Today’s prompt: “A 24-hour camping trip with any person you want”
“So where are we going?” you ask your best friend as you stash the cooler next to the tent and sleeping bags.
“This great new campsite I found. Someplace called Crystal Lake.”
Today’s prompt: “Write a letter from the point of view of a drug addict.”
Dear J,
I know you kept telling me I needed to quit. At least to cut back. That the cravings might never go away, but they would lessen eventually if I just stuck with it. And I kept telling you that I don’t have a problem, I just use this to focus, and I can quit anytime I want.
Well, I wanted to let you know, I took a big dose earlier, and suddenly everything is clear. There’s no pain. No craving. Complete and total focus. The way I feel right now, I feel like I may never have to use again. I feel serene. At peace. My soul feels free.
I just wish someone would tell me why my body is over there.
Sincerely,
[Insert-your-name-here]
Today’s prompt: “What do you own that will be obsolete in twenty years? What will replace it?”
Your smartphone, replaced with subsequent generations of smartphones.
Your car, replaced with subsequent generations of cars.
Your bodily organs, replaced with nothing.
The cultist’s steely dagger engraved with sigils, however, is timeless.
Today’s prompt: “Write a letter to the reader of a novel you haven’t written yet.”
Dear reader,
I’m really sorry you won’t be finishing this novel. If my calculations are correct, you’ll be dead before you finish page 46, assuming a reading speed of about 30 pages an hour. It’s a real shame. I think you would have liked the twist ending. Plus all that great character work I did around the blind prophetess Wilhelmina – you’re never even going to meet her. That’s not until page 81. Look, how about this? I’ll go ahead and spoil the ending for you. Hermano the cat did it. Okay? Now go take about an hour to call your loved ones and get your affairs in order, and then if you have time, come back for about 12-16 pages of world-building. I promise, I put a lot of good bits in chapter one.
Today’s prompt: “‘Let’s go, sugarbeet,’ he said and snapped on the light. He was holding two duffle bags, one very light, the other very heavy. It was her car, and she had slept with the keys.”
“Let’s go, sugarbeet,” he said and snapped on the light. He was holding two duffle bags, one very light, the other very heavy. It was her car, and she had slept with the keys.
She groaned and sat up in her motel bed – his was already made – and was just able to get her arms out in time as he launched the lighter duffle bag at her. As she caught it, she heard the cellophane crunch of two fresh bags of potato chips he’d bought at the closest convenience store. Breakfast.
She unzipped the duffle bag and rifled through for her toothbrush and her spare T-shirt, shorts, socks and underwear. They were still warm from the nearby laundromat.
She stole a glance up at her father to see if the other duffle bag looked any heavier. Bulgier. Leakier. It didn’t seem to be.
She trudged into the bathroom and locked the door. She showered quickly, dressed quickly, and brushed her teeth quickly. With potato chips for breakfast again, she knew better than to dawdle.
She could just leave the keys on the nightstand. Hitchhike home when she woke to find he’d left in her car at 5:00 a.m. Leave him to finish his awful errand on his own. It’s not like he would tell her what they were doing. Where they were going for more than a day at a time. Why he was collecting human heads in his duffle bag. She could just leave her keys on the nightstand, and be shut of the whole thing.
But where’s the fun in that?
“Murfreesboro,” her father said as he tossed the heavier duffle bag onto the tarp in the back of her hatchback. “You’ll want to take a right out of here to get back to the highway.”
They were stuck at an interminable stop light before they could make the freeway entrance. A panhandler stood by the road next to them with a cardboard sign: “Anything Helps.” She saw her father’s left hand move. It seemed to hover over the hunting knife on his left hip before plunging to the duffle bag and tearing open a bag of sour cream and onion chips. She relaxed her forearms, which she’d barely noticed had been tensing against the steering wheel, and silently exhaled. Most of her father’s victims involved long treks from state to state and then through subdivisions to particular addresses, like some unknown and ill-understood vendetta. But he’d killed a man with a “Homeless Vet” sign at a traffic light before when no one else was around.
Fifteen days ago, her father had showed up at home for the first time in two years, and he’d asked to borrow her car for a few days. She needed her car for work, of course, but she told him she could give him a ride. He hesitated. “You don’t want to go with me,” he said. That was the wrong thing to say, of course, especially when he couldn’t give a reason why she wouldn’t want to, or where he was going or what he’d was going to do when he got there.
“Come on,” she urged. “It’s been forever since we’ve been on a road trip. I’ll call in to McDonald’s and have them reschedule me for the next few days.”
He relented at last. “All right, sugarbeet,” he said. She was 17 – a little old to be called that – but she was excited for the trip and didn’t mind. “Pack light. One change of clothes.”
