Today's Document
Not today Justin
almost home
One Nice Bug Per Day
Origami Around
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Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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Kaledo Art
taylor price
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
DEAR READER
Cosmic Funnies
KIROKAZE
Sade Olutola
Game of Thrones Daily
Jules of Nature
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Product Placement
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@chrisdelacruz
You’re a Seer, the maji of time. Wise, philosophical, and serious, you have the power to see into the past, present, and future. As a Seer, you have a unique ability to understand the ways of the world. Though you can be so set in your beliefs you don’t allow other points of view in, you are often sought out as a trusted source of wisdom and guidance.
Pretty on point. I like this result.
I stand only upon a pillar of shame, beyond the ears of the hounds of death, to live in spite of all that was, and glower in the wake of fate.
My last post. The piece I wrote was a’ight, but not my best work. This line though, THIS line, probably deserved a better fate than the slush pile. Maybe someday I’ll scavenge it for another story. Maybe.
Derelict Anatomy
From WritersDigest.com’s “52 Writing Prompts” for the week of
Explanation: The original Writer’s Digest prompt was LAME so my co-worker and I decided to change it. I proposed this when she texted me after work and she agreed. No predetermined setting, no context, we are merely obligated to use the words “derelict anatomy” in whatever we write.
Beef is almost as abundant as chicken in this arcadian backwater of burned out savannah, but leather is as rare as spun gold. My inexpert attendant bit through a bevy of seemingly solid items before stumbling across an old jar of mampoer and a bundle of useless, clean cotton fabric. My butcher stood over me with a look of cold impatience as I drank deeply of the spirit and prepared my mouth for tortured gnashing.
The sodden cloth between my teeth propped my jaw in a pre-emptive scream. I watched the village butcher descend upon my derelict anatomy with a gleaming hacksaw. I went mad with the first stroke. I howled like a French banshee and, with mere hand strength, I ripped a chunk out of the wooden frame of the table.
Through the blinding pain, I could feel the river of blood pouring over the operative stage and the weight of this learned barbarian whittling through my leg.
I chewed through the cloth and only spat to scream.
Blinded by misery, I forgot the imbecile that ran over me with his carriage. I neglected my vows before the Lord to abstain from curses and excesses. I knew only the sensation of being carved asunder.
My faculties abandoned me before the deed was done. I awoke in pain and it has never left me, only diminished. When I close my eyes, my own screams still ring in my ears as if their infinitude echoes off of eternity and returns to me when my thoughts are idle.
Anymore, I see the world in gray and dream in red hues.
I stand only upon a pillar of shame, beyond the ears of the hounds of death, to live in spite of all that was, and glower in the wake of fate.
I wanted to make a book for storytellers. As I myself write stories from time to time. I actually hope to make the book ready to publish by the end of the year. I imagine a special edition only for myself bound exquisitely :) I think I understand the need for a proper vessel to carry your written words. I believe that for a writer, a good journal is a show of respect to your personal work.
Imagine writing your own tales of joy or sorrow, little by little filling the pages of this blank book. Maybe one day your children will continue it or your grandchildren will find it on the shelf and wonder how it came to be?
Check out the Book of Immortal Tales on Etsy here and I thank all of you who appreciate the work I do:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/271896222/book-of-immortal-tales-a-large-handmade
How To Avoid Death On A Daily Basis
If anyone was wondering what I’ve been doing recently.
Read for free at Fiction Grill
or buy the eBooks from Amazon or Smashwords
Because this MUST be good.
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Got that?
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
Women invented language while men were hunting. I mean…
Creation Simulator
From WritersDigest.com’s “52 Writing Prompts” for the week of September 12th
Prompt: As you close your eyes you feel as if you’re being lifted. Yes, higher and higher until you can’t help but open your eyes. You see a vast world before you, and a voice booms: “This is yours now: Craft it well.” How do you shape this world? What inhabits it? Are there sentient species? Have a ball!
