04 Feb 2022
Today’s prompt: “Write a love letter to the one who got away.”
To the one that got away,
Snapper of lines, toppler of ships … may I call you leviathan? You rose from the water, enormous, sunlight reflecting blindingly off your scales, infecting my eyes with a madness of rainbows. You could have swallowed me whole, and I would not have missed the open air. You overturned our ship, drowning the rest of the crew – Kat, Hakim, [insert your name here] – and I find myself unable to mourn their memories without your colossal frame looming over them and turning grief to reverie. I am your Jonah, your Pinocchio. Devour me, I am yours.
31 Jan 2022
Today’s prompt: “What happened that night”
That night an earthquake shook the cut-glass chandelier in Veronica Myers’ house until pieces rained down, tinkling like cold little stars onto the dining room table.
That night José Flores and Jazmín Villareal made love for the first time. It was breath and sweat and arching backs and Jazmín tracing a finger down his chest and José cupping her breasts in his amazed hands and Jazmín biting her forearm to keep from screaming and José’s thighs shuddering and more and more and more than they ever thought it would be. As they went to sleep, cradling each other, unwilling to stop touching each other, from the window a breeze cooled their skin and bore the faint smell of jasmine flowers.
That night Kiara Ellison took three of her son Michael’s crayon drawings off the fridge to make room for his latest masterpieces, and lovingly tucked them away into a box.
That night in the alley between 24th and 25th streets, a loud catfight broke out that lasted nearly half an hour.
That night as you jammed your foot down on the brake that had been working perfectly fine this morning, seconds before the hood of your car crumpled against the produce truck, a thousand frightened thoughts hit your brain like electrical shorts, most of them iterations on, “Did someone cut the brake line?” and “Who would want me dead?” and “Why?”
28 Jan 2022
Today’s prompt: “Ten headlines you’d like to see in the New York Times today and why” [Subheadings follow colons or, in first headline, question marks.]
“End of Pandemic? No COVID Deaths Reported Yesterday; Hospitalizations Down Again”
“Robot Uprising Averted: Computer Scientists Discover Bug in Skynet Just In Time”
“Conflicts in Myanmar, Afghanistan, Yemen, Tigray Cease: War Deaths Hit Zero in Unprecedented Simultaneous Peace Agreements”
“Comet Just Misses Earth: ‘That Was a Close One,’ Scientist Says”
“No More Mass Shootings: Gun Owners Throw Weapons Into the Sea as Manufacturers Cease Production”
“Cthulhu Lies Dreaming: Elder God Rises, Is Tranquilized Before Causing Damage”
“January Police Shootings Drop to Zero as Cities Embrace Alternatives: Crime Rates Fall; Police Unions Express Bafflement”
“Zombie Outbreak Harmless After All: ‘Turns Out They Like Ice Cream, Not Brains,’ Scientist Says”
“‘Miracle Cure’ Found for Cancer: Pharmaceutical Company Insists on Keeping Drug Affordable”
“Tourist Unharmed In Freak Accident at The Met: [Insert your name here] Nearly Impaled By Lance in Arms and Armor Department”
Look, clearly they’re all wishful thinking, but I’m sitting here in this pandemic-slash-zombie apocalypse hiding from robots and Cthulhu. A girl can dream, can’t she?
Oh, yeah, sorry about that accident with the suit of armor, but this is why they tell you not to touch things.
26 Jan 2022
Today’s prompt: “The first time you had sex”
The first time I had sex, I faked an orgasm. I think I was reasonably convincing.
Maybe if you’d been that convincing when you faked your own death, you’d still be alive today. You did a reasonably good job of procuring a corpse and dismembering it enough that all the people out for your blood were fooled for a while. But when you started ordering Amazon packages delivered to your house, it was kind of a dead giveaway. Dude. At least move out of state.
24 Jan 2022
Today’s prompt: “Start with ‘I never told anyone…’”
I never told anyone how to get into the vault. They cajoled me. Threatened me. Beat me. They tried to force the door, to crack the combination, to cut their way in, but either the vault was too well-secured or word got out to the experts they hired to break in that opening the door was sudden death. I wasn’t going to reward their lies, and I certainly wasn’t going to make your death meaningless.
We were duped, pure and simple. They told us we were synthesizing life forms found by a Mars rover. In fact, we were developing a bioweapon. And just like all those scientists in the movies, not only did we fall for it, we didn’t realize what we’d created until it was too late.
But we had the vault. And it was airtight.
We gathered all the samples into the vault, and all of our handwritten research notes, and all our electronic data – thank god we’d never uploaded anything to the cloud or saved anything to the network. Maybe we always knew not to trust them. And then we realized within seconds of each other that someone would have to be in the vault to destroy the samples. And that’s when you shoved me out, and locked the door behind you.
I watched you through the tiny shatterproof pane in the vault door as you lit our research notes on fire and shattered our equipment into fragments too tiny to be reconstructed, then opened the sample cases and exposed them to air. I watched your face as it wracked with agony.
Two weeks, I thought. Two weeks, according to our research, and it should be dead without another host. I wasn’t completely sure of our calculations, so I vowed to do everything in my power to keep the vault closed as long past that date as I could. I knew I would honor your memory more with the absolute safety of the human race than with a timely burial.
I wake up to your face every night. I cannot hear your screams – I never could. But I can see them.
21 Jan 2022
Today’s prompt: “Storyboard a comic.”
Panel 1: A stick figure version of you is walking down an ordinary-looking street, whistling a happy tune.
Panel 2: Stick figure you’s eyes bug out of their sockets as a dozen stick figure cultists leap out from off panel and attack stick figure you, massive knives drawn and cruel smiles on their faces.
Panel 3: Stick figure you lies in the middle of the road with X’s for eyes and a tongue hanging out of your mouth.
19 Jan 2022
Today’s prompt: “And this is what ___’s life looks like in private.”
Maybe your friends and neighbors wouldn’t have been so surprised if they knew about the human-animal hybrid experiments you were secretly performing in your basement.