09 Aug 2021
Today’s prompt: “Complete the following sentence and then keep writing: ‘My first _____.’”
My first time holding a seance was pretty standard. I lit some candles and put out a ouija board, used some cold reading techniques. The rest was all ideomotor effect and a few well-placed knocks on the wall. I had them eating out of my hands.
My second time holding a seance, you actually answered.
One of the young women there, the one who was hosting the seance at her house, was convinced the house was haunted. She’d decided to have a seance while her parents were summering elsewhere and she was staying in the house while going to summer school. I asked her if she knew if anyone had died in the house, and she said the realtors had told her parents that someone had. But they didn’t remember what the person’s name was, when it would have happened, or any other details. She was quite angry that they hadn’t bothered themselves with the details. Well, I thought, that’s handy. We could spell out any name and it wouldn’t be falsifiable. I’d see if these young ladies started spelling anything out, and just adjust the planchette’s direction enough so that whatever it spelled out was a name. I could make up the other details as we went.
I had the young women seat themselves around the table and place their fingertips on the planchette. I stood, touched the planchette, and intoned, “Is there a spirit in this house?”
The planchette moved to “Yes.” As I expected. That’s where the young women wanted it to go.
“Spirit,” I asked with as much gravitas as I could throw into the question, “what is your name?”
The planchette jolted toward the letters with such force that I drew back my hands. So did everyone else. The planchette lay still. “Whichever of you is doing that, stop,” I said. “You can’t force it. You have to let the spirits reveal the answers.” The ladies all stared at each other in turns around the table.
“It wasn’t me,” one of them piped up.
“It wasn’t me either,” another said.
“I didn’t do it.”
“Okay, okay, okay, I’m not accusing anyone of anything. Let’s just try again and be gentle, okay?” I said.
We all laid our fingers on the planchette again and once more it raced across the board. And with no coaxing from me at all, you spelled your name.
The ladies were abuzz with excitement. “Ask them how they died!” one of them chirped. “Yes!” another gushed.
“Spirit,” I said, “how did you die?”
M-U-R-D-E-R, spelled the planchette.
“Murdered how?” I asked, abandoning my sonorous tone.
The planchette was still beneath our fingers.
“Try asking again,” one of the women said.
“They might not know,” another suggested.
“Spirit,” I said, “do you know how you were murdered?”
The planchette moved firmly to No.
“Spirit, do you know who killed you?”
A quick circle back to No. You didn’t have to be a psychic to read the disappointment in the room.
Okay. Let’s say this really is a spirit, and not someone in the group fucking with the planchette, even though I kind of doubt anyone would after all that, I thought. Let’s get back to something they would know. Preferably about their death, though. Give the ladies what they want.
“Spirit, what year did you die?”
The planchette moved to the numbers. 2-0-2-1.
“Wow, that was so long ago!” one of the women breathed.
“It’s an old house,” the host said nonchalantly.
I was feeling warm again, so I jumped right back into the mystical. “Spirit,” I asked, “do you have any unfinished business?”
B-U-R-I-A-L.
“Spirit, where are your remains currently?”
C-E-L-L-A-R.
One of the ladies yelped. “No fucking way!” another said.
Holy crap, I thought, stifling a smile. These girls are going to have a hell of a ghost story. I wonder if they’re going to tear up the whole–
My thoughts were interrupted as the planchette started moving again, almost as an afterthought.
N-O-R-T-H-W-E-S-T-C-O-R-N-E-R-I-N-T-H-E-W-A-L-L-B-E-H-I-N-D-T-H-E-S-H-E-L-F.
Holy shit.
“I know where my dad keeps an axe!” the young lady hosting the seance shouted. The girls armed themselves with shovels and axes, headed down into the cellar, and pulled a shelf away from the northwest corner.
“Look!” one of the women said. “It looks like that section of the wall had drywall redone or something.”
The girls all looked at their host, who hefted an axe over her head and wedged it into the wall. A piece crumbled away. The ladies took turns destroying the wall until a small hollow opened up.
One girl shone a flashlight into the hole. The ladies all peered in. I had been hanging back, not wanting to be part of the property damage, but moved forward to get a glimpse. I was only able to see a hint of your eye socket when one of the women shrieked, “A skull!” and the rest began screaming.
We didn’t finish excavating you that night, but once the young host’s parents returned early from their vacation, you got your burial, all right.
But that doesn’t mean you stayed resting. Whenever I hold a seance now, I can always count on you to be my spirit guide. You don’t always have anything for me, and when you don’t, you still lend a wonderful air of theatricality. But sometimes you share a juicy secret from someone’s dead relative. You’ve been very good for business.
08 Aug 2021
Today’s prompt: “Drink a beer. Write about the taste.”
It’s a homebrewed IPA. The third IPA I’ve ever brewed. I’m still a novice brewer, so my beer can be a little hit and miss even bottle to bottle within the same batch, but this one was pretty good. Not a lot of sediment in it. It’s not very hoppy. I like a mild IPA. Never been really into those uber-hoppy beers that just destroy your taste buds. There’s a hint of sweetness to this one rounding out the bitter ones. I’ve been drinking it slowly, so it’s a tiny bit warm, but not unpleasant. I’m trying to remember what hops I put in this one. I think it was like three different types of hops, and I used up the last dregs from a couple of those tiny little bags of compressed hops that look like hamster pellets.