I usually mind my own business at work. I come in, grab some breakfast and a cup of tea, put in my headphones and type numbers to a never-ending barrage of NPR. But I ran out of interesting news media this morning. I considered listening to lesser podcasts, scouring the internet for interesting stuff, or maybe giving in to the siren call of a young adult fiction podcast affiliated with my favorite sci-fi and fantasy podcast, but I didn’t want to demean myself that much. I hit up YouTube.
I didn’t want to curate my own playlist, so I decided to groove to some Motown—because Monday. I slayed spreadsheets through the Supremes, a bit of Berry Gordy, the Miracles, Temptations, Stevie Wonder, and the Four Tops. I was eagerly awaiting Michael Jackson or a sped up version of a Prince song if they had it, but when I got hit with a series of Rick James slow jams I suddenly felt sleepy.
I’m pretty pretentious: I don’t drink that Keurig swill my co-workers choke down, and I would rather go home and sleep in the driveway until my roommate comes home than brave a mug of the Folgers in the cabinet, so I keep a mason jar of mediocre, locally roasted coffee beans at work. I ground them in my worker grinder, and put them in my work French Press; I filled it using the hot water spigot on our cooler rather than the even hotter water from the machine across the hall because it scalds the beans; and I set a timer for 4 minutes so I could steep it properly.
My coffee game is on fleek, bitches.
I was about to return to my work when I noticed that, if I skip “Fire and Desire” I can get to Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher.” I was clearly in the good for the rest of the day.
I poured my coffee.
I skipped the lame song.
I took a sip and pressed play.
“You know your love (your love keeps lifting me) Keep on lifting…”
But inbetween blinks, I started to feel light. Not like I’d lost weight, or like I was floating away—I mean, I now realize I was, but that’s not the sensation I had—but, I mean literally, I felt like light. My whole body flushed and I could feel little rays of “This Guy” emanating all over.
“Higher and higher,” sang a deafening chorus of castrati voices.
I opened my eyes out of pure anger. I hadn’t been that affronted by music since a friend of mine did a thugstep mashup of Ke$ha’s “Tick Tock” and Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat” specifically to harass me. But anger quickly gave way to awestruck befuddlement.
My feet touched ground and the light within me dispersed. I stood atop a mountain bare of foliage. The sky was black, filled with ash and soot, except for myriad legions of monstrous angels—like the biblical kind with a thousand eyes, wheels, and animal heads, not the pretty ones you see in movies and shit—singing, “Lifting me (lifting me), Higher and higher (higher),” in ear shredding, soul destroying, ball-sackless little boy voices that made the air itself vibrate in apparent horror.
All around, beneath the heavenly choir of subjectively demonic voices, for as far as I could see, was an awful lot of nothing good. The ground churned over oceans of magma. Long seams of possible continents ground against one another, dove beneath one another, and rose back up as flaming geysers beyond the edge of the horizon. There was no water, but the heat exceeded stifling. The sweat spilled through my work shirt and dripped on the ground beneath me. And there, where water first touched, green sprang up.
“Keep on lifting me, Higher and higher!”
The song ended with a cascade of voices carrying the final note out for a full breath—for a human, that is—and ceased abruptly. As their song came to an end, a large, glowing, androgynous hand fell upon my shoulder.
I started to turn to look at whoever possessed the hand, but a man appeared in front of me and said, “I wouldn’t advise that,” without looking up from the massive book in his lap.
The man had ten arms turning pages and making notes, and seven eyes glowing, red eyes around his head that looked about independently like a frightened chameleon on speed, his skin was thin, transparent and clearly on fire and the veins I could see through it seemed like they also had flames coursing through them, every time he blinked lightning leapt from his eyelashes up into the sky and descended somewhere else in the distance. He sat on a gold, pillowy dais, like he was important, but he had the emaciated look of an ascetic.
