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.

Facebook Status Updates Jan - March 2017

Jan 2017

“The government isn’t lying to you about Area 51. The lie is that they really do think they had aliens inside it.”

“.... uh, what?”

“If it had been aliens, we would all be a lot safer.”

You told me the joke was tasteless. I said I didn’t know of any joke that was not tasteless in the end.

“You didn’t kill me,” the monster said.

“Kill you? That would be rude. And we need information.”

“I’ll never talk.”

“We have a tv. A Full House marathon with no sleep.”

“…. what do you wish to know?” the monster asked

Once upon a time, there was a Dark Wood that hid its evil from the world until it was cut down and turned into furniture.

Only then did it begin to destroy the kingdom from within.

“Knock-knock,” I said.

“Who is there?” you screamed.

And that when when I first regretted learning ventriloquism.

The sky cold, dull-grey and empty. I am listening to thunder matching the grinding of my teeth. You are telling me secrets between rumbles in the sky, searching out rainbows while I wait on on lightning. I want one thing, you need another and the sky wishes to be so much more than we will allow.

This is not the tipo you are looking for.

I asked you to wake me up when I was cold inside but every time I imagined myself to be empty, you countered it with a smile or a kiss.

I had a wish but no cake on which to place the candle. Maybe that is why you’ve always walked away.

“You can’t go around pretending to be a god even if you do have a stable 4G connection on your cell phone.”

“Why not? I have more power in my phone than most gods ever did. And far more truth as well.”

"It's not like this," he said. "The world can't be the safe place it is on TV."

“You find words like writers find drink. You use them like they use cigarettes.”

It had been two years, but he still wasn’t sure if the professor had been complimenting him or not.

“It isn’t working out.”

“What?” He turned, stared at her in wide-eyed shock that was almost, almost the real she knew.

“I can’t -. You’re nice. You’re more than nice, my prince, but I miss the frog I fell in love with,” the princess admitted in a whisper.

The prince blinked. Just the once, because royalty is about control and his smile barely wavered. “Dear, I was cold and slimy then.”

“I know. But you were honest.”

And he turned and walked out of the room without a word and no hint of a ribbit at all.

My joy isn’t yours. I can’t be on a leash happy sniffing strangers legs like a wolf pup that never grows up. Some days I think everything would be whole if I could but I can’t be happy like you are. Not on a leash, not being a good boy. Always wishing I had been a cat instead.

Captain Planet stared at Gaia. “But the earth is hurting! The sky still weeps acid, the streets are clogged with smogs, climate change is turning into a climate apocalypse, the industries still - they still -.”

“I know,” she said.

“Everyone else has reboots. Why can’t we?”

“It’s 2017. You think the government will allow our voice to be heard?”

“But you’re Gaia!”

“It means less than you think. It always meant less than you believed.”

And the spirit of Hope Island fell back into sleep, and far away from the world. But Captain Planet took a small measure of hope in that she left her twitter feed open as a last act of rebellion.

“The true danger to our world is He Who Must Not Be Shamed, you understand? There is nothing as dangerous as those who take all slights personally, for those who strikes out at the smallest scratches will invent wounds to justify the most terrible reactions in time.”

As a matter of speculation, wonder how long it will take for France to ask for the Statue of Liberty to be returned?

There are holes that cannot be mended. He watched her drift away. She watched him let her go. Between them the grave sat, as memory and reality, a loss they could not escape even by moving to a home without a bedroom for a child.

“It is a time of great cutbacks,” the administrators said. Meaning everything would be cut except their wages.

Feb 2017

It took you so long to realize that hate, too, was a gift.

You hugged me and I stood still. Even mountains are not this still. There wasn’t a wind blowing, the world devoid of signs. We don’t live in a place that allows for omens. My head a space devoid of miracles. The cruel calculus of reality hovering. Whispering. There is an algebra of loss. Signs. Co-signs. I tried to find my way out as you let go. My shadow would not release yours but you just smiled, letting me fall apart, putting me back gently without damaging a single broken piece.

“But you don’t understand: my tabby cat needs an exorcism!”

“An exorcism. For your cat.”

“He is an orange tabby cat and won’t eat lasagna. I know cats - an exorcism is necessary!”

The tree waited for bodies to be hung on it. But the squirrels brought only nuts.

I was never scared of you. Only of every ending that might comes from all the beginnings we might have together.

They said revenge was a dish best served cold. But Marie found it far better hot as she poured the acid down Ed’s throat.

The app was a news feed that only showed good news and nothing else: every review accused it of one bias or another, from political leanings to those that kindness was somehow an insult to. It lasted four days before the creator was forced to take it down.

The magician stopped pulling rabbits from hats the first time one cried.

