Public vs. Private
17 Jan 2022Today’s prompt: “This is what ____’s life looks like in public.”
To all your friends, acquaintances, coworkers and neighbors, your life looked totally normal clear up until you got mauled by that pack of hyenas.
Today’s prompt: “This is what ____’s life looks like in public.”
To all your friends, acquaintances, coworkers and neighbors, your life looked totally normal clear up until you got mauled by that pack of hyenas.
Today’s prompt: “You are a teenager. Your friend asks you to meet him at a culvert everyone knows isn’t very safe. How do you get out of the house? What happens when you get there?”
“Hey,” Cory says. “Meet me at the culvert tonight. Eleven o’clock.”
“Okay,” you say. “Why? What’s at the culvert?”
“A bunch of us are going to be there,” Cory says. “No adults. It’ll be fun.”
“Cool,” you say, trying to sound like being out at night unsupervised by adults is something you do all the time.
Your parents are pretty used to you staying up late to work on homework, and they’re usually in bed shortly after ten. You try to tell yourself it’ll be easy to sneak out, but as it gets closer to ten, you find yourself looking at the clock every couple minutes and straining to hear what’s going on elsewhere in the house. The sounds of the dishwasher die out. You can hear the evening news wafting up from the living room. The minutes are crawling by. What if they stay up late tonight? What if they go to bed, but go back to the kitchen for some water and catch you just as you’re leaving? What if time just stands still forever? You swear the clock has said 9:48 for the last five minutes. You try to focus on your homework, hoping it’ll make time start again, but you’ve read the same paragraph three times in a row and it still doesn’t make any sense.
At last, you hear the TV switch off. You listen carefully for two sets of footsteps to walk past your room. You realize you’ve been holding your breath.
It should take about 25 minutes to ride your bike to the culvert – you don’t have your learner’s permit yet – and you need to wait in your room until it’s time to leave so you give your parents a chance to get to sleep and you’re more likely to make it outside without them noticing. So it’s another staredown with the clock, pretending to do homework. At last, the clock hits 10:30 and you start your stealth mission. You put on your jacket, shut off your light, and crack open your door. You peer into the hallway. Nothing out of the ordinary. You slowly open your door and almost step out into the hall – wait. Where’s that creaky spot? You panic for half a second before you collect yourself – of course, it’s right there close to the other wall – and make your way to the garage for your bike.
And now you’re cycling through the subdivision streets at night. The first frost was a few days ago and the air is brisk, and you’re biking through patches of dead leaves on your way to the culvert your parents always warned you about to meet a bunch of kids your parents would probably warn you about if they knew about them. The stars feel especially bright tonight. The very air feels alive. You know you’ll remember this night forever.
It took a little longer than you thought to get to the culvert, but that’s probably a good thing. Cory’s already there, and a few other kids. You recognize Melissa and Hector, but most of the others are older kids you don’t know as well but have seen around school. Some of the kids drove, and one parked his car so he could shine the headlights out over the culvert. Cory introduces you around. A few more kids arrive over the next few minutes. Several kids are already smoking cigarettes. Some pull cans of beer or hard seltzer out of their cars and hand them around. You take a Coors. It tastes terrible. You drink it anyway. Someone starts passing around some marijuana and you take a few puffs. One guy gets out a guitar and starts playing a few cords – no discernable tune, but right now you feel like it’s great.
Between the adrenaline and the beer and the pot, or maybe just the reaction you think you’re having to the beer and the pot, and the illicitness of everything, you’re all hyped up. You’re way too shy to say much of anything, but you want everyone there to like you, and there’s a rawness and eagerness to your energy that must be downright palpable, because people start messing with you a little. Before long you have a new nickname, Nerves. And you know what, that’s fine. At least, it’s fine until they really start messing with you.
“Hey Danielle,” this guy Jamal says. “Show Nerves that thing you can do with your eyes.” Cory is a few yards off, talking to the guy who brought the guitar. You and Jamal and Danielle and a few other kids are crowded around the culvert.
Danielle turns to you and blinks, and for half a second you could swear her pupils narrowed into horizontal slits like a goat’s. You gasp. Jamal laughs his ass off.
