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