That it took over fifty rabbits before this occurred haunted his dreams for weeks.

“Blow out your candles dear, and remember: it’s now too late for you to die young. You’re going to grow old like the rest of us.”

You tried to teach me how to be a monster, but it only made me need you even more. Each blow, each break, and somehow I heal the better for your hate. Every time my family dies I turn to you. My breast is red but you are more than madness, Bruce. You try and make me into you, but each time I fall away. So daring on the trapeze, so lost within my darkness. You are my salvation even if I can never know what I am to you.

The worst part about being a president or prime minister is being unable to jump into pools because of the no bombing rule.

You broke my immersion in you.

“I don’t care about it. Not what is lost. Not if I lose every word I know, so long as I still remember your face.”

“But they are human resources. A resource is not a person,” and the people from the finance department smiled their cold smiles.

I wanted to weep but I had no idea if they understood what tears were. Or if they would bill me for them.

“I can be gentle, though not kind. My nature does not allow for such things.”

I was never scared of you. No matter what they say, it was never you. Only

Me. Only me and what I might do.

Only me

“If you really are a starving artist, shouldn’t you be thinner?”

I don’t have it in me; this being a writer, to take the truth of my life and spin false flags with it. To make truth into a lie that seems more true: it is not a talent I wish to have. Every pretty word touches nothing real, and only the lies are so beautiful. Truth is dull and ugly: the cracked tooth, the spent stone and each time I reach for it I embrace lies. Shadows embellish more than they conceal. Every river seeks the ocean but the ocean seeks the clouds. I hope you understand. I fear I do not. There is a hunger in me. I no longer know what it is for.

“You bastard. There is stripping someone of their illusions and then there is this - this - I thought I was real, damn you!”

“The truth always hides inside the light. I thought you knew that. There is no standard fluoride in water, man. They manufacture it from the local chemtrails.”

Once upon a time, there was a minotaur trapped inside a maze until the SPCA sent an agent named Theseus in to retrieve him but, being a hero, Theseus botched the entire operation.

The recipe called for an ounce of sadness but I couldn’t find anyone with so little sadness in them.

I know I said I’d never lie to you, but sometimes pranks are more important than the truth.

The shop was open 24 hours but the staff never talked about the customers who came in for haircuts during the witching hour.

Mostly out of a sense of profound embarrassment.

“And then they woke up to discover it wasn’t all a dream after all but a nightmare that had disguised itself in kind.”

It was a sad day when he realized that his dreams had become gluten free as well.

March 2017

shakespeare plagiarized nihilism from nietzsche.

“Each of us wields power commensurate with the empires of old. And it is our privilege to pretend that we do not.”

Prompt: The Predator has sought out the most cunning and vicious prey in the cosmos, now at long last he has found one worthy for his greatest hunt; The Batman.

But The Batman was not at home.

There was only Alfred Pennyworth.

And The Butler gave the Predator a thrashing the likes of which he had never received before.

“Every time you cry it just shows that the universe doesn’t care about such things at all.”

“Being so bad you are good may apply to certain genres. It does not apply to people.”

“I said it wasn’t over, but my every action was a lie to the truth my words uttered.”

“No one wins a war,” the old man said, but the gleaming medals on his chest claimed otherwise as he stood at the podium and delivered his lecture earning him a thousand dollars a plate to a roomful of disbelieving stares.

Me: I spent an hour having to wait for that delivery that never arrived. Granted, I was able to clean up the back and furniture area a little but it was a wasted hour.

Manager: It's okay, you were supervising while I was out.

Me: So supervisor means not working?

Manager: Come closer so I can strangle you.

He can’t name one thing that doesn’t get better by ending.

Some days the world feels like a child-proof cap and we are too tired to open it at all.

We are the sum of nothing if not dim sum.

I am too hungry to be so full.

“I used to be a poet. Before I got better.”

“What are you now?”

“Other things. Just - other things.”

Once upon a time there was a monster that never hid what it was at all; and everyone declared then honest and not a monster at all.

We water fake plants in the vain hope that they, too, can be real.This is not a metaphor but the way of the world.

It is not so much that people forget as there are limits to what we are willing to remember.

“Look. I know you want to get granddad an Easter gift, but the Black Rabbit of Inlé isn’t really the best figurine to pick.”

“I think it’s time we broke up: I realized last night that if I had to choose between you and the cat, I’d pick the cat.”

“I’m sorry. Breaking up with someone is many things, but it can never be gluten-free.”

“How dare you call me out on the motivational post I put up!”

“You didn’t include the source.”

“But I -.”

“You didn’t include the source.”

