16 Oct 2020
Today’s prompt: “Suddenly, you can hear everyone’s thoughts, and you are shocked by what they think about you. Write their thoughts.”
We’re all a little narcissistic. We all think people think about us way more often than they do. On your last Zoom call, how much time did you spend obsessing about how you looked to other people? And how much time did you spend obsessing about how other people looked?
That’s a little beside the point now, of course. The fact is, since last Thursday, people haven’t even looked at you at all. You’ve walked past their houses and they continued taking out the trash and raking the leaves without so much as a glance at you.
You can hear what everyone thinks about you, and the silence is deafening.
You don’t get it at all. If you were them, you wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about the giant bloody gash in your forehead from where the axe hit you. I mean, you get why people wouldn’t want to look at it, or you. It’s ghastly. But you’d think there’d be a train wreck aspect to it. You’d think their minds would be going a mile a minute about it. Instead of thinking, “Man, it’s nice to finally stretch my legs today,” or “Ugh, this trash smells disgusting,” or “Please please please don’t let Molly see the squirrel OH GOD MY ARM.”
Maybe your mind is playing tricks on you. You poke the axe wound. Nope, it’s still there. A little sticky, maybe. Maybe things are coagulating a bit. But it’s got to be visible, right?
Your other neighbors are either still inside or taking their dogs for early walks, but Mr. Ferguson is outside with his newspaper and a cup of coffee. He turns to the obits, and scans the names. And then he looks at your house. And you hear his thoughts. “Didn’t they live right over there?”
14 Oct 2020
Today’s prompt: “Describe a time when you wanted to orgasm but couldn’t.”
Unfortunately, tonight, the [succubus/incubus/delete according to your orientation] was more interested in harvesting your soul than providing any kind of release.
12 Oct 2020
Today’s prompt: “Write a music review that doesn’t refer to any other bands, musicians, or other genres, but can refer to anything else.”
“It’s like…” I held my hands raised, fingers crooked towards the opposite palms, in search of answers. It’s impossible to describe [insert-your-name-here]’s latest album, “Where It All Went Wrong,” in terms of other music. And without the ability to make hand gestures in writing, I’ll just have to do the best I can to capture this animalistic death wail in print.
The first single from the album, “On Pain of Death,” is like experiencing the stigmata. And then having the blood escaping from your palms set on fire by Adam X the X-Treme. And simultaneously feeling the self-doubt and shame of whether it’s okay to be destroyed by a ’90s superhero that was designed to be so cool and has since then fallen so far by the wayside with his backwards baseball cap and his numerous blades all over his uniform.
Track 3, “The Way of All Flesh,” sounds like the scrape of a shovel hitting a rock as someone digs your grave.
The fourth track, “Widow’s Weeds,” sounds like when a pipe breaks in your house and floods your basement and stains your carpets and infests your home with mold, except it’s happening in your soul.
No one speaks of track 6. No one.
Track 7, “Pale Rider,” feels like a monster’s massive, rough tongue licking up the length of your spine.
The next song on the album, “Dead And Gone,” is like watching a Scooby Doo villain fervently mopping his brow as the meddling kids apprehend the wrong person.
“The Way of All Flesh Part II,” track 9, sounds like when all of your internal organs start tingling.
The 11th song on the album, “Oh My God We’re All Going To Die and There’s No Way to Prevent It,” is a lovely mixture of a sort of wind-whipping-through-the-willows sound combined with the caterwauling of a mountain lion. Plus a really good drum solo and bass lick.
The final track, “The End of it All,” incorporates a deep, intense percussion that sounds as though it echoes deep within chambers of magma-rich portions of the Earth’s core. That fluid beat combines with guitar cords that hum as though they were traveling across a graveyard. And of course, the vocals – a shriek as piercing as the pitchfork that penatrated [insert-your-name-here’s] sternum as they were singing the track.
Oh, that last bit wasn’t a metaphor, just an interesting tidbit about the production process.
10 Oct 2020
Today’s prompt: “The person you loved who didn’t love you back”
Silly human. Moloch doesn’t want love. Moloch wants sacrifices.
08 Oct 2020
Today’s prompt: “Pick a dictator and write about an imaginary morning or day of his life, focusing on the banalities (digestion, sleep, oral hygiene).”
The Dark Pontiff of the Cult of the Bloody Tongue experiences a moment of minor indigestion as the nail on the severed tip of your index finger passes through his small intestine. It’s a minor inconvenience to be part of the blessed ritual sacrifice wherein he eats one small fragment of your body and Nyarlathotep devours the rest.
06 Oct 2020
Today’s prompt: “Write wedding vows. The bride is thirty-five years old; it’s her first marriage. The groom is forty-eight, and it’s his third go-round at the altar.”
“And do you, Ayi’ig” – oh my god the priest just slaughtered Alana’s name – “take this fresh victim, to hold in your tentacles from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, until your hunger is sated?”
“Wait, what?” you stammer, as tentacles reach forth from below the veil.
04 Oct 2020
Today’s prompt: “A road to hell paved with good intentions”
You were helping your friend move when you threw your back out while improperly lifting a box.
You tried to trip up a purse snatcher who was running past you, and that’s how your lower right leg got all banged up.
You were folding donations to a charity-run thrift shop when a hobo spider dropped out of an old shirt and bit you on your toe, which swelled up.
And that’s why you were in no way able to run fast enough to escape the werewolf pack. Trust me on this – it is a particularly gruesome way to die. One might even call it “hellish.”