowing through an artificial system of some sort?”

“Yes.”

Astor Martin sat back in her couch, desperately wanting to rub her face. The space suit’s helmet and gloves prevented even that basic comfort.

Prompt for Sunday, August 17

The sound of flowing water, closer than expected

Sugar and Spice

“You what?”

“I... Look, you’ve just got to try it.”

“Um.” She looked down at the brown, granular concoction in the little bowl. There was a spoon.

“Just take a small spoonfull, you’ll see what I mean.”

She fastidiously knocked the spoon against the side of bowl, then took a small amount of the brown stuff on the end of the spoon. She looked up at her friend with a certain amount of trepidation, then back down at the spoonfull of...

Prompt for Saturday, August 16

A novel new use for sugar

Thumb On The Button

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re asking me?”

They stared at the sign on the locked door of the bar.

“Two men enter, one man leaves.” The larger of the two men scratched his head. “Isn’t that from some movie?”

“Yeah,” said the other one, “Fight club, maybe.”

Prompt for Friday, August 15th

A door that was open before is now locked. A new sign on the door provides no real insight into why.

Prompt for Thursday, August 14th

Seven Men, Six Cookies, and a gun.

Prompt for Wednesday, August 13th

Running away in headlong, panicked flight, thinking not of what's ahead but only of what's behind.

The letter

She sat across the table from him, the air between them thick with silence.

"Did you get the letter?" he asked.

"Betty gave it to me," Annette said toward her hands, clenched under the table.

"Oh, good."

The truth is that she had only skimmed the letter. It made her too angry to read it. It was a letter that should have been written ten years ago.

------------

It was New Year's eve. Annette's ringtone went off and she looked at who was calling. Her father. She answered and he launched into a stream of banality. After a minute or so, Annette interrupted.

"Dad, do you know how long it's been since we've spoken? It's been almost a year."

"Well, yeah... that's partially my fault, too -" he began.

"No, Dad. It was a conscious choice on my part not to contact you, and it didn't occur to you to call me in all that time until this moment. And then, when you call, you act as if we'd just left our conversation off yesterday."

"Well, sure - "

"No, Dad. I can't do this. I can't be an afterthought, or a toy to play with when it's convenient for you. I'm done here. I'm angry at you. Really angry. You've been a really crummy father and I just don't want to talk to you anymore."

"Now wait a second - "

"No. I'm done waiting for you, like I waited with my coat on for hours for you to show up for your scheduled visits when I was a kid. I'm done.

He scrambled verbally for something to say. The excuses poured from him. Annette gathered herself.

"Here's the deal, Dad. I am superstitious about New Year's eve. I do not want to ring in my new year feeling this angry. I'm going to hang up. If you think you have any right to have a relationship with your daughter, write me a letter telling me why. I'll read it. We'll see where we go from there."

Annette hung up the phone.

------------------

So here they were, ten years later. He had written the letter today, and given it to her sister to give to her, so they could meet and have lunch. Those weren't the terms, but Annette capitulated. He's not going to be alive forever, she thought. Can you let him die with this unresolved? Can you live without regret if you didn't reconcile when you could have?"

She looked at him across the table from her, babbling away about banalities, just as he had ten years prior on the phone. She shook her head and tamped down her frustration.

It wasn't New Year's eve, at least.

Swarming Behavior

“It’s good to see you again.” He sat on the curb, looking sideways at her.

She glared back at him, suspicion and hostility plain on her face. She held onto her knee, which was scraped up pretty badly; the effect of the posture added to her air of closed-off hostility.

“Listen,” he said, “I really, really am sorry about your bicycle, I really didn’t see you coming out from between those cars...” He laughed, a little painfully. “And what are the odds, really? One blind date, months ago, and I’ve been thinking about you on and off ever since, and then... there you are, sprawled across the hood of my car.” He grinned, a charming, boyish expression. All innocence.

Prompt for Tuesday, August 12th

An awkward reunion

Indiana Jones and the Failure to Pass the Torch

No fiction today.

The assignment here is “A different ending for a movie.” I started by looking up some top-ten lists: I was drawing a total blank. Even though there are several movies whose endings irritate me, I couldn’t really think of them right now. Googling for “10 worst movie endings” seemed like a place to start, and sure enough, there seem to be an infinite number of click-bait top-ten-movies... so I spent some time clicking through them.

The movie that turned up on just about every list was a surprise to me: “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” It surprised me because the movie irritated me so badly when I went to see it on opening night, and has continued to irritate me each time I’ve seen it since; my son is a big Indy fan, so we’ve watched all four movies en marathon a bunch of times.