I was afraid of spiders until you gave birth. I was afraid of the dark until a night spent in your shadow. I am still afraid of smiles.

That the magician pulled a rabbit from a hat impressed no one. That the rabbit proceeded to do a dozen card tricks was considered far more impressive.

“There are many forms of warfare.” The magician smiles. “I, for example, have given Jay a set of bagpipes.”

My doctors gave up on me. Now I don’t know what to think at all.

The ideal amount of cheese in a smile turned out to vary from culture to culture.

He devoted years in trying to find a correlation between poor customer service and lack of public washrooms in businesses.

“I said that I had to protect you. I never said what you needed protection from.”

“So many teddy bears. So many hungry eyes.”

“Yes.”

“You burned the house down. What happens now?”

“We find out if that killed them or not.”

“Then there’s all those stories about Atlantis, which is just made up nonsense about a place that didn’t even exist —.”

“What?! Some of my best friends are Atlanteans!”

Nerdy-number facts about Atlantis

2. The number of times Atlantis has sunk beneath the waves.

1. The position Atlantis holds as first nation to join the Underwater Nations (Lemuria, of course, is #2.)

18. The minimum number of years one is sentenced to prison for pretending to be a mermaid in order to drown the surface dwellers.

7. The number of humans who have actually seen Atlantis.

5,000,000: The population of Atlantis for the past 8,000 years.

45,394,493.2: The generally accepted Atlantean lucky number.

“You don’t understand. I was never afraid you would try to hurt me. I was only ever afraid of what I would do in response.”

We met at the bar. Two strangers talking: a story as old as the pub. We talked for several hours, forging a common ground. After, I asked about a toast half-joking.

The smile I received wasn’t something I understood. It felt as if I had passed some kind of test by failing it. “Sláinte,” was said.

“Good health,” I responded, and I think maybe it was that I knew that phrase which saved me.

Only it wasn’t like that at all. Every day since has been sláinte. No sickness. No pain. I haven’t aged a day in thirty years. I don’t know what happens now. I don’t ask about toasts anymore.

I don’t even eat toast.

(I just don’t want to see my children get older than I am.)

I had a secret. Until I told it to you in a stutter-burst of confession. Now I don’t know what I have at all. Or what is between us save a desire for a perfect silence.

Free short story plot for today: Aliens were responsible for the first pyramids, only it was really a pyramid scheme.

After it was over, you thought we could just be friends. As if it was as simple as flipping a switch inside us. Friends have barriers we did not. Each intimate secret was part of us, ours in a way no sharing is. Friends have inside jokes. We had moments no one else could know, thoughts no one else can feel - and I cannot resend that never was, nor wish away all we had been and by content with bring half-strangers.

Sacrificing a black goat together to call up Satan means something even in this age. And I’m not going to let you pretend otherwise.

And after that moment, he was so happy that he never laughed again.

After half of the class contracted the Black Plague, Ms. Frizzle was fired from Walkerville Elementary and the Magic School Bus was made to test its magic against a car crusher at the salvage yard.

Joe applied to become a scarecrow just to master straw man arguments.

Every secret I know pretends to be something else.

If trees could talk (prompt)

“Did you see Denise? I kept saying she should listen to me and moisturize, moisturize, moisturize and - well! She lost all her leaves WEEKS before Ruth did!”

Facebook Status Updates Nov - Dec 2016

Nov 2016

“You stole data: you need to sift through it, hold what you can. Find out what we can make use of. Focus.”

“I don’t know what I do. I don’t know how to do it,” Loqi protested.

“I know.” Loqi let out a whimper as pain shot through his left hand. “So I am going to break one of your fingers every time you lose focus.”

Loqi opened his eyes. The world swam with data that wasn’t his. Facts, memories, meetings people had stored in their personal clouds. He focused on the real world, stared at Niles. “You said you had a way to help me use this – whatever it is.”

“I do. I just explained it. If I think I need to again, I will break another finger. I think you do not want me to go beyond fingers, yes?”

“They didn’t kill us: that means they need us.”

‘It might not,’ Jo signed. ‘It really might not at all.’

“Shut up and give me a moment. We need one,” Miri said, and started walking to what looked to be a stable building. They weren’t dead.That had to a plus side to their situation, even if she had no idea how it was one right now.

“Loqi isn’t my real name,” Loqi said. “It’s a use-name I adopted during the war and I’ve stuck with it ever since.”

“Well, it is a stupid name,” Miri said.

He nodded. “I know. But I thought cruxymox wasn’t the kind of name anyone would take seriously.”

Not that Miri didn’t know anyone who was old, but few people ever looked it. Mr. Josef was old, pale and wrinkled with ears, his movements slow and unhurried as he stilled or turned off feeds and faced the both of them.

