24 Jun 2019
Today’s prompt: “Introduce your long-time imaginary friend.”
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
You wouldn’t think that overly-apostrophed, heavily fricatived phrase could be turned into a sing-song rhyme. But Piper found a way.
“Cut it out, Piper. It’s not funny anymore.”
Piper cocks her head to the side. “Oh, is somebody being a widdle saddums?” she says. “You don’t have to be a saddums! Cthulhu is coming!”
“I know,” you say, desperately trying to concentrate on the spellbook before you, trying to find a reverse-summoning spell, something to put back to sleep the monster awakened by a local cult.
“Cthulhu is coming! Cthulhu is coming!” her voice cries out like a nursery rhyme, obnoxious and impossible to ignore, as she loop-de-loops around the ceiling.
“Why are you here?” you scream at the impish figure. “Why, after all these years, did you pry your way out of my imagination?”
“I want to be devoured by Cthulhu!” Piper shrieks with laughter.
“Well, when he shows up, I’ll be sure to send him your way,” you mutter, turning again to your book. You finish flipping through the chapter. There’s nothing useful in here. You grab another book.
Piper alights at your elbow. “Why aren’t you happy? You wanted this when you were a kid.”
“I was indoctrinated into this when I was a kid. When I got older, I learned to think for myself. And I decided that I didn’t want to have a big monster eat me and destroy the world. Living is nice, and the earth is where I keep all my stuff.”
And there it is. The one spell that can put this genie back in the bottle. You tremble as you lift up the book to recite it. This can all be fixed.
Piper glances at the page, then glares at you. “Traitor!” she shouts, and flies toward an open window.
“Throdog Cthulhu, hai nogephaii l’ fhtagn,” you chant. “Nogephaii l’ gn’thorr, l’ R’lyeh. Nogephaii–”
“Hey, Mr. Cthulhu!” Piper’s voice rings out in the dead of night. “Over here! Eat this one!”
Giant footsteps make the dishes in your cabinets rattle. You feel like an extra in a kaiju film.
“Nogephaii l’ shugnah ot fhtagnshoggg,” you read, your voice halting.
“Right here!” Piper’s voice calls.
Scaly fingers tear the roof from your house, and a watery bellow erupts from between green mouth-tentacles.
It figures, with your luck, that the only one besides you who could hear your imaginary friend would be Cthulhu.
23 Jun 2019
Today’s prompt: “Set your alarm for 3 a.m., wake up, and write the first thing that comes to mind.”
Death by dutch oven, by the gassiest, methane-iest people in the world.
21 Jun 2019
Today’s prompt: “An unexpected gift”
You hear the zombies shuffling closer to your house.
You turn up the Christmas music.
You and Jordan sit cross-legged in the glow of multicolored LEDs peeking from between faux evergreen needles, and kiss.
“Merry Christmas,” you say, handing Jordan a package that’s surprisingly heavy for its size. “Uh, be real careful opening that.”
Jordan tears off the wrapping paper, opens the box, and takes out a lead-lined container. “Is this…?”
“Plutonium,” you say. “I know you needed something radioactive to create your cure for zombieism. I had to trade away the last gun in my arsenal to get it, but it’s worth it. We can do it now. We can save the world.”
“I can’t believe you were able to find this.” Tears well up in Jordan’s eyes. “I didn’t think there was any way we’d ever get the fissile material I needed for the cure. That’s why I traded all the remaining cure ingredients that had any value to them in exchange for ammunition.” Jordan nudges a brightly wrapped present toward you.
You pick up the box from Jordan, unwrap it, and cut the packing tape holding down the lid flaps. Inside are several boxes of .223 Remington rounds.
You look at the ammo. You look at the plutonium. And then you start to laugh. Jordan laughs, too. The zombies shuffle closer.
19 Jun 2019
Today’s prompt: “What you were doing this time last year”
Exactly one year ago today, you found the lamp. It was bronze, ornate, and looked straight out of the set of Aladdin. You took it home, set it on the table, and held your phone out for a selfie while you rubbed it. And then a genie totally came out of it.
“Ooh, three wishes!” you said.
“No,” the genie said. “That’s not how this works. I’m offering you a trade. A blessing, and a curse. Every day for the next year, you can think of one thing, your heart’s desire. And you will have it. But a year from now, I will take your life.”
