09 Mar 2022
Today’s prompt: “Describe two visits to the circus from the point of view of someone who’s bipolar. On one visit, he’s manic, and on the other, he’s in a pit of despair.” (As always, feel free to disregard the gender specified in the prompt.)
OMG, you think, the circus is amazeballs! The elephants! The trapeze artists! The fire eaters! The sword swallowers! The funnel cakes! The clowns, okay I can do without the clowns, but the lion tamers! The dancing bears! The games where you have to shoot little moving targets!
OMG, you think, the circus was way more fun last time when I wasn’t being trampled to death by rogue elephants.
07 Mar 2022
Today’s prompt: “The most intriguing and/or unexpected conversation you’ve had with a complete stranger”
A tall, fat man sits down on the bench next to you. You glance up quickly from your phone, then immediately back down. Something about him is vaguely unsettling.
He sits quietly for a while. You continue to stare at your phone. You can feel the tall, fat man watching you.
The tall, fat man’s stomach gurgles loudly. He scoots closer to you. You’re sitting cross-legged on the bench, so it takes you a second to scoot away, and before you can, a drip of something lands on the knee of your jeans.
You glance at the tall, fat man and notice a rivulet of drool trickling from the corner of his mouth to his chin. You barely repress a shudder, scoot away again, and look back at your phone.
At last he clears his throat. You glance up at him briefly, and back to your phone, trying to avoid his keen interest in you.
“Have you ever met someone with three rows of teeth?” he asks you.
You look up, and cannot look away from the the most horrific grin you have ever seen in your life.
04 Mar 2022
Today’s prompt: “Watch three spectators at a ball game and describe each one as a different animal.”
There’s the lady in the bleachers one row up and to the right of you. She scoops up handfuls of popcorn into her hand and, instead of bringing her hand up to her mouth, brings her mouth down to her hand, like a chicken pecking at grains on the ground.
And there’s the man at the railing below your bleacher section, pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth like a watchful panther.
And there’s the man just to the back and the right of you, laughing uproariously at everything his companions say, like a hyena.
And then they all actually turn into their spirit animals. Except for the lady, who turns into a giant chicken instead of a regular chicken.
And they converge on you and peck, maul, bite you to death.
I guess you just didn’t have sufficient team spirit.
02 Mar 2022
Today’s prompt: “That snappy reply you never had a chance to say”
The French have a phrase, l’esprit de l’escalier. It translates roughly to “staircase wit,” and means the perfect rejoinder to something someone said to you, but that you thought of too late, at the bottom of the staircase as you were leaving the party. When I think of the phrase, I am reminded of my late dog Sarah. Once, a neighborhood cat got pregnant and decided to have its litter under the deck in my back yard. She strolled through the back yard as if it were hers, and if Sarah happened to be out, the cat arched her back and acted so unpleasant that Sarah gave her a wide berth. Eventually the cat and all her kittens left our yard, but long afterwards, every once in a while, Sarah would stick her head under the deck and bark, as if to say, “And another thing!”
And so it is now with you. All these witty comments running through your head as the cult priest drones on and on about the Old Ones this and the Old Ones that. Oh, they’re so old, you think, positively geriatric. Where does one find adult diapers in their size? It’s such a pity you’ll never get a chance to say them, being bound and gagged and all.
28 Feb 2022
Today’s prompt: “Write a scene set in a different location, using all the details from above.”
The glass and metal dome clangs open with the sound of a metal trash can being bumped into in the night. Gears in some hidden mechanism operating the dome’s hinges yowl like an angry cat. Sentries in towers eye you as you propel yourself through the water into the open dome and through the gate to the hidden city. The sentries hold what look like fantastical sniper rifles, slim and metallic but with ornate nautilus-shell details.
A sound almost like a jackhammer fills your ears. You realize it is the groan of metal cables pulling the sides of the dome back up. The dome closes with a heavy clang, and then there is silence.
Kelp leaves swirl through the Atlantis city streets, like deciduous trees dropping their leaves all at once. A large fish as black as a crow swims through the top leaves of a piece of kelp as large as a tree as though it were perching there. It eyes you warily. Goosebumps raise along your skin.
The silence breaks as you hear laughter echo around you, and suddenly children – some with gills, some with fins growing out of the sides of their heads, each wearing an elaborate white mask encrusted with shells and seaweed – chase each other through the watery streets. They wear slim-fitting dive suits, some with helmets, some without, but in no way could they be confused with your own dive suit. They are slim-fitting, modern-looking, in bright colors. Some of them have cartoon characters of fish on them. They’re reminiscent of Hello Kitty, but aquatic. Hello Fishy?
Out of the corner of your eye, you spy a dogfish shark. You decide to follow the kids.
Most of the buildings you’ve seen until now have been spectacular – glassy towers topped with bulbous domes, twisted spirals of metal mesh, Nautilus-inspired coils that shimmer like mother of pearl. But as you follow the children, they divert into an alley of run-down ancient ruins of brick and stone. You notice what looks like words written onto the walls of some of these ruins in a language you don’t recognize, though it seems like it has some similarities to ancient Sumerian. You pull out your waterproof camera and begin taking pictures, and tell yourself when you catch up to the children – the only people other than the sentries you’ve seen so far – you’ll see if you can communicate with them, and then ask them what the words mean.