… Ears. Years. Wrinkled with ears would be nicely creepy to keep though :p

His parents had moved cities. That alone would have warranted a call, or at least a message. But there had been only silence. Silence, and no help. Not that he wanted it. No. Not that simple. He didn’t know what he wanted. Jo could admit that in the privacy of his own head. He gained nothing from being mute in a world where speech was important. Getting apps to work without it was a pain at best. Public spaces warranted stares from those not zoned one somewhere in the data fields. Not having those issues would be nice, but he wasn’t sure if he even wanted to be a different him. If he’d change. If silence was some kind of protection.

If people were only friends with him because he was different.

‘Miri?’ No response, so Jo dropped his hands, studying them. Would she have come, if he hadn’t needed someone to? He had no idea. He wouldn’t be himself if he could talk. He’d have been a different Jo, maybe a bit the same – he didn’t know. It could be his parents were trying to spare him all this, this thisness that circled through him without answer or end. Be healed, and he no more. But it wasn’t that simple. Or it was, and he didn’t want it to be.

Jo gnawed on his lower lip, staring out at automated farming-factories. If they could fix his voice and whatever was wrong with his brain, he had no idea what he’d say. Anyone else would say yes, from the outside. But not being normal had a power. No. It was addictive. If he had to be honest, there was something to it that felt like that.

If it was being honest –.

“I never wanted to think my son had actually been part of the war.”

“I doubt he was, except at the fringes. The people who planned the war were the ones who are afraid – it’s always that way. Oh, there are always things to be gained – land, people, wealth, power – but the core of it all is fear. Get people scared enough and you can get them to do anything. And there is almost nothing as scary as the future.”

“You make it sound like the war was simple.”

“I’ve been around. People are a lot more simple than they like to think,” Niles said quietly. “You can move most anyone with the right lever. Tribes are the easy one. We had humans, and we had the future and there was no room for humans in that.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Harold said.

“Imagine knowing your granchildren would be immortal, Harold. Literally knowing this. There were children being born in the world who might never die, and that knowledge engendered hatred on a level those who looked to the future couldn’t even begin to understand. The war was for many things; it was about others, at the start. Humans who were scared to be anything other than human, and wouldn’t let anyone else take that step if they could avoid it.”

“Were you involved in the war?” Niles hadn’t meant to ask it, not that bluntly. He was tired; he hadn’t consciously realized how tired until the words slipped out.

Loqi stiffened, tried to hide that. “Who wasn’t?”

Niles smiled. “A point. It’s not as if you have to answer.”

“I don’t, no.” The kid looked almost uncomfortable at that, but hadn’t yet pulled up a privacy field to screen his appearance. “Were you?”

“On the fringes. No one understood what had happened until it was all over, at least not anyone I worked for. You can’t win a war when your enemy is everyone.”

She considered poking into Jo’s health and family files, but breaching his sister would be more than an insult to their friendship.

… sister. System. Heh. I think I will need to catch a bit of sleep now :)

“If any of this works, we’re going to have an army. I’m twelve: I didn’t expect to have my own army until I was at least fifteen.”

“The worst part of that is that I don’t even know if you’re joking.”

Miri handed Loqi back the water. “I might have been.”

It had been thirty four years since any member of the Peace Force had felt the need to use a weapon. The clue, as they told often baffled planetary representatives from other worlds, was in the name. Hasfa swore softly as she yanked a pulse disruptor out of storage en route to the old museum. She did not want to be the one to break the current record, but dying just to preserve it would be even more foolish.

“The engine felt off too,” I say.

“Like it was yawning?” Wilbur says.

“It could be my imagination.” I don’t add that it should be. A contagious case of yawning can’t affect cars. I hope.

We take turns trying to call anyone in Rivercomb but still get no answer. An entire town asleep and the only solution being to drive elsewhere and hope for a cure. It would feel like a movie, only there is no movie that would put us into the cast. That cheers me up a little.

The lies you have to tell yourself to sleep better at night are your own.

Just don’t expect anyone else to fall for them.

Some days it is hard to be a secret you want the whole world to discover.

I did a post in secret only for you.

(I wish this was that post.)

It hurts the most when you paint me in red. I adore the other colours, even when I am none and stripped back to the semblance of emptiness. But red is your fingers harsher than brushes, thrusts that dig into my skins and your anger is your hate and I do not deserve to be a receptacle for hate but each time you go with red violent in your movements. And all I can do is hope the outcome hurts you less than I. All I do is wait for you to put down brushes, sobbing, to stare at the canvas and see the painting as more than just broken strokes. And to see the canvas hurts too as I wait also to be whole.

