Facebook Status Updates April - May 2017

April 2017

“Putting someone in the friendzone is NOT an April Fool’s prank!”

“The prank is making them believe it exists.”

talent

to balance smiles against pain

I fell in love with you until we met.

I am not a forgetting for you to cling to.

Photograph

In this photograph, I am a negative.

The real secret Monsanto doesn’t want anyone to know is that the modern human being makes for the best fertilizer.

The fuel for every technology in sci-fi shows is budgetium.

Antiques Roadshow, D&D version:

“No! No decks of playing cards! They have no value! WE WILL NOT VALUE THEM AGAIN!”

We fit a square peg into a round hole and sometimes that’s all it takes to break the world. Imagine how little it takes to break a person. Imagine how many people aren’t truly pegs or holes at all.

“What I told you was true, from a certain point of vie -.”

“No. it only counts if it was from a jaysome point of view.”

“I - I can’t guarantee that. There are some things the dead should not do.”

“Including lying to the living?”

“Oh, no. That is pretty much mandatory.”

Prompt: The price was the beak of an octopus, which was very steep.

“What have you done?”

“You wanted the beak of the Octopus and -.”

“The prince. The prince, not the price! You murdered the prince!”

“I wondered why you said the price was steep when no one eats the beak of an octopus.”

Once upon a time there was a royal heir who did not run away from home for love because they understood that duty was more important.

I could spend a lifetime just watching corvids.

my heart is a river pressed against a dam

“I can run pretty fast,” Mateo says, bristling a little. “I’ve done track at school, and grandpa says it’s always good to know how to run because you can’t trust the cops.”

You told me you had no trust in secrets as though anything else lay between us.

“I didn’t come this far to be stopped by something as small as falling in love.”

You don’t understand. It started out as a lark. A joke. A few times. That was all. I did it a few times. I could quit at any time. But once a week became twice. Then more. It was everywhere. Enticing. Everchanging. Tugging at me with potential and promise both. Then one day I tried to quit and found nothing else left. I’d used so often that there was no well left to drawn from. I was empty save for what I could take from others, what I could twist about and pretend was my own. I’d laughed when someone told me it was a drug. Oh, how I’d laughed.

— the muse reflects upon prompts

“You cannot drown the world.”

“Not even with very cute animal videos on YouTube?”

“… oh.”

Every truth makes sense at 4 in the morning. That is how you know they are all wrong.

“Yes, I could have swam out into the ocean and rescued him. But there would have been interviews and publicity and I could not have that.”

“What?”

“I called in sick to work today. Had I saved your son, I would have lost my job.”

Having been the first person to ascend Mount Everest naked, he expected fame and fortune to await him on return to base camp.

The amorous Yeti on the way down was something else entirely.

They thought the eldritch abomination could not be understood because it was amoral.

It turned out to be iMoral instead.

If I hated you it would be so much simpler. Instead all I can do is make proxies on the internet that can love you more than I was ever able to.

They said we won the war, but nothing that lay about us looked like victory.

“I am sorry, but I am fairly certain there is a proclamation in the Geneva Conventions that prohibits us from being friends.”

You told me I was one of the wonders of the world, but you refused to say which world.

May 2017

From old novel notes: stuff I will probably never use

STARVE: Society to Achieve Responsible Vampire Emancipation

GROWL: Grassroots Organization for Werewolf Liberation

Prompt: A super intelligent AI is created and evolves to treat humans as pets. Now most humans are kept at zoos while the other “feral” humans are fighting to survive.

“Really? Is it so hard?”

The AI studied the humans, waited for the feral ones to catch each other and discover the peace of the zoo.

“You merely have to say: ‘I Choose You,’ but you don’t seem capable of that for long enough at all.”

My chakras are blocked. I can get one across but not four down.

You expect too much of me if you want a six word poem.

I can do four. Or twelve.

The wizards held that every mage who died was an assault against intelligence and the future. To the barbarians, every dead wizard now meant one last tyrant later.

It’s not foreshadowing when it’s your own shadow being cast ahead of you.

At least not all the time.

You tried to steal my dreams but I didn’t have a single one.

That moment. The one I keep trying to forget.

You tried to steal my wishes but I had already given them away to those who needed a wishing in their lives far more than I did.

The aliens began their plan to exterminate humanity with the introduction of the roundabout.

“Oh,” the angel said, lowering the flaming sword. “You can cry. We didn’t know you could cry.”

“You didn’t know -. What the actually fuck do you mean you didn’t know?!”

“Have a care.” Stars died in impossible eyes. “The universe is vast. We are finite, as are you - there is a limit to what we can pay attention to.”

“You were going to kill my son!”

“And now I will not. Be thankful and grateful.”

The only secret I told you wasn’t this at all.

“Of course my client is innocent. Given that he is Taurus while Mars is in Gemini and the Moon squares Pluto with, I may add, Moon at 25°20’ Virgo, Sun at 36°03’ Taurus, along with the 12th lunar mansion and exhibit A - his most recent Tarot card reading - combine to be undeniable proof of this.”

“There are things even I will not do,” the serial killer hissed, eyes cold with fury.

“Look. The world has changed. Everyone uses emoticons now.”

“You only find out if you are a hero after the war is over.”

“Look. It’s like this. We could have a fight. The battle might level half the city.”

“Two-thirds.”