Prompt for Monday, August 11th

A different ending for a movie

Claptrap

It was exactly like every other school he’d attended. The though gnawed at him as he made his way back to the dorm. He was wearing a fancy uniform and the teachers made a big deal of how special and smart they were to have been accepted here, but it went exactly the same way it had at his last school, and the one before that.

You sat in a class room, the teacher told you stuff, you wrote it down, you did exercises, you took tests. The ‘specialness’ of the school, the ‘advanced curriculum,’ came down to the teachers being better at telling you stuff, the students being faster at picking it up, the exercises getting harder faster.

He held out his hand and flexed it in a specific way he’d been taught in his orientation; a pig, old-fashioned iron key appeared in his hand, the puff of displaced air tickling his palm. He fitted it into the lock, turned, opened the door, removed the key; then he flexed his hand in a different specific way, and the key vanished.

Prompt for Sunday, August 10th

First day of school

Specialist Chen's Last Stand

This, she thought, was the dumbest thing that had ever happened to her. She couldn’t believe that she was in this position. Had let herself be in this position. Fuck.

The Texans came up over the rise, and she settled back into her chair. It was just as uncomfortable as it had been the first time she sat down in it. The big screens on the wall of the semi-trailer were lit up with ranges and windspeed and time-on-target figures, as well as several rapidly cycling views of the big tanks and APCs climbing out of the wadi.

Her fingers flew over the big touch-screen in front of her, dragging fire-source icons onto the out lines of the lead tanks; when she was finished allocating fire, about two-thirds of the tanks were hilighted red; none of the APCs were covered, and the infantry advancing in the big vehicles’ lees were still mostly uncovered. Soft kills, she thought; once the tanks were all taken out, she could reallocate fire to the APCs and hope it would take out the infantry.

Prompt for Saturday, August 9th

California secedes from the US

Tablecloth

Hey, what’s this? I seem to be some sort of cloth lying on a table. Perhaps one might call me a tablecloth. Fascinating. I’m always surrounded by food, yet I only really get to keep the discarded crumbs. Life sucks.

The Animator

"I work in animation," Charlie said as he sipped the vintage Merlot.

"Really? Who do you work for?" Jessica asked, completely enthralled. He was successful, that much was evident by the brand suits and the nice car. Charming, successful, and smart enough to be into Jessica. Everything she wanted.

"I'm freelance. I animate a little bit of everything. I'd be happy to show you some of my work sometime if you like." He was looking at her bright red hair, and matching lipstick. His eyes betrayed that she had won him, and she smiled like a blushing schoolgirl. She was painfully aware of this weakness, but she didn't care after this night. She had a pretty good buzz going, and they were alone, sitting at a little breakfast nook in her living room.

She put the wine down, and began to contemplate her move. She looked him up and down, looking for the best angle, the best approach. He locked eyes with her and she was paralyzed for a moment. He had caught her. He's so clever, she thought, He can see right through me. He leaned in and kissed her passionately. It was the first time they had kissed. It was electric, unlike any kiss she'd had in her adult life. It was like the sort of first kisses she had experienced in her high school days. The kind where you weren't quite sure how both parties knew to lean in at that exact moment. The kind where you're not quite conscious of the signal of intent, but that your body was moving of it's own volition, without needing to be told.

It was the kiss that initiated the best sex she had ever experienced. She forgot herself in it; lost herself in it. She was an animal with her conscious mind replaced by sheer ecstacy. She lost track of time, lost track of her thoughts, and had the most effortless orgasm she had ever experienced, and it lasted for what seemed like an eternity in the throes of such pure and unadulterated pleasure.

Afterwards, he slumped back into the chair and she lay there, her bare back on the table, and it occurred to her that at some point he had removed everything from the table and placed it on the shelf behind him. As the world came slowly back into focus, she smiled at him weakly, drained. He didn't have any bullshit pillow talk. He didn't feed her some line about how it was the most incredible sex he'd ever had, or even inquire as to whether or not she enjoyed it. He had a confidence, a strength that she was unaccustomed to finding in men. She felt like she should speak to fill the silence, but no words came to her, and she didn't want to risk losing such an amazing high by talking, or even getting off of the table, for fear that she might somehow fuck it all up.

Suddenly he began buttoning his shirt and fixing his perfectly groomed black hair, reaching for his coat. She moaned softly, "Don't leave?"

He waved his hand over the table, closing his eyes and... saying some sort of prayer? Oh god, she thought, No no no no, please don't fuck this up, Charlie. Please! Suddenly a shiver ran up her spine as the tablecloth itself seemed to be lifting up, wrapping softly around her, almost caressing her. Her mind went blank. She couldn't understand what was happening. And then suddenly, the tablecloth was wrapped around her neck and began constricting, blocking her airway. Charlie simply stood watching, smiling.