It didn’t occur to any of us to wonder what kind of trap a magician could set with their dying, not until it was far too late.

Even by the standards of door-to-door salesmen, Jacob Grumsley entered the rank of legend when he managed to sell a well to the cacti and he was judged to be a trickster when he convinced them it was also a wishing well that could remove their unsightly spines.

“The myth of families is that they are forever: that’s the lie people sell each other, the one their kids absorb. And when it’s found out to be just a myth, everyone deals with it differently.

“I don’t think we really recover from that, even if we pretend we do.”

I’m not good enough at talking to others. Everyone else just talks as if it’s easy and maybe it is. Breathing is easy, but some people don’t breathe as easily as others. Maybe it’s like that: that everyone has a limited amount of easy to put into things everyone considers to be easy. I don’t know.

“Stairs are society trying to force cardio on everyone. There is a reason we invented elevators.”

“We are friends. Friends stand up for each other, even if it is against homicidal suicide cults.”

I used to be scared. But everything changed once the monsters scarred me.

“Dave. I know you’re trying to be meta, but you cannot get Straight White Male as your superpower in our superhero campaign.”

“But look, he’ll have atheist as a character flaw!”

“No.”

I wanted to be a love letter but could not pay the price the ink demanded.

If you want to fly, you must give up the wings that weigh you down.

The problem with magicians is that they were terrifying. John Adams had taken the four of us down without trying, never mind everything Noah had tried to do to stop him. He’d spoken words we had to obey, looked right into us the way only God should look into anyone. At least some of the hate I feel for him disappears as I drive back to Rivercomb. All that power, and the only thing he thought he could do with it was die. It would have been tragic if it didn’t feel so terribly, achingly stupid.

The monster has one terrible gift. It could bring back the lost for one day only: family, friends, lovers, pets. You would get one more day if you paid the price it asked and it fed deeply on what was left behind after the gift had ended.

“I didn’t yawn,” Anya says, “though writing about characters yawning is making the author yawn. Which isn’t something this particular plot thread was intended to cause.”

We have questions for the magician of Rivercomb, and I’m sure Mr. Pickles has questions for us, but for the first time in days it feels like it’s all right if they wait for a while.

The future waits for us. But somehow it doesn’t scare me as much as it used to.

“I am sorry, but no.” She turned away from him.

“But mistress! I wish to be like you, undead and eternal -.”

“Yes, yes. I know. But no self-respecting vampire can drink the blood of a vegan.”

Dec 2016

Once upon a time there was a goddess who learned how to turn men into pigs. The other gods gently mocked her power, certain that such an act required no magic at all.

Everyone made fun of Heather for having two mommies.

Until she brought them to school and they realized she had two mummies.

The resulting curses did more to curb insults than any anti-bullying policy the school ever tried to adopt.

We don’t talk about it to outsiders. People who do never have a moment of peace. But the day the aliens landed in our back garden, they asked what made us human. We were having a party a few weeks before Christmas and no one wanted to attempt to explain that holiday to aliens. It was Mabel with her small fork at the ready and Cho with his stuffed face who came up with fondue.

“Chocolate and fire,” I said. “Those are what make us human.” And we gave them fondue and they left. I have no idea what may have happened after that. But the world is still here, so maybe we saved it?

“I like a challenge.”

“So do I; that’s why we’re friends.”

Once upon a time, there was a Hydra who was tired of being hated and so formed a boy band with all of his five heads.

I never ran out of truths, just out of ways to spin them into pleasing stories.

She cared just enough to pretend that she had never cared at all.

The problem with being a monster was that everyone knows you are monstrous. No act of kindness is ever worth it for everyone sees hidden evils and dark motives under everything you do.

I guess what I am saying is that I shouldn’t have let that child live even if I was full after after eating her entire family.

“This was going to be a poem.” She sighed. “But I forgot where to put the line

breaks and you

see my problem since it makes

no sense at all?”

You tried to tell me you loved me, but kept blowing your nose each time.

Six words to make seven wounds.

“But I want to be your friend,” the monster said. And how it smiled, trying not to show any teeth at all.

“I thought monsters didn’t have friends,” Kelsa said, suspicious in a way close to wisdom.

“It depend of what we hunger for, and why.”

Sometimes the only way to understand a truth is to make it a fiction.

The family prepared for Christmas the way survivalists prepped for the apocalypse. Only, they hoped, with less chance of zombies.

I don’t have poems in me for you. I know I promised you one for the holidays but I am only seeing days in them: nothing holy and only holly brambles ensnaring every attempt to get beyond the world. Sometimes the past is chains. Sometimes, too, the present is as well.

I am sorry.