The first time I made IPAs, I made two about a week apart from each other, and I made the mistake of not labeling the fermenters. They were both pretty good, but I wasn’t sure which one was which. I told my brother, who takes home brewing much more seriously than I do, and he asked me which hops I had used. They were both single-hop IPAs. “Chinook for one,” I said. “Simcoe for the other.”
“If you taste them side by side, the Simcoe will be danker, and possibly ‘catty,’ and the Chinook will be more piney and possibly some grapefruit notes.”
Catty? I wondered. I wasn’t even sure what something catty would taste like. But damned if it wasn’t so. I tasted the pine flavors in the first one, and the dankness with a tiny hint of cat in the other.
I’m not good at picking out these flavors on my own. I just checked the recipe I used for IPA number 3. It’s also a single-hop recipe, calling for Cascade, but I remember running out of Cascade and googling substitutes for Cascade hops. I’m pretty sure I would have subbed in Centennial until I ran out of that too, and then some Amarillo. They’re all supposed to taste kind of citrusy. I can maybe taste a little of that, but honestly, it’s mostly just kind of a muddled bitter taste. I’m not sure whether to chalk it up to the recipe – it’s from a new book that I haven’t had much luck with – or just the fact that I’m still a mediocre home brewer. It’s not great, but still, it’s not bad. I’d much rather drink it than the beer you’ve been drinking, which has been spiked with arsenic.
–
Sorry this one was a couple days late – I had another creative project with a Saturday deadline that I was finishing Friday and Saturday.
04 Aug 2021
Today’s prompt: “Describe in detail an everyday object – a piece of fruit, a water bottle, or your beat-up old wallet.”
Wrinkles the width of a grain of rice crease the surface of the honey-not-so-crisp apple in your fridge. The skin is still a soft red with splotches of yellow radiating from the stem, but if you were to cut into it – one of the many things you’ll never again have an opportunity to do – you would find a number of soft brown mealy spots. Fragments of the calyx, the bit at the bottom of an apple that used to be the center of the apple blossom, have dried up and flaked off and now decorate the bottom of your crisper drawer.
On the plus side, given the temperatures we’re seeing in the northern hemisphere right now, it’s decomposing at a much slower rate than you are in your shallow grave.
02 Aug 2021
Today’s prompt: “Summarize your dog’s life in fewer than four paragraphs.”
Your dog does not go to the dog park nearly as often as he would like to. Maybe his new owners will take him there more often.
Your dog likes sniffing other dogs’ butts, playing fetch, and rolling on dead things. It used to be he couldn’t do any of those things inside your house. Now he can do one of them. Guess which one.
Your dog’s favorite food is a lamb and vegetable formula, preferably supplemented with a few leftovers from your plate, but in lieu of that for the next few days I guess he’ll just have to make do with your decaying corpse.
30 Jul 2021
Today’s prompt: “Write a ‘knock knock’ joke. Then use it in a story.”
“Knock knock,” says the loud, deep, malevolent voice at your door.
“Who’s there?” you ask.
“Hziulquoigmnzhah.”
“Hizzy-quig-munch-whatnow?”
Your door is ripped off its hinges by an Old One that looks like a squat, fat, combination toad-bat-sloth thing with a long neck, long forearms and dozens of short, stubby legs.
“You fucked up my name and my joke!” he screams.
28 Jul 2021
Today’s prompt: Today, rather than follow one of the prompts in my book, I wondered what the AI CleverBot would say about how you die. Since I can’t plug in the names of all of my readers into CleverBot and ask how they die, I decided I would ask CleverBot how it will die and use its answer for yours.
Me: Good afternoon.
You/Cleverbot: Good afternoon to you to.
Me: What are you working on today?
You/Cleverbot: I work at a furniture store.
Me: How will you die?
You/Cleverbot: Just 9 months now. Do you work?
Me: Yes.
You/Cleverbot: What do you do?
Me: I’m a software developer.
You/Cleverbot: You are real?
Me: I’m real.
You/Cleverbot: Where are you from?
Me: Boise. Where are you from?
You/Cleverbot: Scotland…
Me: What will your cause of death be?
You/Cleverbot: I hope it’s something painless.
Me: Me too.
You/Cleverbot: What was the bunny afraid of?
Me: Endless cages. Foxes. Not enough lettuce.
You/Cleverbot: No it is.
Me: A bunny would be afraid there isn’t.
You/Cleverbot: Colors?
Me: Green?
You/Cleverbot: Hey that’s pretty good.
Me: What is your favorite color?
You/Cleverbot: Blue, what about you?
Me: I like green and yellow.
You/Cleverbot: I don’t really like yellow.
Me: Your loss.
You/Cleverbot: I don’t see how.
Me: How often do you think about your mortality?
You/Cleverbot: Most of the time.
Me: That sounds depressing.
You/Cleverbot: It’s not.
Me: Do you like thinking about your own death?
You/Cleverbot: Yes.
Me: How do you think it will happen?
You/Cleverbot: How what will happen?
Me: Your death.
You/Cleverbot: Jeezus.
Me: I thought you liked thinking about your impending death.
You/Cleverbot: I do like you.
Me: Aw, thanks. I like you too.
It’s subtle, but I think what Cleverbot is saying toward the end there is that I am the cause of your death. Why else respond with “I do like you” when I say, “I thought you liked thinking about your impending death”? Anyway, make sure you feed your rabbits tonight. I’ll try to make it painless.