“You’re still human, you know. If you look upon the face of God like that you won’t even have time to realize you’re being incinerated from the soul out.” He dabbed the long feather pens on his black tongue in succession and continued writing as he spoke. I could feel the body of the over-large androgene behind me nodding. It shook my entire body. “Wait until you’ve transfigured to turn around. At least then you’ll only go mad from looking at the Creator.” One of his eyes paused a moment to consider me. “Oooo, that might be a good idea!” He looked over. “We haven’t sent a prophet to mankind in a while, at least a few hours, he’d be…”
The entire universe felt like it was shaking. I ducked and covered my ears but I could feel my head splitting in two. The chorus of angels all shrieked at once in one of those high, glass shattering howls that women train their entire lives to manage in an opera house—just gajillions of them at once. I could feel the blood bubbling in my ears as it poured out and ran down my trembling skin.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” the scribe said. “Just stop talking already before you kill the kid.”
It stopped. The angels all seemed to sigh at once, but I couldn’t hear them.
The scribe snapped one of his fingers at me and mouthed the word, “Shit,” very clearly. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and seemed to whistle.
A small boy with a fishing pole, a trendy looking canteen, and at least a dozen rapidly moving wings appeared.
The scribe said a few words to the boy. He laughed, unscrewed the cap on the canteen, poured some into his hand, and threw it in my face.
“What the hell!” I shouted.
“Hey, hey! Watch your mouth when you’re in the presence of God!” the little boy said.
“Which is basically all the time,” the scribe said. “But I’ll take the blame for this one Raffa,” he added.
The little boy, Raffa, scowled at me and said, “If you say so.” He looked over at God and said, “Did I do a good job.” His eyes grew big and needy while his wings fluttered behind him like a dog’s tail.
God’s arm stretched over my shoulder until he could pat the child on the head.
“Yay!” Raffa said.
“Now go away,” the scribe said. “We have a lot of important business to discuss here and every second you’re here is a hundred thousand more words I need to write down.”
“Whatever, Enoch,” Raffa said, sticking out his tongue before disappearing from beneath the hand of God.
“It’s Metatron, now!” Enoch shouted. He turned one of his eyes back to me. “Good heavens,” he sighed, “of all the archangels, he’s the most annoying. I’ll tell you, he has more mature forms, but he just loves that one because the Big Guy dotes on him when he’s like that. He’s such a sucker for children. No offense, Sir.”
I could feel God nodding behind me.
“Now, we have business.” Metatron cracked the knuckles on all of his hands at once and started writing furiously. “Welcome! Random Son-of-Man! You have been selected by God—or whichever archangel he delegated the task to—to be the new steward of the world!”
“Huh?” I said.
“Honestly, Elohim, who did you delegate this job to? He’s not the sharpest human in the world, obviously. Why him?”
I felt an in-rush of air coming from all directions.
Metatron suddenly stopped writing, raising all of his hands to cover his face, ears, and defend the space directly in front of him. “Wait! Wait! Don’t answer that! I didn’t mean to question the unfathomable wisdom of your managerial skills! Please don’t speak or I’ll have to call Raphael back.”
The four winds dispersed and Metatron sighed.
“Sorry, kid. I walk with God all the time. He’s actually quite funny, although his sense of humor has been getting drier over the eons. But until you accept the job, you can’t even hear his voice without dying so I’ll try to speak for the Holy of Holies until this interview is over.”
“Ummm, thanks,” I said, stupidly.
All seven of Metatrons eyes rolled at once and his hands began writing so quickly that his arms seemed like a blurry halo rising and falling around his body as his hands moved deftly up and down the pages.
“Anyway, this was your world until a few moments ago. You may not know this, but the apocalypse started about a thousand years ago, but when God moves it’s always overly significant and it takes awhile for existence to realize it’s been completely obliterated. Anyway, right about the time that you started playing that song—big fan, by the way, the Funk Brothers slayed that track—the universe ceased to exist. All the necessary people in the world received their due salvation, as promised, everyone that sucked a little too much got their just desserts, and then there’s you.”
“Wait! What did I do! I mean, sure, I’ve been behaving pretty agnostically, but I didn’t deserve this!” I waved out at the expanse of utter desolation that was Earth.
“Nope, you don’t,” Metatron admitted. “But not like you think.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m trying to explain if you’ll just be patient. Do keep in mind, I’m currently writing something like seven hundred seventy seven billion words per second by hand right now. Please, offer me a little courtesy and wait for me to gather my thoughts before barraging me with questions I was already going to answer. Even my transfigured mind is strained trying to keep up with all of the subtle activity of God and His works.”