It was too late when she finally decided to accept that she was being strangled by a tablecloth. She kicked and tried to gasp out a scream as she clawed desperately at it. But it was too late. She heard the beautiful voice of the Animator speak softly as the world began to fall back away from her and the ambient noise all became metallic and unreal.

"Good night, sweet Jessica."

i cover, therefore i am?

what are these heavy things on me?

they feel roundish. some of them smell tasty. sometimes they are gone. they move around.

i am on top of something. it is not round. it has corners and it is bigger than the round things.  it is almost always here, except when it is not, and then everything gets hot and wet and misshapen, and then hot and dry and misshapen.  then flat again, and hard and cornery underneath.

i remember being folded.  it was dark and quiet when it was folded, and i had some friends who seemed a lot like me....flat and soft and folded up. some of them were thicker and smaller, different colors, embroidered. one was stiff and shiny ("plastic"?), and had stories about a place where it got very bright and then very dark, warm and cold, over and over, and sometimes water fell from the sky.

what is this big roundish shaggy thing? it has teeth. wait, what are "teeth"?  it is putting the teeth-things in a bit of me.  make it stop. ow.

The Smell of Sentience

“Oh, my God, what is that stench?” She covered her nose with her elbow as soon as the door opened. The house seemed... coated... the air thick... She felt like she was pushing through it as she went in.

He followed, not covering his nose but his face registering the same awful scent. “Jesus,” he said. “Something... it smelled like this when a raccoon died in the chimney, when I was a kid...”

Prompt for Friday, August 8th

A tablecloth becomes sentient

Prompt for Thursday, August 7th

A terrible stench

The Smoking Pun

“You’re... smoking.”

“No I’m not, I gave it up years ago...”

“No, you’re... smoking...”

She pointed. He turned and looked behind him... smoke was billowing. 

“Fuck!” He started batting ineffectually at his rear end. 

“Turn around.” 

He turned, dancing a little. She reached into his back pocket and pulled out a lit smoke bomb, attached to a battery and some sort of circuitry. She flipped it to the ground.

“Oh, shit.” he looked down at the little device. “It wasn’t even hot, I didn’t feel it at all.”

“Well,” she said, “It looks like someone has friends with an odd sense of humor.”

“Yeah.” He looked up at her and grinned. “Thanks,” he said.

“No problem.” She grinned. Their eyes met.

The elevator dinged, and the door opened.

“Well,” she said, “That’s my floor...”

“Wait,” he said, “I didn’t- Can I get your phone number?”

She paused in the elevator door, looking down at the smoke bomb and back up at him. “Much as I like a guy with a smoking ass,” she said, “I need to get to work.”

She stepped out of the doorway. An older woman got on the elevator; the door closed.

The older woman looked down at the still-smoking bomb and up at him.

“You can’t smoke in here,” she said.

Prompt for Wednesday, August 6

Someone is smoking where they're not supposed to smoke.

The Nature of My Game

“Please, allow me to introduce myself.” He held out his hand and I shook it, despite my reservations. His skin was warm and he smelled faintly of... something. Spice of some kind, and smoke. His teeth were a little too long for the smile he was wearing to set me at ease.

“I know who you are, Mister Iblis,” I said. “What I’m wondering about is...” We sat down on either side of the huge conference room table. I made an all-inclusive gesture with my hands. “Well, why you’re here. I honestly haven’t been able to work it out.”

Prompt for Tuesday, August 5th

"Sympathy for the devil."

Do whatever you want with it!

Unprompted

There are things far too terrible and far too terrifying to reveal in any other way than fiction. No one would understand, let alone would even believe me, if they knew the things I keep hidden.

I am the secret keeper. Always have been. I kept secrets for one man for 32 years. I hate lying, but it’s all I ever seem able to do. I wonder if that’s why I don’t talk much.

My friend tells me her son has begun speaking like a baby when he’s not around children his own age. She tells me he spits in her face and throws toys at her. She can’t imagine what the problem is. All I can do is stare at her, but I couldn’t say it, even if I wanted to. How do you tell someone you think their kid is showing symptoms of PTSD because all she and her husband do is drink and use drugs?

Her dad drank too, so she’s a secret keeper, just like me. You can always tell them. They look almost too sad to be real.

There’s a home video of me, just a bit younger than her son is now. We are at my preschool graduation. The kids are singing and at first I sing with them, but eventually I see myself withdraw into my own head, and it makes me sick because I know what is happening to that kid, to that little girl, to me, and I can’t stop it.