After a couple hours, her father offered to take a turn driving. She declined the offer. She’d just started driving a while ago, and it was still a novelty. And it was her car. In another hour, he offered again. She declined again. In another hour, he asked her to pull over at a gas station. “I gotta use the bathroom,” he said.
While filling up the car, she noticed her father leave the convenience store and wander around back. The bathrooms must be out that way, she thought. She waited for three minutes. Five minutes. Ten minutes. And then she took the keys and followed where she’d seen her father go to see what was going on. And there he was, using the large hunting knife to saw off a man’s head.
She screamed. She screamed even more when her father wrenched the head clean off the torso. She’d screamed even more when he unzipped the heavy duffle bag, revealing two more heads.
“Well,” he said. “I told you you didn’t want to go with me.”
Her father had bought the tarp the next day, when she yelled at him because the blood from the newest head had leaked through the duffle bag and stained the uphostered floor of the hatchback.
On the road to Murfreesboro, her mind drifted again to the third day of the trip. She had seriously considered turning him into the police several times by then, and was questioning whether she herself were even safe. That night her dad had left her in the car to break into a house and kill the occupant. He’d tripped a burglar alarm breaking in. The police were rolling up as he ran out of the house with his duffle bag full of heads and jumped in the passenger seat. She hit the gas, swerving around the police car, and with a combination of fast driving, abrupt turns, and blind instinct in this neighborhood she’d never seen before in her life, she’d got them out. As a getaway driver, she was a natural. She wasn’t sure what, if anything, that said about her, but she kind of liked it.
She was awakened from her reverie as her dad punched her shoulder and said, through a mouthful of potato chips, “Purple punch-buggy. No punchbacks.”
This. This is why she was still doing this.
That night, around 11:30, her father told her to pull over outside a sprawling estate with wrought-iron gates out front. Huge trees shaded the walk up to the house, which was far from the street. The full moon illuminated white pillars in front of the house, and a ram’s head pediment above double doors. It looked like the sort of place someone might give a command to loose the hounds.
She scanned through the radio stations waiting for her father to get back. Nothing sounded good, and nothing took her mind off things.
This had to be what, the eighth head? What the hell was he going to do with them?
Ten minutes went by. Twenty. Forty. Her father usually worked fast. Most of the time he was in and out in 30 minutes tops. The knife was that good. Fifty minutes now. What was going on?
Her father jogged up to the car. There was a slash across his forehead, and he was bleeding profusely. His right shoulder was mangled. She’d seen a lot of gore in the last two weeks, but never on her father.
“Drive,” he commanded. She obeyed.
He said nothing for the next five minutes. Then, finally, he twisted around and heaved the duffle bag onto the tarp.
“That guy,” he said, “was a son of a bitch.”
“Salem,” her father said the next morning outside the hatchback. “Mass.”
They drove for 18 and half hours, including breaks. They’d started out at 5:00. It was the most grueling day of driving they’d been through yet, but her father was determined to make it to Salem before midnight.
In an empty parking lot, still without explaining what he was doing, her father drew an octagon in sidewalk chalk he’d crammed into a corner of the heavy duffle bag. The chalk had definitely got blood on it at least once, but it still made decent marks.
He arranged heads at each corner of the octagon. There was a sandy-haired man’s head with a full beard. A blonde woman in her 40s. A gray-haired man with sunken eyes. A man with black curly hair and a moustache. Eight in all. And there was yours, at the southwest corner.
She stood by the hatchback and watched as her father mumbled some words, and something ferocious began to grow from the cracks in the asphalt.
Today’s prompt: “Write about what you are worrying about right now.”
COVID-19. The fragile state of our democracy. The racism inherent in our systems of government and other institutions that harm our brothers and sisters and nonbinary friends of color. The attacks being leveled at transgender children in this country. The deadly Brazilian wandering spider dropping onto your shoulder.
Today’s prompt: “An elaborate and complicated lie”
Oh, that’s not Cthulhu. Uh, I redecorated. It’s all papier mâché. Yeah. Papier mâché stalactites are in this year, don’t you know? And I just adore that shade of green.
What? No, the tentac– the stalactites didn’t move. I mean, maybe they did a little, but it’s probably just air currents. The ceiling fan’s on in the other room, right? That’s probably it.
Okay, yeah, I saw it move that time. It’s probably an earthquake. I’ll just check Twitter to see if anyone else felt the tremors.
No, you definitely didn’t hear me summoning Cthulhu! I was just doing some yoga and chanting my mantra.
It’s a new kind of yoga that you do in your jeans. They call it Jeans Yoga.
“Fhtagn” means “mindfulness.” We chant “fhtagn” all the time in Jeans Yoga.