“Sorry.”
“No worries. Now,” he dabbed at his tongue with all of his pens as he pulled his thoughts together, “as I was saying. The world was destroyed. You weren’t. And you didn’t get salvation. You, basically, deserve nothing.”
“What?”
“I thought we talked about this.”
“Sorry. That’s just pretty heavy.”
“I would claim that I understand, but I’ve kind of been God’s favorite for a long time.”
“Second favorite, right.”
“Hmph,” Metatron sniffed. “Anyways--”
He was clearly dodging the question, but I decided not to interrupt any further.
“But God has seen fit to not only display his Divine Grace in your case but to also renew the entire Earth. That task, of renewing the Earth, has been delegated to you.”
“Wait, so I’m…”
“No, don’t even say it. That’s a blasphemy that, if said in God’s presence, will probably get you completely eviscerated. No, you’re the new steward of Her garden. All this is yours now: Craft it well.”
I looked out over THE endless, post-Apocalyptic landscape and said, “How, exactly, am I supposed to do that?”
“Are you accepting the job?”
“What if I don’t want it?”
“Hmmm, I hadn’t actually asked that. No one has ever turned down the Lord’s Work when they were called. In the past, that might’ve just earned you an immediate death. I suppose now there’s the Abyss…” his voice trailed off as he pondered the question.
“No, it’s cool. I said. I suppose any job is better than Oblivion, right?” I forced a smile.
“Precisely,” Metatron said. “The Lord’s Work is often challenging but, when all is done, it will always be fulfilling.” I could feel God’s presence fading from behind me. “Besides, just remember, God will always give us burdens according to our strength.”
I felt a hand the size of a car hood on my head.
“Good luck, My son,” said a beautiful voice that seemed to, all at once, melodically span the sonic scale.
Both of them disappeared, and I was left alone on a lifeless world. I was no longer sweating—which, I assumed was a side effect of having been touched by God—but that meant that the only living thing on the planet was the little bit of green growing beneath my feet.
Lightning and thunder crackled in the charcoal sky. It was all mine but, for the life of me, the only step in the development of life on old Earth I could remember was that, somehow, lightning did a thing and simple proteins were formed.
I looked down at the desperate buds of life and sighed.
Prompt: Whispers in the dark
Go for it!
These are photos from my favourite bookshop in London: Foyles. This is the foreign language floor! Yes, floor not section 😁 The last photo shows the Italian and German grammar, vocabulary, etc., not including the literature! There is another full side for Italian alone. You can also see Portuguese, Russian and Greek, plus the aisle for Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. Not featured: the Nordic languages section, Ancient Greek, Latin, Polish, French, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Afrikaans… And so on and so on. Too many for me to remember.
If you visit London and you love languages, I really recommend that you visit.
a hoe’s contour and highlight routine
products used:
anastasia beverly hills cream contour kit in fair
urban decay naked skin concealer in light warm
becca shimmering skin perfector pressed in champagne pop
on me:
@fifthtee pug shirt
no pants
song: keith ape - it g ma (spazzkid bootleg)
I didn’t know what to expect tbh
how do you go from drawing 5 penises to blending a flawless contour
I...completely misread this video as commentary on women feeling compelled to perform normalcy after they experience sexual violence.
But sure, hoes and make-up, why not. Sounds legit.
Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’ What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!’ This is the matriarchal approach to learning.
Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquois woman (via socialuprooting)
Sickbed Confession
From WritersDigest.com’s “52 Writing Prompts” for the week of September 5th
Prompt: Your mom is in poor health and you spend extra time at her apartment taking care of her. While getting her out of bed and into her chair one day, she thanks you for all your help. Then she says that she needs to tell you a story about her past, one that you don’t know, and one that will change everything.
My mom’s aged pretty well. I’ve seen some pictures of her when she was younger and I can only see that three things have changed: the growing cloud of afro spreading all over the bed, the weight she’s lost, and the expanding infinity in the depths of her eyes.
