The faeries came and traded our baby for a fake leg. Thing’s totally made out of wood and there’s not enough liquor in the house to help us see a resemblance to our missing kiddo.
But the clothing store doesn’t take returns, so that leg’s getting dressed up in a sun bonnet. That leg’s getting a stroller ride along the beach.
Eventually, that leg’s getting a college fund, faeries. We don’t care. We had life plans and we’re sticking to ’em. Us and leg baby.
Hear that, faeries? WE’RE FINE!
Hey, get on the boat!
Going for a cruise!
Parasols and drinks!
Shuffleboard and naps!
Clinging to the nets!
Salt encrusted hair!
Gems around our necks!
Seaweed in our eyes!
Swearing a new oath!
Vengeance of the sea!
Death to all who sail!
This cruise ends in blood!
Blood and endless shrimp!
all the recruiters are reaching out on linkedin and each of them have profiles that list competencies such as
* The Closing Fist
* The Tongue Taste of Time
* Inside-Outing
* Skin Collection
and the inbox notifications, they can be seen from across the room, why is that?
Job market’s tight. Job market’s constricting.
Venture capitalist finds a way to paywall death itself.
There they are, standing outside the hospice, screaming through window, “If you don’t want PREMIUM, then just WATCH AN AD!” and all the old people, brittle and immortal, watch the soaps and eat the soups.
Sometimes you think “Man, things are going pretty well right now” and you can forget that there’s a tree out there, beyond the village’s glow, that has scratchy branches and a you-shaped hole in its center, waiting for you to wander out amongst the shadow-shrouded & silent woods.
[I don’t know much about Pokemon, but I’ve seen some pictures, I guess]
Two children stand facing each other. One of them has a prison orb in his hand, which he opens and shakes, slinging a snot rocket creature into the schoolyard’s dust in a wet streak. But this snot is alive! And in great pain, its moisture being wicked away by playground dirt!
“Attack!” shouts its young master, kicking it, and his shoe’s tip launches a wedge of wet slime into the mouth of the other child, causing them to retch. “Effective.”
Finally, the weather outside is warming up and we all know what that means!
Time to wrap our limbs in liniments and cotton wrappings to protect ourselves against the insect hordes that seek our precious bodily fluids. “No more grandparents lifted and flown off” is the commitment of the day, so every leg wrap is carefully tied to a safety harness & anvil.
Sure, from a distance we resemble bug-covered mummies, but it’s safety first and fun second and there’s no hope the bugs’ll ever leave third.
“So I says to him, I says: Gary, you gotta take this stuff more seriously! The daggers, they’ve got to be anointed in oil, Gary. The oil in the carved amphora by the door, I says. And get this, he goes: By the door? I’ve been using the oil in the shallow pool that holds the EYE BUGS where the bodies of the sacrificed are reduced to component parts, and I says: Gary, that’s not oil… those were PEOPLE!”
“Wow.”
“Anyway, so yeah, that’s why his dagger smells weird.”
setting: an office
me: ” ”
something resembling my coworker, sharing their form, but inside their brain case, an incredible pressure, a writhing mass of worm-like structures, or if they could break free a nest of tentacles, a foreign body trapped here and biding its time until it can crack bone like eggshell and erupt into the world full of hunger and fury: ” ”
[editors note: we tend to work in silence, with headphones on, listening to music]
commentary: this piece doesn’t work, because the open quotes should either be replaced with bracketed [silence] or, even better, replaced with some sort of mundane but immediately recognizable piece of corporate chit chat, providing a counterpoint to the ludicrously long character description
A pie is thrown: Its flight is arrested by a face, mostly harmlessly. In response, another pie is thrown in the opposite direction. Soon, the air is alive with pies.
Where are all these pies coming from? They appear in hands unbidden and freedom is found (however briefly) only in the seconds after a throw.
Facial features are buried, nostrils full of pie, mouths sucking air from the bottom of meringue peaks, shoes squeaking for purchase on pie slick floors and still, more pies, and we gasp for air and wait for the laughter to stop so we can be free.