You paused. You thought. You could do a lot with an entire year’s worth of wishes. Just think – your heart’s desire, every day? With that, you could build more of a legacy for yourself than most people could build in a lifetime. You could have it all – love, wealth, respect, complete happiness.
“I accept,” you said.
“Very well,” the genie said. “Focus your mind, and envision your heart’s desire.”
You closed your eyes. Your mind fluttered from thought to thought, but then a vision emerged from the clutter – the one thing you knew right then you wanted more than anything else. You focused with all of your might, and you stretched out your hand.
You felt it nestled in your hand, and you knew your heart’s desire had materialized. You opened your eyes. There it is – one piece of Bazooka Joe bubble gum.
You eagerly unwrapped it, greedily popped the stale gum into your mouth, and guffawed over the cartoon on the wrapper (it involved Mort, Bazooka Joe’s friend with the giant turtleneck that comes up over his mouth). The genie coiled himself back into the lamp.
The next day, you rubbed the lamp again. The genie came out and once again directed you to focus on your heart’s desire. Once again, you closed your eyes and thought about what you wanted. And once again, you were delighted to open your eyes to see a piece of Bazooka Joe in your hand.
It has been a year, and the genie has poured out of his lamp for the last time. And suddenly a fog lifts from your mind. What on earth possessed you to waste your wishes this entire year?
“So, to be honest,” the genie says, “it was two curses.”
17 Jun 2019
Today’s prompt: “Find a world map or globe, close your eyes, pick a spot. Write about a person arriving there for the first time.”
Cave Lake, Kootenai County, Idaho. It’s about a 1,600-acre lake, one of a handful of small lakes spreading out east from Coeur d’Alene Lake. Bordered to the north by the Coeur d’Alene River and the south by Highway 3. Home to bluegills, largemouth bass, northern pikes, catfish and crappies.
The sack you’ve been chained up in falls from the sky to the center of the lake without warning, without reason, without any obvious means for it being there. There was no crane lifting you above the lake’s surface, no plane dropping you out its cargo bay doors. You just appeared in the sky, as random as a roll of the dice, and gravity took you. You arrived there, instantly, as if hurled by an unseen hand. And you plummetted. And you drowned.
The odds were never that good. The Earth’s surface is 71 percent water, and you can drown in an inch of it. It’s not the sort of thing you want to leave to random chance.
15 Jun 2019
Today’s prompt: “Finish the sentence that begins ‘What I’ve always wanted to say is….’”
At last, you’ve got the hero chained up and right where you want him!
“What I’ve always wanted to say is, you’re nothing without your Sword of Magisteria, which I have melted down into slag, and your trusty pegasus, which I have already carved up into delicious pegasus steaks for my pet tigers. Did you actually believe you stood a chance against my army of orcs? Did you really think you could make your way through the Dark Forest of Etrich and into the city gates undetected? Hahahahahahahahaha! As soon as I’m done killing you, I’m going to ravish the Princess Aurelia and then put into place my master plan to conquer the outer realms with the just-completed mind-control device in my inner sanctum down the hall. And now, prepare to–”
But before you can utter the word “die” and frog-march your hapless captive at laser-gunpoint into the deep pool where you keep your giant angry electro-sharks, his cavalry of unlikely companions swoops in, shooting the laser gun out of your hand and throwing you off balance. You topple into the pool you just opened in the floor a minute ago and are instantaneously shocked and devoured.
14 Jun 2019
Today’s prompt: “What does writer’s block feel like?”
Writer’s block? Man, don’t get stuck with writer’s block. Not everything has to be good! Just get something down on the page, even if it feels like written diarrhea. I mean, even that’s something. Death scenes and diarrhea aren’t totally antithetical. People die of cholera all the time. You can die of cholera!
So if getting some bad writing out on the page is like diarrhea, what does that make writer’s block in this admittedly very gross metaphor? Some kind of intestinal blockage? But that’s something, too! People die of intestinal blockages! You could die of a rupture!
Look, maybe we’re just being too picky about this particular death scene. Yeah, okay, maybe you don’t want to write about/die from the runs or an intestinal obstruction. But if we just sit here stewing about what a good death scene should be, a worthy death scene, we’re going to just keep drawing blanks and staring at a blinking cursor. And we’ll just give up, and won’t come up with anything at all. And you’ll have died, but there won’t be any words for it. There won’t be a cause. There won’t be any rhyme or reason, and there certainly won’t be a story.
Because that’s what writer’s block feels like. It feels like your death happened before it ever began. And that’s just anticlimactic.