I have vague memories of the years when my mother still walked and talked. She used to be the most active member of the family. She hiked and biked, she taught a pilates class on Sundays for all the neighborhood soccer moms that had already abandoned their faith, she swam in summer, could outrun my uncles, and she was the first person to knock out one of my baby teeth when she stuffed my little foam basketball back in my face as I was trying to dunk on one of those toddler goals. Maybe she was a little too active, but the tooth was already loose and I got a full week of ice cream cones for the offense.
I can’t recall when my mom became an avid reader. My early childhood was mostly of her movement, but she became progressively inert sometime around when I could read for myself. When I left for kindergarten, she’d cook breakfast with a dusty, old, leatherbound tome in one hand, and when I came back at the end of the day, there would be a stack of four dusty, old leatherbound tomes on the living room table and a new one in her hands. By morning, they’d all be gone and a new one would appear.
My mom stopped reading before she stopped moving.
I remember the day all that stopped better than I remember my birthday last year, and not just because of the alcohol:
My mom was owning me in a game of Scrabble. I loved playing her, but I hated losing. That’s probably why it was always the first thing we did when I got out of school. She was brutal. I remember I started out with a small lead, but after four more hands she laid down a bingo connecting a double and triple word score for a total of something like 130 points. I got up tried to run off, crying, but she just yelled at me.
“You get your buns back here and finish this game right now, young man!”
I couldn’t recall her ever yelling at me, so I stopped, but I wasn’t ready to give in.
“What’s the point,” I said, turning around, sniffling like the child I was. I was only nine at the time, but I was pretty mature for my age thanks to her influence. “You’ve already won. I’ll never make that up, you’re too good.”
“Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. I’m not gonna lie to you and say I’m not really good at Scrabble.” My mom was never very humble. “But you don’t know how good you are unless you try too. You may not beat me, but you’ll know how close you are to doing so. You’ll learn some new words from me if you keep playing too, won’t you? But every battle is the last battle. If you quit now, you’ll never get better, you’ll never know, and you will never be better than me. You will spend your whole life as my child and never my equal. Is that okay with you?”
I never really considered the idea of being equal to my mom until then, but when she put that idea in my head, my whole world changed.
I was only able to shake my head.
“Good. I’m your mother, and I never want to lie to you. Letting you win, or not playing my best would be like lying. You deserve to win when you are good enough to win. Simple as that. Until then, I’ll help you get better by whooping up on that butt every time you ask it of me.”
My mom had this self-confident smile that made you want to punch her. It spread across her face like warm butter and she showed enough of her gums to make it seem like an endearing snarl. But, then and now, it only reminded me why I love her.
“Besides, you stop being a parent when your child beats you at something. I’d like to keep my job as long as I can.”
I didn’t know she was about to retire.
We played the game down to my last hand. I looked up from my last four letters utterly disappointed and certain I was defeated. She had a 63 point lead on me. As an adult, I look back and realize how close that actually was, especially after she overwhelmed me so early on. Back then, though, I could only see the inevitable defeat in front of me.
The last word she played was “pyx.”
I swore under my breath.
She stood up quickly and put her hands firmly on the table.
I thought I was in trouble. I was sure I was gonna get my mouth washed out with soap like Billy from class did only a few days earlier. His family used Irish Spring, which he said tasted like butt cheeks and Cap’n Crunch milk. I didn’t want to know what our soap tasted like, but when I saw my mom’s face, I realized she hadn’t even noticed my indiscretion.
Beads of sweat had appeared on her face and her whole body was trembling slightly.
“Mom,” I said.
Her eyes were growing glassy and vacant.
“I didn’t know it was gonna happen so soon,” she said to herself.
She slowly turned her whole body to face me, one step at a time, like every motion required a lot of effort.
“Hug me, please, sweetie.”
“Mom, are you okay?” I asked, but I still came around the table to hug her.
I knew something was horribly wrong when she didn’t close her arms around me; she only spoke, and that was slow and clipped.