“Maybe, maybe. But I propose a challenge.”

“A challenge?”

“We watch every Michael Bay Transformers movie back to back. Whoever emerges sane wins.”

“And after, the Twilight movies.”

“Shit.”

“Call it a draw?”

“A draw.”

My defence at the court was simple. A man from Mars can’t understand a woman from Venus: how did you expect me to understand one from Earth?

So. Anecdotally, the amount of people who went into archeology because of the Indiana Jones movies is more than a little impressive. So making a movie geared to target this aspect of the psyche specifically would be interesting, especially if it was about a very unloved or underrepresented occupation.

For more fun, imagine if this is the intent of all Hollywood movies. So Paul Blart: Mall Cop was made specifically to draw people into becoming security guards at malls etc.

Prompt: You are the owner of a magic backpack; every morning you stick your hand in and it contains exactly what you need for the day. One morning it contains a gun.

“Damn it.” I look at the clock, then at the gun. “I really don’t have time for this today.”

But that’s when my younger brother bursts into the room with his gun and I spin and return fire.

I hit him with water before he gets me, and he yelps and demands to know how I know every single morning he’s going to do this.

I don’t tell him. I’ve never told anyone.

I take a second shot before he dives behind the sofa.

I hated that you made me hate you.

“I know you wanted to be innovative but opening a cannibal fusion restaurant might be going a bit too far.”

Sometimes all we can fear about the dead is how they still yearn to be alive.

The boy band claimed they never intended to summon Satan with their music and people might have believed them if Satan wasn’t also their manager.

I patented our marriage, hoping that would help it last.

Prompt: They warned her to always keep the passenger seat occupied. On the day she forgot, they stopped her on the highway.

“I am sorry,” she said as the police officer stared at her. John Wayne stood beside the police officer in grim silence. “I don’t know where my invisible friend went. I haven’t had someone with me for years. Only real people when I can bribe them.” The police offer stepped back. “You - you’re alone?” She nodded. He let her off with a warning. It was not a kindness.

“You’re strong, yes. But most people are stronger than they know.” She offers up a tired smile. “The lucky never have to discover how strong they truly are.”

“There is no door that cannot also be a window. The same is true of most things. It would be a very small world if your creations were as small as you imagined them to be.”

The lesson of the tale was this:

A crying child in the woods was a lure.

The lesson of the tale was this:

Teeth that tore into flesh were less scary than those that spoke cruel words.

Trump Tower: The roleplaying game.

The lesson of the tale was this:

Expecting a tail from a tale was a dangerous prospect.

Once upon a time, there was a story without any prince or princess in it at all.

The lesson of the tale was this:

It was a dangerous undertaking to expect morals from every tale involving mortals.

“I forget nothing,” she said and how she wept at the bitterness of that truth.

“I have no secrets from you,” I said, and you didn’t believe me even when I got a DNA test and gave you every medical file I had.

You probably knew I’d destroyed two of the psych evaluations.

I tell you my goals are not the same as yours. Mention a VPN, drop boxes for my mail - but you say flying under the government’s radar is not the same as Tumblr Radar.

I don’t think you understand.

“Any idiot can pull a sword out of a stone. The real king is the one who put it in the stone in the first place.”

The truth of the matter was this: the chicken did not cross the road.

The chicken stood in the middle of it, faced the traffic, and died.

The chicken, wise in the Clucking, knew this would lead to the Other Side.

He did not die as he lived, because dying was not the same thing at all.

They played the game of politics, and they lost because they thought it was a game.

The walkways on either side are old stone, metal railings long since rusted into little more than oxidized memories.

“Knowledge is not power; access to it is. You will forgive me if I value my privacy as more important than your thirst.”

This morning is when I understood. Things have been so busy that I’ve had less time to say I loved you. You were right about that. But it’s also that work has become so busy that I’ve had less time to love you.

And I don’t know what to make of that. Not yet.

A smile is all the surprise I need from you.

Once upon a time, the warriors of the kingdom captured an elf in the woods near the palace. The royal torturer, desperate to curry favour, decided to torture the elf for information by putting the creature on a shelf.

Even the elf was confused that it worked.

You handed me a bill of how much it cost to love me. Every item listed, every receipt kept, every expense documented. And I took it. And I smiled.

“How much do you think it would have cost to hate me?”

And you said nothing to that at all.

“I don’t want anyone to be afraid of me.”

“What a most peculiar thing to want.”

“You hated me for so long,” she says into my silence, her voice pale and brittle. “What will be left of you when I am gone?”

Selling her soul wasn’t what scared Sandra. It was discovering that the interest involved her family and friends.

The author found himself so tired that his story kept changing tenses from paragraph to paragraph. Say became said, he became I. Rather than trying to edit it into sanity, he decided his story was now a time travel story.

“It is a rare thing to know oneself; to know another, rarer still.”

There is no such thing as ghosts. But there are demons, which is why they appear to you after the second drink – perhaps the third – with ethereal bodies and sad eyes, to whisper: “It wouldn’t have happened if you’d really loved me.“

What gets out is never as scary as what gets in.

I think all your nonfiction is really fiction.

And I worry you will hate me if I utter this truth.

You keep pretending that a whisper isn’t just another scream. It is dark inside the shadows, feels more like shade within the sun. I keep pretending I have words. Speaking truth only with silences.