If I were to write a true fictionalized story of my life, it’d come out a lot like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. At some point midway through the second book, the reader would think, “Wait a minute. How could all of this really be happening to one person?” The answer, of course, is that victims get re-victimized. I was always so weak, so vulnerable, so easy to take from. So people kept taking. And that’s how you make someone like Lisbeth Salander. Take away all her desire to make ties to the world and then, surprise, she stops trying to make them. I listen to all the women talk tonight, all of them victims of sexual assault, and I can’t fathom telling them how many times it’s happened to me, how many different men, how many different ways, how many different worlds of denial I tried to wrap myself in to make it all feel not real, make it feel like fiction, take away its power.

But I don’t say anything. I am the secret keeper.

Proprietary Data

“Oh, Christ,” said Calvin. “They found us again.”

“Shit,” said Luther, “I guess it’s time to move.”

The two of them sat facing each other across a huge table in a smallish room with three hundred sixty degree windows. Both of them hunched over the keyboards of old-fashioned large-screened laptops, typing furiously.

Prompt for Monday, August 4th

"Robots vs. Pirates." :-p

Do whatever you want with it!

Undo

“So who’s this Hitler character?”

“German, born 1889, served in the Great War and afterwards active in German Military Intelligence. Rose to be deputy head of intelligence for the Reichswehr; early recipient of Prolong treatments in the late 60s, career with Reichswehr Intelligence stretched all the way to 2000, when he finally retired.”

Kierman leaned back in his chair, watching his superior across the cafe table. He’d abandoned his chai, the way they made it here tasted more like Christmas than like India.

Prompt for Sunday, August 3

An intrepid band of time travelers go back to 1993(!?) in a desperate bid to kill Hitler.

Terror

Everyone just sat there, that’s what I’ll remember. Ali was slumped on the floor of the train car, unconscious, hands clenched around his chest, and everyone just sat there, staring at him.

Then, almost as though they all thought of it at the same time, they all looked at me.

I raised my hands in a placating gesture. “It means ‘God is Great,’” I said. “Think of it as the equivalent of someone saying ‘Oh my God.’” I could tell that my accent wasn’t helping things.

As one, they all looked back down at where Ali was laying. I could have kicked him, the stupid bastard; of all the things to shout when you’re having a heart attack.

Prompt for Saturday, August 2

A man suddenly stands up on a commuter train and says, "Allahu-" then clutches his chest and falls over.

Just as interesting as Coffee and Cigarettes

“It’s too bad someone else isn't here,” Laura said, shifting uncomfortably in her seat in the middle of the coffee shop.

“Why’s that?” asked Sandy.

“Because I’d sure like some coffee.”

“Yes,” Sandy agreed. “If there is literally no one else here but us, that means there is no barista.”

Gone Fishing

Harold was sitting on the seat of his tractor, tuned out, letting the rumble of the engine and the jolting of the suspension move his body without trying to resist, carefully steering the thing back and forth across his field, turning earth. Nobody else was visible for as far as he could see, which was all the way to the horizon; he liked it like that. Harold’s war had been rough, and he didn’t do well with strangers.

He was just making the turn at the end of a row when he saw it come down, maybe half a mile away: something streaking downward, an impression of red, a cloud of dirt where it impacted. Harold resisted the urge to jump off the tractor and burrow into the soft, freshly turned soil; all his nerves screamed “barrage! barrage! barrage!”

Prompt for Friday, August 1

Set piece: two women sit in a coffee shop; no-one else is in the shop.

Prompt for Thursday, July 31

An ice chest falls falls out of a clear blue sky and lands on open ground.

A Quiet Night in the Country

Cameron arrived at the hotel an hour behind schedule. He sat in the parkway for a long time, staring at his mobile. He hadn't left London in 12 years. The peace and quiet in the little village of Belshire was a corrupting influence. He was so accustomed to the hustle and bustle that the silence was oppressive, disruptive to his already weakened state.

totally not fair, seriously

It was not fair, she thought.  Timmy the beagle should have legs that work, not dangly floppy things hanging off his rear.  And Daddy's surgical tools were all sharp and shiny because they were real doctor's tools, not the fake plastic things that came with her little sister's toysets.   The robot arms from Mommy's lab in the basement had hands on the ends, but they looked almost like dog legs, and anyway Timmy would really like to have hands instead of feet so he could climb onto the big bed by himself instead of waiting to be picked up from the floor, all forlorn looking.  She'd seen the TV shows where someone put a liquid in a syringe and injected someone, and they fell asleep, but the liquid she found that said "anaesthetic" on it didn't make Timmy fall asleep and lay still for very long.  He'd woken up after she got the second useless leg off, and was trying to attach the wires and metal to bones and muscle.  Of course Timmy had panicked and tried to leap out of the tub (the big Jacuzzi one that 4 adults could sit in, not the tiny one in the shower), but fortunately she'd made sure the bathroom door was securely closed. She'd injected him again, and he didn't fall asleep, but did lay still and let her drag him back into the Jacuzzi.