Some people planned for their futures as it happened. Merry planned her eventual dictatorship over the whole of the Earth at the age of five in order to ensure that no one would ever say Merry Christmas to someone named Merry and find it funny at all.

And to abolish Christmas as a last name for anyone named Merry, on penalty of a week-long lecture by her that would involve implements of torture.

It took effort to learn to be proud of silence.

“But I know who will kill me.”

“That’s not what I asked.Who killed you?”

The ghost smiled sadly at the exorcist. “You did. You will, the moment you perform the exorcism and banish me from this place.”

Dear Santa,

Does Boxing Day really mean that Daddy has to hit Mommy?

The bus named streets as the driver drove, the automated voice stuttering each time it passed Crabapple Lane, but no one thought it meant anything at all. Not until after it was far too late for things to mean anything at all.

Do our omens fail us or do we fail them?

I keep forgetting that the stars have other names than yours.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who found no man worthy of her hand in marriage and the rumours that began about her had no kindness to them at all.

“But I don’t deserve to be happy in 2017,” I explained. “None of us do.”

“Wait, what?”

“What if 2016 hears all this? What if it gets jealous? What if it wants to get revenge?”

“That’s ….not how it works.”

“It’s 2016. I wouldn’t put that past it.”

Facebook Status Updates Sept - October 2016

Sept 2016

I wait for you like the iceburg waited for the Titanic.

“There are times when there is no difference between a push and a pull.“

The bargain was simple. I’d learned enough to make it as basic as I could.

The demon ate my soul.

And I waited to feel any different at all. And I waited. And I waited.

He thumps into the bed and just tries to sleep in the manner of a drowning victim swimming towards the shore.

“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “I don’t have this many shoes because I like wearing them at all.”

“Then why?” he demanded, waving the credit card statement like a blade.

“Shhh,” she said and he was so shocked he said nothing.

And heard the patter of hundreds of tiny feet.

I keep trying to find that moment as if the world only offered one. I am drowning in being parched, we are treading water in the clouds. I dis, to associate. We are the un in the undone: that our sacred hum. I am your sacred whisper and you my baited breath. I offer words without meaning because tears are only salt and we cannot drown. Sometimes everything we share is only things and nothing real.

The bomb threats were the story everyone knew about, but it wasn’t really what got Kelly out of being homeschooled. It was entering the makeshift classroom their mom had made and threatening both mom and brother with a gun and a demand to be enrolled in the proper high school or else that got the authorities properly involved. The Donald family isn’t rich, but someone kept it out of the local paper probably because the town would have been swarmed with reporters for years. Shootings at regular schools are almost common; the idea of a mass shooting at a homeschool isn’t even a blip on the radar and everyone wanted it kept that way if possible.

The time loop didn’t work as intended. Each loop reset Greg’s body as he retained his memories of each loop. Or so he thought, until he began to realize he was a little taller than before, that he was ageing in real time during each loop.

And he had no idea how long it would take others to notice this at all.

They said nobility could only be measured by sacrifice and were entirely wrong in this. Service to others was not a sacrifice and that was the height of any noble calling.

“Excuse me? Hurry? That is what servant are for,” Lord Milquetoast snapped, finally frazzled at yet another interruption to his plans for the day.

“I believe,” Death replied after a bemused moment, “that you are in error concerning the nature of our relationship.”

“This story has too many moving parts. That’s the problem with stories. Too many characters, and never enough pages for them all to breathe.”

This post is a shorthand for a longer narrative intended to subvert itself.

On my way to be a poem I lost my way in prose: trying to twist time, to find a way in rhyme I ransacked a thesaurus searching for words porous but had naught to show as no poem would grow.

I keep telling you I am sorry every time we sleep together. I refuse to tell you why though you always think I’m talking to you.

I am sorry.

“It’s not that I never wanted to fall in love, but I think part of me believes I didn’t deserve it. The loving or the being loved. Sometimes, when you do terrible and important things, there is a cost that comes due only with the fullness of time. And I thought that was part of mine.”

They say nostalgia is a liar but too often the future makes promises it cannot deliver.

“It really is that simple. You are not worth hating at all. Hate is never worth what it costs.

"Not even if you become the president.”

Be my profanity that I may be your filter.

“Nothing turns a good person into a monster quite like desperation,” she murmurs. “And a desperate person can justify anything in their own mind if they try hard enough.”

“This is not my world, I am not you. But I have met Toshi, and doubt the healer would ever approve what you plan to use your sacrifice for, I am afraid. No matter what it might cost him. Heroes are often far stupider than other people, but that is partly what makes them heroic.”

They said it was the end of the world. There was wailing in the streets, gnashing of teeth and people screaming to their gods for answers or looking around in desperation for wild sexual thrills to make everything seem as though it had had meaning. Me? I was just relieved to avoid my credit card debt.