“Mom made—mistake. Going away—while. Mommy…” She fell into my arms. Her whole body collapsed as if she were not my mother but a rag doll designed to look like her. I watched as the last light of awareness disappeared from her eyes and as she finished the last sentence I would hear her speak for over fifteen years, “…loves you.”
We never finished the game.
I called 911. The ambulance came and I rode with her to the emergency room in a hysterical fit of tears that was only restrained by my seatbelt. I spent the next four years of my life listening to grown-ups discuss the anomaly of my mother’s paralysis over clipboards, over my head. All I understood was that my mom was alive, awake 24 hours of the day, and completely unresponsive to any stimuli in the immediate environment. At the end of the fifth year, they managed to get her out of the hospital—after doing extensive research and, as I later found out, publishing several papers on her phenomenon—and into a special apartment complex for quadriplegics in the area.
I’d been volunteering with my mother’s apartment complex since I was sixteen. Volunteer nurses turn the patients every 4 to 6 hours, help with food when possible, clean the room and the patient, and we talk to them in hopes of providing stimuli to encourage them to wake up. In my case, I just watch my mother and walk the halls every so often to make sure no one has gotten in and to help whichever nurse is running the floor. Mostly, I study from my mother’s apartment until it is time for her to sleep. I turn her once every four hours, I read aloud to her twice, I beg her to come back to me when I feel weak, I pray when I’m desperate, and I do a lot of remembering. What I don’t do, anymore, is hope.
A dry, croaking noise emanated from her mouth as I was studying in the corner. I thought I was hearing things, but I turned around to make sure she was still breathing okay. Her face was turned toward me and, for the first time in over a decade and a half, she was frowning.
I fell over in my chair in a panic to stand up and, once I looked up, she had a weak smile on her face that suggested the one I learned to love to hate as a child.
I couldn’t talk. All I could do was turn my back and cry like an infant.
“Wa’er,” I heard behind me.
I turned around, wiping at my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater and said dumbly, “Huh?”
“Wa—dur,” she repeated. The glass was disappearing from her gaze. Her eyes looked wet again, and seemed to see what was in front of her.
“Water!” I shouted too loud. “Yes! I…” I stumbled on the chair I dropped and hurried to pick it up. “Just a sec,” I said rushing out of the room to fill a glass.
The quadriplegic apartments are all equipped with proper hospital beds and, when I came back, I was even more surprised to find that it had been shifted into the upright position already than I was to see her looking at me, smiling and aware.
I put a straw in the glass and placed it gently between her lips. She closed them and sucked forcefully on the straw, like she’d been waiting for that glass of water as long as I’d been waiting for her.
“Thank you,” she said as I moved the glass to the side table so I could gawk at her properly, “for everything.”
I wiped at my eyes and sniffled. I struggled to keep my composure in front of my now awake mother.
“It’s a medical miracle,” I stammered.
“No,” my mother said, “it’s not. It’s a fucking abomination and I think I owe you an explanation.”
My tears and sniffling stopped. I’d never heard my mom curse before. She had my attention.
“I need to tell you a story about my past, one there’s no way you could possibly know, and it’s likely to change everything you think you know about the world. Do you want my explanation or do you want to continue living as you always have? Either way, I’m back now and I’ll be with you for as long as I live.”
I wanted to hyperventilate. I wanted to crush the metal part of the armrest on the swivel chair I sat in. I wanted to let all of the fear, panic, and relief happen at once, but I asked, “That’s not some play on words right? You don’t mean you’re gonna die on me in the next few minutes, right?”
“The next few minutes, no. But, I only expect to live another nine years and, if you accept my explanation, I’ll have a lot more to explain before I do.”
“Tell me everything, then.”
“I was born 1,223 years ago in a small village at the western end of Tiqur Abbay, what you would call the Blue Nile today. One night, when I was a toddler, during a wedding, when I’d gotten away from the festivities at my home and into the bush, I found myself staring down a wolf. Without knowing why, I knew that if I looked away it would kill me and eat me. I stood there, with my eyes locked on the wolf, neither of us willing or able to move until daybreak when the adults descended on me.