It was totally not fair, Timmy getting all scared and trying to escape when she was trying to help him.  Now she had to clean all this blood off the cream-colored tile *and* finish the bionic dog before her parents got home; they would be so mad about the mess, though they would probably be more mad about the nice Egyptian cotton towels that had blood on them, that she was scrubbing the floor with.  It wasn't working well. All she had was shampoo and hand soap, all the cleaners were downstairs in the closet where the housekeeper kept them.

Timmy's whimper echoed in the big bathroom. The heavy breathing from the tub began to crack and slow.  Oh darn, she thought;  don't die on me, stupid dog.  Don't make me have to take you down to Mommy's lab and bring you back to life after fixing your stupid broken dog legs.

Cleanup

The blood was still dripping from his forehead as he sopped it up off the tile floor. He’d put a pad of folded-over paper towels over the wound and wrapped a bandana around his head, but it had soaked through and was dripping again. The Boy Scout manual open to the first aid section on the floor next to him -- now smeared with bloody fingerprints -- said that scalp wounds bled a lot, and that he should apply direct pressure in order to stop the bleeding.

How was he supposed to apply direct pressure, he wondered, and still get the blood up before his mother got home? He looked up at the clock on the microwave: five twenty-four. He had maybe fifteen or twenty minutes until she came in.

Prompt for Wednesday, July 30

An eleven-year-old child on hands and knees, cleaning blood off of tiles.

Dinner Party

            The winter wind whipped Donna’s scarf away, exposing her neck. She attempted to shift all the grocery bags she was carrying to her left hand so she would have her right hand free to fix it, but in the process one of the bags freed itself from her grasp. A glass jar of honey struck the cement and shattered at her feet.

            “Shit,” she said, staring down at the mess. What would she do now? She needed the honey to make her signature dish, honey orange barbecue chicken. Everyone will be expecting it. She wondered what she might be able to substitute for the honey, but it was no use. Nothing would taste the same. No matter what she did now, everyone will know she failed. She wondered if the broken honey jar wasn’t some omen. Could she cancel the dinner party two hours before it began? No, that would be quite impossible.

            There was also the mess to consider. Less than ten feet from her front door, her guests would be walking on some sticky concrete. Donna had no idea how to even begin to clean up the honey. It was hopeless.

            Donna was growing more and more frustrated the longer she stood there and thought. It’d be best to just go inside and get started. Nothing was going to stop the dinner party now, so she would have to just do the best she could.

            Summoning her courage, Donna prepared an impromptu dry rub of various spices for the chicken. It smelled fantastic, and she knew it would taste wonderful, but what would she say when people asked why she didn’t make her usual?

            But there was too much work to do to dwell on it. Vegetables needed chopping – oh, wait, she had to start the rice now. It was already five minutes too late. She was so absorbed in her preparations that it barely registered when the front door opened and Carl stepped inside.

            “What on earth has gotten on my shoes? Why is there broken glass outside?”

            “Oh, no,” Donna said. “You didn’t drag that honey inside on the bottom of your shoes, did you?” Donna rushed towards the front door to meet Carl.

            “Why was there any honey out there for me to step in?”

            “It fell out of my bags. I forgot all about it until now.”

            “Forgot? How could you forget something like that?”

            “Well, if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been a bit busy getting ready,” she said, gesturing towards the mess in the kitchen.

            “And you don’t consider clearing the walkway for our guests a part of getting ready?”

            “Well, maybe if I had some help from you.”

            “There you go again,” Carl said, rolling his eyes. “I never do enough for you, do I? Working twelve hour days just to keep us afloat, but all you care about is socializing. Well, I didn’t invite them. I don’t even want them to come, but I know better than to leave a mess all over the walkway when we are expecting people. And if you find putting a dinner party together to be too much work for you, stop having them!”

            Carl bent over and reached down, tore each shoe off of his feet, and, for a moment, considered throwing them at Donna. But the moment passed and instead he flung them to the floor in a huff and growled his way up the stairs.

            Donna wrung her hands while examining the damage Carl had done to the entryway floor. How long would it take to clean and how does one even clean honey? Before she could think of an answer, the kitchen timer went off and she went running to shut it off and attend to the food again.

            Time seemed to pass quickly while she was absorbed in her cooking. By the time she had a moment to address the honey, guests were due to arrive in only fifteen minutes. Frantically, she headed outside with a broom and dustpan. She was able to collect the pieces of glass from the broken jar, but the tools proved useless against her most sticky and formidable opponent. In fact, they only seemed to exacerbate the problem, spreading the honey around so that it covered more ground and sticking to the broom’s bristles. She’d ruined the broom.