The doctors asked me what happened at the clinic. They did the usual blood work, the tests, the police asked all their questions. None of them understood. I told them I was poor, a college student, and I thought grindr could save me.

But I didn’t get a sugar daddy. I got a spice daddy.

And they are something else entirely.

“You think I would not trust you? I am a healer. What healer does not give as many chances as others need in order to heal?”

All I know of sorrow is that we live in a world where it is possible to forget that we are jaysome.

“I am staging a protest.”

“A protest.”

“You heard me. Consider this my hunger strike, my Waterloo, my -.”

“Refusing to post to tumblr because a poem you wrote ‘did not get enough notes’ is not a hunger strike!”

“You cannot invalidate my experiences by shouting. My truth is not your truth, my way is not your way.”

“That’s because yours is asinine.”

You are here, but I no longer am and we are but mirages passing each other in the night mistaking it for day.

I rubbed the lamp in the shop as a joke, never expecting the genie to appear.

“Hello,” a spectral voice said. “You are Wisher number 4351. Your Wish is very important to us. If you desire for your Wish to be granted, please continue rubbing the lamp until the next genie is free to serve you.”

I am down to 4312 now. I haven’t left my apartment in weeks. But the Wish will fix everything. It has to fix everything.

I tried to explain to you that my kiss was a +1 weapon but you said it didn’t change your feelings at all.

Character Concept

Telepathic power. But it makes use of auto-correct.

I tried to tell you the truth but I couldn’t lie well enough to make you believe me.

The house continued to haunt the ghost no matter where they tried to flee. It was revenge, the house explained, for the purple wallpaper in 1972.

After the breakup I threatened to write you into my novel. Half-pleading seeking to keep you in a way that won us nothing. You put me into your web comic, the one I’ve seen a dozen times this week alone as it spreads like wildfire. You changed my name, pretending that would be a kindness. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but it wounds like thousands more

The genie said he could make any wish come true. But even he could not remove all the videos of me on YouTube.

“Sometimes one can be more than one is by virtue of being less: it is a strange lesson to learn.”

I deleted your name from my memory when we broke up. I just wish if had been an uncommon one. And that my sister had another name.

I said I had committed the perfect crime. You disagreed with my definition of love.

I moved halfway across the world in search of a different life. But I brought me along and found everything tinged with my life.

Oct 2016

“It’s okay.”

“The story wasn’t meant to end up like this!”

“I know. I know. But it will be something different.”

“I was meant to be better.”

I say nothing. Better for the narrator is not always the same as better for the main character in the story. I just give the narrator a pat on the back and wait for him to recover.

“Sometimes I think we desire healthy too much as a goal in itself. How much of a healthy relationship is hiding how sick we sometimes are from each other? How much of what goes wrong is rooted in the oldest lie we tell ourselves?”

Once upon a time there was a star that wished upon a person and had no wish come true at all.

All stories are jaysome because they are stories!

— @randomlyjay

I looked for you as if love could find a way, as if the law was only a lie designed to hide us from truth, as though our eyes contained secrets only the truths of our hearts could know. But you said the restraining order still mattered.

This is not the post I promised you.

Once upon a time, there was a dead princess everyone said was only sleeping to make the queen feel better. The prince who came to wake her with a kiss never knew this, and committed suicide after the third ballad the bards wrote about him.

After the explosion in the test kitchen, Chef Tyler was never the same again. The scars meant he no longer got work on the TV, the damage to his reputation from the Network meant that no kitchen would hire him. But he gained powers over kitchens, and slowly but surely he murdered every person who had slighted him because kitchens were more dangerous than people liked to admit.

And no one could eat out forever.

Oscar knew that, if he had not been such a grouch, his parents would have never lost their apartment due to his crying incessantly as a child. Living among the trash was the only form of penance he knew.

Before the accident, you always said that life was like a stage. After, in your new apartment, I repeated the phrase with the ease of words between friends.

You turned slowly to face me. “How dare you,” you said. “How dare you say that now?”

I stepped back, half-shocked, fumbling between moments for a bridge between the present and the past. “It’s still true,” I said finally. “The world is a stage. You just fell through a trap door.”

There was a silence, and then you let out a small, disbelieving laugh. And I think it might turn out okay. Just maybe.

“Sometimes the world feels like it is made of souffles always in danger of deflating.”

He wanted to be a bard. But the bardo had other ideas.

We generated stories as if a bill would never come due. But nothing was free. Not time nor energy. Even so we argued with the judgement.

Payment for the stories, yes, but certainly not, we reasoned, for the fanfics.

