02 Oct 2020
Today’s prompt: “Describe a mortician’s meeting with a newly bereaved family. Remember that he isn’t just dealing with grief but selling a funeral package and getting necessary information about the deceased and the survivors.”
“See, this is why you always read the local paper,” the older mortician said to his younger employee after an incredibly awkward conversation with your family. “If you’d checked the front page this morning, you’d have known that family was going to need a closed casket.”
30 Sep 2020
Today’s prompt: “Your first time in a foreign country”
The first time you went to Mexico, you went to Tijuana. You remember tequila, and some fish tacos, and puking up the fish tacos, and getting the bed spins.
The second time you went to Mexico, you went to Oaxaca. You visited an old monastery, the Templo de Santo Domingo; an archeological museum, the Museo de sitio do Monte Albán; and the gardens at Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca. The highlight was a pastelería near Mercado Benito Juárez where you bought a pastry in the shape of a swan. It was delicious.
You were really looking forward to snorkeling and checking out the Frida Kahlo meusem at Playa del Carmen, but your plane was hijacked by cultists and you were flown to R’lyeh to be dinner for the Old Ones.
28 Sep 2020
Today’s prompt: “Why your boss should give you a raise”
You enter your boss’s office. She’s in the middle of adding a pie chart to a PowerPoint. You cough politely, and she looks up.
“Hey, Joan,” you say with only a slight stammer. “Do you have a minute?”
“What’s up?” she asks, locking her screen and turning towards you.
“I was thinking,” you say. “I’ve been working here for a little while now. And in the first half of the year, I met all of my sales goals. Surpassed them, even.”
“Uh huh,” Joan says.
“Our NPS scores have been really good this year, too, and I think I was a big part of that. Christine from Markie sent that one email that had really positive things to say about my customer service.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” Joan says.
“And, of course, there was the time earlier this year that band of Cursus raiders attacked,” you say, suppressing a shudder as you remember the clan of warriors in their red jackets and snake tattoos. “I managed to protect our inventory from three of them!”
“Until the fourth murdered you with the blade from the paper cutter and they made off with everything.”
“Three out of four ain’t bad,” you say.
“Look,” Joan says. “I appreciate that you get really good customer service ratings for a ghost. But we just made a big life insurance payout to your family. We’re not giving you a raise, too.”
Joan unlocks her computer, signalling that the conversation is over, and you float glumly through the wall of her office.
26 Sep 2020
Today’s prompt: “How the other half lives”
The other half lives in a parallel antimatter universe, where positrons and antiprotons make up not only antihydrogen and antihelium, but anti-daffodils, anti-chihuahuas and anti-Cool-Ranch-Doritos.
Maybe that sounds implausible, given that particle accelerators have only succeeded in making miniscule amounts of antiparticles a day, and only a handful of those have survived cosmic rays and radioactive decay and have formed anti-atoms. But that’s the thing about the multiverse. An infinite number of universes makes the implausible not only possible, but, somewhere, a reality. Kind of like how the Marvel Universe has Earth-200500, which is just like the normal Earth-616 in the Marvel Universe except all the Avengers have beards, including Scarlet Witch.
In that antimatter universe, antimatter you is relaxing with an antimatter beer after a long day of pulling antimatter weeds, washing antimatter dishes, and folding antimatter laundry, when a wormhole opens up and propels them across the multiverse and right into regular-matter you.
24 Sep 2020
Today’s prompt: “Write a life as the inventory of an auction.”
Lot 47: Your wedding ring, pried from your cold fingers.
Lot 62: The bike you rode up the Pacific Coast with your teenage son.
Lot 84: An oak bookshelf, the one that contained your old art history textbooks and the photo album of your trip to Venice. Lightly stained with your blood.
Lot 91: Your Nintendo Switch. Heavily stained with your blood.
Lot 127: The pipe that was pried from under your kitchen sink with inhuman strength and wrapped around your neck.
Lot 165: A painting by your favorite local artist. The glass in the frame was found cracked, and deep, clawlike slashes spread across the canvas.
Lot 228: The eldritch spellbook that you found under a loose floorboard one day that called a monster into being. Starting bid: $500,000.
22 Sep 2020
Today’s prompt: “You’re filling a time capsule to bury in the backyard that will be dug up in five hundred years. Write the letter you’d put inside to describe life as you know it today.”
“Hello, 2520!” you write. “Boy, I hope for your sakes that it’s a better year than 2020. I’ve enclosed a few items to give you a feel for what life was like, well, now.
“First, there’s a cloth face mask and a small bottle of hand sanitizer. That’s because we’re all stuck in our homes trying not to get coronavirus. Whenever we venture out, we have to wear masks. Well, the responsible people do, anyway. It’s pretty hard to get tested for coronavirus, but it’s possible to be asymptomatic and still pass it on to other people, so we wear masks and sanitize our hands to try not to pass it on to other people in case we have it. Over 200,000 Americans have already died of it. That’s way more than other countries, because the current administration cannot get its shit together on this. Which reminds me, you would not believe how difficult it was to get toilet paper earlier this year. People did a lot of panic buying for staples, but other than that, the economy has tanked. Small businesses are really struggling to stay afloat, since people have been avoiding unnecessary trips outside, and unnecessary spending since times are uncertain. So people are losing their jobs, and a lot of them had health insurance tied to their jobs, so the health crisis is just compounding.
“Second, there’s a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and a copy of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Police officers have been killing innocent black people for decades with no repercussions, but I think it took being stuck home during the pandemic for a lot of white people to sit up and take notice. We’re educating ourselves, trying to learn to be anti-racist. We’re out marching and demonstrating. But the current administration is gassing protesters so the president can have a photo op with a Bible he plainly doesn’t read, and plainclothes members of federal agencies are kidnapping protesters into unmarked vans. The president called white supremacists ‘very fine people,’ so I guess there’s no real surprise there. He is, of course, a monster to Latinx people as well. His administration has been taking migrant children away from their parents and putting them in cages. They’ve been forcibly sterilizing migrant women. And of course things are even worse for trans people of color.
“The last item in the capsule is a Free Joe Exotic sticker in the shape of a tiger. You kind of had to be there.
“Let’s see, what else sucks about 2020…. Murder hornets. California wildfires turning the sky orange. The administration is slowing down the mail on purpose with the hope of interfering in absentee voting. That’s classy, when people have to get their medications through the mail. John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg both died; they were pretty rad. Oh, and the electro-beasts! I can’t believe I almost forgot the electro-beasts. They come out of electrical sockets, turn into giant monsters made of electricity, and murder y-“
ZZZZZAAAAPPPPP.
20 Sep 2020
Today’s prompt: “Never underestimate the lives of old men sitting on park benches.”
You never know when they’re actually zombies. And, like, the fast-moving zombies.