            Next, instinct compelled her to try hot water. She did seem to be making progress, though not quickly enough. It was not long before she noticed the Maxwell’s Lexus down the block and had to run inside to prepare to greet them. She had not even had a chance to begin cleaning the entryway. She quickly shoved Carl’s shoes into the coat closet, but she had nothing with which to conceal the obvious sticky mess he’d tracked into the house. Oh, well, this is just going to have to do. Her heart pounded. She ran her hands over her hair to smooth it out a bit and tried to catch her breath.

            The doorbell rang. She waited a moment before answering so it wouldn’t seem she had been standing right by the door.

            “Jim. Maryanne. Come in,” she said.

            “Donna, it was so good of you to invite us,” Jim said, grasping her hand warmly.

            “Oh, don’t be silly. It was good of you to come,” Donna said, smiling.

            “Donna, darling,” Maryanne said as Jim moved out of the way. They shared a small hug. “It’s dreadful outside, and I think I’ve gotten something on my shoe.” Maryanne began to look down to inspect the shoe.

            Donna needed to distract her quickly. “How is Bill enjoying his first year of college?”

            It worked. Maryanne forgot all about her shoe and gushed as Donna took their coats and ushered them into the living room.

            More guests arrived and the night wore on. Donna grew more and more anxious someone would spot the mess in the entryway, but no one did. With each successful entrance, she only worried more and more that the next guest was sure to notice.

            The evening only grew more dreadful as they sat down to their meal and not one guest bothered to ask about the chicken. They praised her dish extensively. Each compliment made Donna sick to the stomach. Each moment that passed without being exposed made her fear the inevitable exposure even more.

            Someone must comment on it before she explodes. Donna tried to will her guests onto the subject, at one point even reminding Maryanne what she’d said about her shoe, but Maryanne simply shrugged it off and turned back to the conversation she had been engaged in before Donna’s interruption.

            Eventually, the evening came to a conclusion as guests began to leave. Donna played the hostess and reunited each guest with his or her coat, though she was furious with them all. Once the final guest left, she felt she could finally relax, finally declare the evening a success. Relief.

            Then, she heard it, a loud crash, someone screeching for help. She flung open the door and hurried outside.

            One of her last guests had tripped. “Mark’s shoe got stuck on something,” Susan said. “He just fell right in the snow.”

            Donna could tell Mark got stuck right where she’d dropped the honey.

            Carl appeared behind her. “Donna, help him up,” he said, brushing past her. “What is wrong with you? Why are you just standing there?”

            Donna lifted her arms. For a moment, it looked like she was trying to embrace Carl. Instead, she pushed him hard and he went hurtling into the snow himself. She stared at the drops of blood by Carl in the snow, counted them, thirteen blood-colored spheres sitting in the snow, and she laughed.

13 Verses

There's a multiverse in my backyard. 13 individual everythings, sitting in the snow, each with their own unique physical laws. Most of them have galaxies and star systems and planets just like mine. There are - in all probability - millions of intelligent civilizations, living in little colored bubbles in my backyard.

Time travels much faster for these verses. They will evolve and expand and die before the snow melts. The yellow one is the hot one. It's just cold to keep the snow intact around it though. The black one is the smallest. The purple one has the most exciting physics of all. The stars are all very close together and frequently trade planets while maintaining relative stability. It's the little red one I like the most though. Causality works both ways inside it, and it's amazing how delightfully functional the little red one is.

They will all be done before the snow melts. Which makes me wonder if there isn't some Great Winter outside my universe, and we're all just waiting for the snow to melt.

Prompt for Tuesday, July 29

Thirteen colored spheres, sitting in the snow.

Guns blazing

So, according to Ian, I’m expected to come in and post something spectacular. This is it, folks. This is all I have. I feel awful about it, but my creativity and my gumption have both been nil of late. Blame the medication, or the underlying condition for which I take it, but the result is the same.  I just don’t have the words in me.

So I’m sitting here, willing words to happen, and this is what I am finding. I finding that I may just not be a writer anymore.

 

Indecisiveness

Indecisiveness is a symptom of depression. As a kid whenever my mom took my sister and me to the grocery store, she would let us pick out a candy bar. My sister picked hers quickly and never looked back. I could stand there forever trying to make up my mind. It felt to me as if the weight of the world hinged on that decision. The earth would quake and mountains would topple if I chose incorrectly.

In reality, the candy bar did not matter. What did matter, however, was every trivial thing besides it. Put the remote back in the wrong place and Dad gets mad. Talk back to him and Dad will hit you.

I used to think my actions had consequences, but it wasn't true. My dad would have gotten mad about something eventually because he had to get mad. He would have hit me over something eventually because he had to terrorize children. That’s just my dad, and nothing I ever did or said could have changed him. What candy bar I chose did not matter because it wasn't going to win me my dad’s approval.