That was the first time I ever used magic. I realize it doesn’t seem like much, but until the adults showed up, the wolf and I were locked in a death match. If my concentration was broken with no one around, the wolf would come and eat me, but if the wolf turned away, the spell I didn’t know I was casting would end its life. The wolf had to resist my power or die. Fight or flight. But not the kind of fight that involves teeth or claws, but one of will. The adults broke my concentration, but they also fought off the wolf. To this day, both of us live, locked in an unending battle of wills. One of us must lose, the other will be properly immortal until a greater power comes along to defeat us.
That is how I have lived so long: in terror and desperate to win an eternal spiritual battle against a wolf. To that end I made the ultimate weapon of humanity. I was a witch once. I used that power to foster a talent for alchemy. The secret I have that will change your life is simple: the elixir of life is real, but it is not permanent. No one could pour enough power into it to make it last that long.
My lovely baby boy, I am the last living alchemist on Earth and, as of the day you saw me fall, I am powerless. Time will race to catch up with me now that I’ve failed to push it back. I feel certain I have less than ten years left of life. That may not be enough time but, somehow, if you’re willing, I have to teach you everything I know, and, I need you to do what I could not. I need you to find and kill a wolf.”
Sickbed Confession
From WritersDigest.com’s “52 Writing Prompts” for the week of September 5th
Prompt: Your mom is in poor health and you spend extra time at her apartment taking care of her. While getting her out of bed and into her chair one day, she thanks you for all your help. Then she says that she needs to tell you a story about her past, one that you don’t know, and one that will change everything.
My mom’s aged pretty well. I’ve seen some pictures of her when she was younger and I can only see that three things have changed: the growing cloud of afro spreading all over the bed, the weight she’s lost, and the expanding infinity in the depths of her eyes.
I have vague memories of the years when my mother still walked and talked. She used to be the most active member of the family. She hiked and biked, she taught a pilates class on Sundays for all the neighborhood soccer moms that had already abandoned their faith, she swam in summer, could outrun my uncles, and she was the first person to knock out one of my baby teeth when she stuffed my little foam basketball back in my face as I was trying to dunk on one of those toddler goals. Maybe she was a little too active, but the tooth was already loose and I got a full week of ice cream cones for the offense.
I can’t recall when my mom became an avid reader. My early childhood was mostly of her movement, but she became progressively inert sometime around when I could read for myself. When I left for kindergarten, she’d cook breakfast with a dusty, old, leatherbound tome in one hand, and when I came back at the end of the day, there would be a stack of four dusty, old leatherbound tomes on the living room table and a new one in her hands. By morning, they’d all be gone and a new one would appear.
My mom stopped reading before she stopped moving.
I remember the day all that stopped better than I remember my birthday last year, and not just because of the alcohol:
My mom was owning me in a game of Scrabble. I loved playing her, but I hated losing. That’s probably why it was always the first thing we did when I got out of school. She was brutal. I remember I started out with a small lead, but after four more hands she laid down a bingo connecting a double and triple word score for a total of something like 130 points. I got up tried to run off, crying, but she just yelled at me.
“You get your buns back here and finish this game right now, young man!”
I couldn’t recall her ever yelling at me, so I stopped, but I wasn’t ready to give in.
“What’s the point,” I said, turning around, sniffling like the child I was. I was only nine at the time, but I was pretty mature for my age thanks to her influence. “You’ve already won. I’ll never make that up, you’re too good.”
“Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. I’m not gonna lie to you and say I’m not really good at Scrabble.” My mom was never very humble. “But you don’t know how good you are unless you try too. You may not beat me, but you’ll know how close you are to doing so. You’ll learn some new words from me if you keep playing too, won’t you? But every battle is the last battle. If you quit now, you’ll never get better, you’ll never know, and you will never be better than me. You will spend your whole life as my child and never my equal. Is that okay with you?”
I never really considered the idea of being equal to my mom until then, but when she put that idea in my head, my whole world changed.
I was only able to shake my head.