“They’d call what I did cheating, when there’s only winning and losing in any real battle.“

Sometimes when I talk to Siri, I pretend you are the one replying.

It’s not as easy as it used to be, finding the way into stories. There was a road once but these days it is a small path half-seen. The kind of path taken by prey. Desire routes to avoid predators instead of the wide open roads people make. I have to hunt stories that once leapt into my hands.

I never had to shoot them before.

Today I laid my first trap for one.

(It escaped.)

I used to try to hate you. But that was all you ever wanted from me.

Hi?

I don’t write letters. It’s not something they teach us in school anymore. Not that I’m going to send this; I don’t even know who I’d send it to. But I thought you’d want to know that you saved my life. Nothing is ever quite as terrible as it is when you’re a kid. Four, five, six: you remember everything and it all matters deeply.

It was the ghosts, you see. I didn’t know what to do about them haunting me. My mother got tired of my crying. My dad beat me as if that would stop me from wetting my bed. I was so scared but my older brother sat me down at the TV. Gave me the controller. He told me about you. Everything you were, everything you did. It didn’t take long, but I killed the ghosts. Each one was a victory, and that night I waited up, opened my mouth.

I ate ever single ghost just like you did, Pac-Man. And they never came back, not even the one who claimed to be Grandma

Love,

Kelly.

My GPS fell in love with Dead Man’s Curve despite all my attempts to find another route home each night.

“You don’t understand! I’m not sick. I’ve never been sick in my life.”

“Your house is filled with apples.”

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away. And all the sickness they carry with them.”

“… that’s not how it works.”

“And which one of us have never taken a sick day from work? It is not my fault you can’t see the truth and laughing at me will not help!”

“I am not laughing at you; I merely know that laughter is the best medicine.”

The hardest part of not being dead was the ways in which the dead judged you for it. At least on a Tuesday. The hardest part of Monday was generally that it was a Monday.

“We’re all in the gutter,” Jeff said.

I laughed. “No kidding,” I replied as other leaves drifted in to join us. From tree to roof to rotting. All lives have stages. To bemoan is to misunderstand.

“But some of us are looking at the stars,” Jeff exclaimed.

I was about to point out that we saw the stars every night when Jeff laughed. His laugh was falling from a tree in bliss rather than fear and some of my anger melted away.

“Look, a star,” Jeff cried out and the world became fall again: orange and red and wild fires burning as a star fell among us like a sun.

“Shit,” a voice cried out from far below us as the world became warmth, as we turned to ash in a moment instead of in weeks. “Your cigarette butt set the roof on fire!”

But I pretended not to hear another side to the story as Jeff cried out in vindicated joy and almost I joined him

but it was

too late.

Six-word horror story

“I didn’t vote; it won’t matter.”

Trudy stared down the vampire. “You’re not scary: you’re just a jumped-up little parasite that’s little better than a cat.”

The book claimed that there was a monster at the end if it. It included no mirror on the last page, leaving the reader to discover that they were the monster on their own.

I swore at you until I ran out of words - you just laughed at how few curses I knew.

“What do you mean you won’t kill it? That’s what we hired a dragon slayer for!”

“It has yet to do anything monstrous.”

“It burned down our village, you colossal idiot!”

“Yes. And I would have too if I was a dragon and you called me a flying rodent. There are consequences to all things.”

“Well, we aren’t paying you for this!”

“There are consequences for that, too. Imagine, if you will, what it would take to slay a dragon who can burn down a village. Now imagine having that angry with you as well.”

“….”

Almost went so far. But never far enough in the end.

We plotted a course to the future but made the mistake of using our pasts to guide us.

Everyone stared at him, seeing a ruin when the mirror had once showed him a god. Not that he had ever dared call himself such, but he had a skill and played it with a proficiency no one else had managed. But the world had changed and some days it takes so much effort not to hate it and those like his son who walk it with terrible ease, entirely unaware of what was lost.

“They say that Admin listens with their ears, but it’s really with their eyes. You can hear more with your eyes if you tune them to the right colours.”

We stopped the zombie apocalypse dead in its tracks with our zombie-making weapons. A dozen TV shows, four YouTube channels and two competing cable networks led to massive infighting among the undead as they argued over ratings and their favourite shows and entirely forgot to eat the brains of the living.

“We’re branching out from dinosaurs,” the PR person said with a bright grin. “If we can bring dinosaurs back from the dead, why not minotaurs as well? Besides, the minotaurs just want to make mazes and that’s far better than the dinosaurs constantly breaking free and murdering people in our parks. Minotaur Park will be far better than Jurassic Park ever was. Besides, we can’t get insurance for any of the dinosaur parks anymore.”