He cannot be pleased. He was born miserable, lived miserable, and will die miserable. When I decided to stop trying to please him, I stopped being quite as miserable as he is.

Memorabilia

“Mr. Rourke, this is an incredible discovery, but it presents us with a difficult decision.”

Rourke waved a languid hand, looking seeming everywhere except at the man across from him. He shifted in his seat, leaning forward slightly. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know, man, that’s why I brought it to you, right?”

Arthur Wittmann was one of the more reputable collectors of Hollywood memorobillia. His office was decorated -- maybe a better word would have been ‘encrusted’ -- with posters, art, and framed and mounted props from various films.

Prompt for Thursday, July 24th

Today's Prompts are:

Multiple Prompts! Choose One!

"A moment of your life where you had to make a really hard decision."
"A day in the life of Mickey Rourke."
"An Incredible Discovery"

Do whatever you want with what you pick! Enjoy!

New World Government

This line is secure.

/Rerouting seg.0001-63862

It is now.

Good.

What's the news?

Acting balanced

I struggle. I am depressed and know that I have to permit myself to feel depressed, but I also have to guard against wallowing. At what point do I stop saying "this is expected and acceptable behavior and I shouldn't beat myself up over it," and start telling myself to do the goddamned dishes?

Balance

Six stories up above the cheering crowd,

among the pigeons and the plastic bags

I set my feet upon the wire and bowed

and shuffled out among the urban crags.

These twenty years I’ve learned to love the act

of balance, pitting speed and skill and nerve

against the fear of falling and the fact

of pavement lurking deep beneath the curve

of my balance pole, the only tool allowed

to me in my attempt to touch a cloud.

Prompt for Wednesday, July 23rd

Trying out a new format for doing prompts. New prompts will be posted to the blog, not the Facebook page. Today's prompt is:

"A tight-rope walk."

Do whatever you want with it!

Ship in a Bottle

Diego worked tirelessly building ships in bottles. It was his favorite way to piss the days of eternity away. He had tried so many other hobbies, but none were so fulfilling as this. The naked woman chained to the bench beside him was getting weaker from the fumes in the model glue, so she wasn't nearly as annoying as before.

Hell is the absence of...

Lucifer sighed, leaning back in his chair. “Evil,” he said. “It’s just... so subjective.” He drummed his fingers on the surface of the desk, looking out the window. He looked... annoyed, distracted. Like he’d been reminded of a vexing problem.

“Hell isn’t some vast torture chamber,” he said. “I mean, I’m aware of how we’ve been portrayed in art and literature over the years, but I assure you that... well. There’s nothing here that wasn’t brought here by the people who dwell here.”

This Guy I Know

No plot twists here. No fiction. The guy I know, he's me. Or rather, I hope he is.

This guy I know is amazing. He's everything I've ever wanted to be. He's calm, cool, and collected. He's clean, fit, and he never gets bored because he always knows how to make a good time. He eats a lot better than I do, and he actually enjoys it. His tastes are so much different than mine. When he eats, there's this sensuality about food. The taste, the texture, the flavor. He eats for the experience of tasting, as opposed to eating for the gluttonous lust for consumption.

His hobbies include gardening and biking. He's been biking since we were kids, and he's no pro, but he likes to get a good ride in every day. He's got a green thumb, grows herbs and aloe vera, and he works in his flower bed for hours on end because it gives him a chance to just create life and form just for himself. Just for the experience. The look of what he produces is a byproduct.

This guy is really big on some simple acts of kindness that he feels should be universal. Let people in. Merge when you see the sign, not when you run out of lane. Leave a fucking penny. He lives by this code and does everything he can to spread it to others.

Perhaps most of all, this guy always has a sense of calm joy in his heart, and a lust for life. He's attracted to spontaneity, distraction, disruption. He promotes it and tries to loosen other people up to. He lives by example to say "Just don't panic."

I think he's a writer too, but I don't know yet because I feel like I write everything for him. I am everything he is in all the wrong ways. I lust for distraction not for the sake of spontaneity but to numb myself to the pain. I never go to the beach because it reminds me how alone I am, and how much I fear, hate, and love everyone, and instead of a calm joy, inside me is a chaotic body of emotion whose tides overflow and ebb unpredictably, chaotically.

Every now and then, for a brief period, my brain chemistry is just right and I get to be him for a few days, and it's a wonderfully sweet bitterness. Because it's only partial. I only get to spend a few days in his shoes a few times a year, and then I go back to my cave and hide behind my computer. He's my superhero though, and I will never stop believing that someday he will come and rescue me. And I'll get to be him from then on.