The children have gotten far ahead of you at this point. You can no longer hear their laughter. Instead, you hear a sound a little like a woodpecker, a little like an owl hooting, and a little like your old house settling. Is that the dome? The creaks are unearthly. They’d be right at home on a Halloween CD amidst the wolf howls and clanking chains.
You see the dogfish again. It seems to be following you. You hurry to catch up to the children.
Going in the direction you last saw the kids, the structures around you change once more. They’re smaller, but they look lived in, and they’re constructed entirely of amalgamations of coral and shells cemented together. Kelp beds in front of these dwellings appear to be well-groomed. Some of the homes look beautiful, similar shapes and colors of shells working together to create a pleasing, harmonious whole. Others are more of a hodge-podge – random shells thrown together any which-way, looking less structurally sound. It’s in front of one of these hodge-podge houses that you see your first adult in the city proper, cutting down a few overgrown kelp leaves in the yard. Suddenly, this adult Atlantean darts toward you with incredible speed, its large kelp pruners in hand. You can only stand still as the Atlantean barrels toward you and stabs with its pruning shears a mere foot behind you – right into the neck of the dogfish shark, who, despite being much smaller than you, was surging toward you, teeth bared and poisonous spines at the ready. Blood billows out from the dogfish and evaporates into the surrounding water, as if it was washed away with a hose.
“Thank you,” you say into your dive helmet, and then, remembering your surroundings, you sign “Thank you,” hoping that even though ASL was created long after the Atlanteans diverged from the rest of the populace, that the intent will be conveyed. The Atlantean looks perplexed by your signals, but makes a gesture unmistakable in any language: move along.
You follow along your original path, past a home festooned with shells with holes bored into them and attached by string to the rafters. The shells were hung along a rapidly moving current, and they tinkled and clinked against each other sweetly. You move forward for a closer look at the trinkets, when you hear a snap below you. A giant clam the size of a bear trap clamped down on the end of your flipper. Thank goodness it wasn’t around your ankle – it could have broken a bone. You pry the end of your flipper out of the mollusk. You resolve not to swim into anyone else’s front yard. This place is dangerous.
After nearly getting your foot caught, this neighborhood takes on a creepy vibe. What would have been a simple collection of large, pointy shells now looks like the equivalent of a chainsaw collection. Narwhal horns that would have looked ornamental now have you wondering if they could be used as weapons against unwary interlopers. Everything seems sinister.
Get hold of yourself, you think. You’re just jumpy. There’s no cause for alarm.
You keep telling yourself that until you round the corner and see a town square where a diving suit that looks just like your own hangs from a scaffold.
Your heart stops momentarily in your chest. The whole square is filled with silence, but you could swear dozens of eyes are watching you.
And then you hear a giggle, and then a rock launches at your diving helmet, and another, and another. You begin to panic. You envision a rock shattering your face plate like a broken window left by an intruder. Not likely to happen – modern diving helmets don’t use glass. But that doesn’t stop a sharp rock from severing the tubing to your air supply.
25 Feb 2022
Today’s prompt: “Write down twenty details of your neighborhood block”
The metal trash cans that clang noisily when you bump into them at night.
The cat that yowls every time it sees you.
The guy kitty-corner from your house who you frequently see standing by an upper story window holding a sniper rifle.
The deciduous trees that always seem to drop their leaves all at once.
That one house with all the bear traps out front.
The house that never took down its Halloween decorations. You know there are ways to corpse a plastic skeleton – to make it look like there’s a bit of rotting flesh on the bones – but these are especially realistic. Such craftsmanship!
The house that never stopped playing that one Halloween CD with all the moans and wolf howls and clanking chains.
The guy across the street with the chainsaw collection.
That one guy who wears a hockey mask everywhere.
The crow that frequently perches in one of the trees and caws loudly.
The many wind chimes in front of bear trap house.
The little lending library outside Halloween CD house with all the Goosebumps books and that one copy of The Anarchist Cookbook.
The graffiti that has appeared in the alley in a language no one recognizes.
The red stains that keep appearing on the driveway of the house three doors down until the man who lives there hoses it off.
The mailbox that has Hello Kitty stickers all over it.
The stray dog that has been acting much more aggressive lately.
Occasional sounds of a woodpecker.
Occasional sounds of an owl.
Occasional sounds of a jackhammer, though you don’t see where anyone is doing construction.
Your house, which you see has a newly broken window as you approach it.
23 Feb 2022
Today’s prompt: “Write about something extraordinary in a flat voice.”
So there’s this cult, right, NBD, you know, black robes, fancy knives, yadda yadda yadda, Great Old Ones, whatever. And they like, showed up outside your workplace with some chloroform, NBD, yadda yadda yadda, now you’re tied up in the middle of a circle with a bunch of elder signs written around it, whatever. And they like, sacrifice you to open up a dimensional portal for the dark ones to travel to earth, NBD, yadda yadda yadda, yuh dead.