Was it the beer? Was it the pot? Did someone put something weird in your drink? That can’t have been real, could it?
“Hey Tanya,” Jamal says. “Show Nerves that thing you can do with your tongue.”
Tanya, standing just a few paces to the right of you, opens her mouth and a narrow tongue like a snake’s darts out. You step a few paces back. Jamal laughs and laughs.
“Hey Simone,” Jamal says. “Show Nerves that thing you can do with your teeth.”
Simone grins, and you could swear you see the glint of moonlight on bared fang.
You forget where you are. You step back. And back again. You hear Jamal saying, “Hey Nerves, wait, wait – no one’s gonna–” but you are falling, falling into the culvert, and the current pulls you into the pipe, and you drown.
Today’s prompt: “Open your medicine cabinet. Catalog every pill, ointment, and product. What conditions do they treat and how does the whole lot add up to a statement about your mortality?”
Let’s see, let’s see… Band-aids, calcium supplements, folic acid, my antiseizure drugs … maybe this tube of IcyHot? No? I’m sorry, I just don’t have anything that’s going to fix your spontaneous human combustion.
Today’s prompt: “Write from the point of view of a nurse who hates the patient she is charged with helping.”
In the early days of the pandemic, she texted her husband a minute before she got home from her shift. He would scoop up their 3- and 5-year-old kids and take them upstairs to play with toys so she could run into the bathroom and shower without her little girls trying to give her a hug first. She was so scared of giving it to them.
They relaxed that rule after she and her husband got vaccinated, but she got a breakthrough infection of the Delta variant. It’s hard not to when you’re around sick people nearly every waking moment, even if you are using masks and face shields and washing your hands until they’re raw. Her whole family had mild cases. It was the most she’s been able to stay home in over two years. She hasn’t had a proper vacation in three goddamn years. That would be endurable if it weren’t for the fact that the past two years have been long shift after long shift after long shift with no letup, and more patients dying than at any other time in her career.
In the early days, she felt proud to do her part. She was on the front lines of a disaster, holding back the tides. Her profession was needed, and she would step up and make the sacrifice. But as the months went on and on with no letup, as the hospitals stayed full despite the available vaccines, the reservoirs of her good will went dry. She sacrificed so much, for so long, and these assholes can’t even get a simple shot? She is sick. Of. Your. Shit.
And so when you, on your deathbed, turn to her and ask, “Is it too late to get the vaccine?”, she cannot hide the hatred in her eyes.
Today’s prompt: “Describe an image that is embedded in your brain in detail and why it remains there.”
You’re not sure when the image showed up, exactly. It’s been at least a few months, but it could have been longer. It has this tendency to slide into your consciousness from the outskirts, first fading from your brain when you wake from a dream, then intruding into your thoughts as you zone out during Zoom meetings. It emerges from your subconscious when you’ve had a few drinks, or when you’re driving down a road you’ve driven many times before. You lose your focus for half a second, and there’s the spheroid.
Sometimes it’s more of an ellipsoid. Sometimes it’s a reddish purple, and sometimes it’s a bluish purple, and once it was blindingly white. Sometimes it has warts all over it, and sometimes there are runnels carving through the surface like a brain or maybe a volleyball. But somehow you know it’s always the same thing.
And then it hatches, and massive wormlike appendages explode from your head.
Today’s prompt: “The most painful letter you’ve ever had to write”
The cultists told you you could write a goodbye letter to your loved ones, as long as you wrote it in your own blood. They gave you a knife and a blank piece of paper. No pens, no quills. Just jab your finger and try to form the bloody driblets into letter shapes.
You wrote a letter to your son. You told him you loved him. You told him you missed him. You told him to warn the world – murderous cultists are kidnapping innocent people and using them as sacrifices to raise their eldritch gods. You pricked your fingers over and over, squeezed out the blood a tiny bit at a time. You poured your very veins into that letter.
And then those fuckers didn’t even mail it!
Today’s prompt: “Open with a bad joke”
What has two thumbs and 16 knives sticking out of them?
Wow, some people just have no self-awareness.