I honestly don't know how realistic this expectation is. But I do know that I couldn't go on without it. So I cling to it, desperately. Anyway, I'm off to go work in the flowerbed some more. Until my time as this guy expires.

The Work of a Hero

The guy was just standing there on the street corner, at a sort of parade rest, his hands clasped behind his back, feet shoulder-width. He was looking up and down the street, gazing out on the squalid, torrid mess that was Sixth Street: junkies wandering here and there, down-on-their-luck drug dealers prepared at any moment to duck down an alley and sell someone a sketchy dose of something that might almost have been what they wanted, drunks just sitting on the curb dozing as things happened over the top of them.

A cadre of really spectacularly unattractive women in very skimpy clothes wandered here and there, theoretically for rent but in practice mostly just gossiping about whatever drama was going on this hot night.

The guy was notable for his stance, for the sense that he was just standing there, too alert to be one of the drunks, too still to be a junkie or a dealer.

He was also notable because he was wearing a cape.

Crime of Passion

Gloria Hansen is deceptively beautiful. Supple, smooth skin, perfect form. In the bushes outside her condo, where the lamppost doesn't shine, I can see her putting on her little black dress. I always wondered if her grace was just an act, or if it came naturally to her, and indeed it does; she doesn't look sloppy slipping into that dress as anyone else would, but she sort of slithers into it, like some sort of middle eastern dance. Nothing she ever does looks clumsy, like normal people. She stands above us. Better than us.

No one believes me when I tell them the power she has. How dangerous she is. They say I'm obsessing, that I'm crazy. I don't care. I know what I see and what I see is some kind of jungle animal. Like a great cat. A black panther, who might at a distance appear as a diminutive feline, but up close, you can see her for the beast that she is.

She steps over to the mirror and takes a stick of blood red lipstick, and I swear the way she applies that red paint across her lips, she must know I'm watching. But no, I was careful. I quickly dart around to make sure my cover hasn't been compromised, and then I look back through the window, and I see her reaching into her closet and pulling out a black hat, the kind women used to wear back in the forties, and yuppies think is so fashionably retro. It fits her like a crown.

Now this is interesting. She sits down on the bed and pulls her stockings on, slowly, gracefully pulling them up her leg and lifting her dress as she drags them into position and I can't breathe for a moment. I want to be with her.

I don't want to be outside her condo, watching like some sort of predator, I want to take her, have her for myself. But I can't, not in this lifetime. She owns a law firm that ours has been competing with for clientele. She hates me because she knows that it's me who's been ruining her business. Without me, her competition wouldn't stand a chance. I've probably lost her tens of thousands of dollars this week alone. And so, here I am, her sworn enemy, due to a roll of the die.

She walks over to the dresser and- shit. I duck down as an old woman with blue hair and pastel sweats walks by with her toy dog. The Pomeranian starts sniffing the bush and the woman just drags it away, not bothering to turn her head. I let out a sigh of relief and look through the window and there she is, standing right beside the blinds, her back turned to me. She's on her cell. I press my ear against the windowpane but I can't make out the words. The light goes off and I duck down again, and a minute later she's outside locking up the condo, and walking for her car. I wait until she's left the lot and I dart for my Jaguar.

I'm having a hard time keeping up with her, she's driving like a bat out of hell. So I'm having to drive like an asshole when she turns out of sight, and check my tazer and my camera to make sure both are working properly at the same time. Screwing this up could mean the end of my life as I know it.

Eventually, we make it to my house. I park a few houses down and watch her as she walks casually up to my door. My camera is running now. It's go time. I zoom in on her as she reaches down and picks up the Gothic porch statue I keep my spare key under, and she unlocks the front door. Gracefully. Like she does this every day. I start moving in as fast and quiet as I can manage. I slip around the back, to the back door I left unlocked. I slink inside and watch as she deactivates my alarm. She steps casually, quietly up the stairs, and into my bedroom and I keep the camera focused on her the whole time.

Once in my room, she walks over to the form lying in the bed that she thinks is me, and ever so slowly edges around the bed and delicately, so as not to wake me, sits on the edge of the bed. She reaches into her purse. This is it. My sweating palm wraps around the grip of the tazer, and I almost sink my thumb too hard on the button in my excitement. She pulls out a pack of Pall Malls and lights one up. You've gotta be kidding me. I hold my breath in the deafening silence that follows.

I gently set the camera down on the dresser by the door, facing the bed. Finally, she reaches into her purse, takes out her switchblade and stabs the pillows under the comforter of my bed exactly three times but no more. One for the neck, one for the heart, and one for the gut. Crime of passion. Yeah. Right. This will be an easy conviction. I race forward and stick the tazer to the bitch's neck.