“Good. I’m your mother, and I never want to lie to you. Letting you win, or not playing my best would be like lying. You deserve to win when you are good enough to win. Simple as that. Until then, I’ll help you get better by whooping up on that butt every time you ask it of me.”
My mom had this self-confident smile that made you want to punch her. It spread across her face like warm butter and she showed enough of her gums to make it seem like an endearing snarl. But, then and now, it only reminded me why I love her.
“Besides, you stop being a parent when your child beats you at something. I’d like to keep my job as long as I can.”
I didn’t know she was about to retire.
We played the game down to my last hand. I looked up from my last four letters utterly disappointed and certain I was defeated. She had a 63 point lead on me. As an adult, I look back and realize how close that actually was, especially after she overwhelmed me so early on. Back then, though, I could only see the inevitable defeat in front of me.
The last word she played was “pyx.”
I swore under my breath.
She stood up quickly and put her hands firmly on the table.
I thought I was in trouble. I was sure I was gonna get my mouth washed out with soap like Billy from class did only a few days earlier. His family used Irish Spring, which he said tasted like butt cheeks and Cap’n Crunch milk. I didn’t want to know what our soap tasted like, but when I saw my mom’s face, I realized she hadn’t even noticed my indiscretion.
Beads of sweat had appeared on her face and her whole body was trembling slightly.
“Mom,” I said.
Her eyes were growing glassy and vacant.
“I didn’t know it was gonna happen so soon,” she said to herself.
She slowly turned her whole body to face me, one step at a time, like every motion required a lot of effort.
“Hug me, please, sweetie.”
“Mom, are you okay?” I asked, but I still came around the table to hug her.
I knew something was horribly wrong when she didn’t close her arms around me; she only spoke, and that was slow and clipped.
“Mom made—mistake. Going away—while. Mommy…” She fell into my arms. Her whole body collapsed as if she were not my mother but a rag doll designed to look like her. I watched as the last light of awareness disappeared from her eyes and as she finished the last sentence I would hear her speak for over fifteen years, “…loves you.”
We never finished the game.
I called 911. The ambulance came and I rode with her to the emergency room in a hysterical fit of tears that was only restrained by my seatbelt. I spent the next four years of my life listening to grown-ups discuss the anomaly of my mother’s paralysis over clipboards, over my head. All I understood was that my mom was alive, awake 24 hours of the day, and completely unresponsive to any stimuli in the immediate environment. At the end of the fifth year, they managed to get her out of the hospital—after doing extensive research and, as I later found out, publishing several papers on her phenomenon—and into a special apartment complex for quadriplegics in the area.
I’d been volunteering with my mother’s apartment complex since I was sixteen. Volunteer nurses turn the patients every 4 to 6 hours, help with food when possible, clean the room and the patient, and we talk to them in hopes of providing stimuli to encourage them to wake up. In my case, I just watch my mother and walk the halls every so often to make sure no one has gotten in and to help whichever nurse is running the floor. Mostly, I study from my mother’s apartment until it is time for her to sleep. I turn her once every four hours, I read aloud to her twice, I beg her to come back to me when I feel weak, I pray when I’m desperate, and I do a lot of remembering. What I don’t do, anymore, is hope.
A dry, croaking noise emanated from her mouth as I was studying in the corner. I thought I was hearing things, but I turned around to make sure she was still breathing okay. Her face was turned toward me and, for the first time in over a decade and a half, she was frowning.
I fell over in my chair in a panic to stand up and, once I looked up, she had a weak smile on her face that suggested the one I learned to love to hate as a child.
I couldn’t talk. All I could do was turn my back and cry like an infant.
“Wa’er,” I heard behind me.
I turned around, wiping at my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater and said dumbly, “Huh?”
“Wa—dur,” she repeated. The glass was disappearing from her gaze. Her eyes looked wet again, and seemed to see what was in front of her.
“Water!” I shouted too loud. “Yes! I…” I stumbled on the chair I dropped and hurried to pick it up. “Just a sec,” I said rushing out of the room to fill a glass.
The quadriplegic apartments are all equipped with proper hospital beds and, when I came back, I was even more surprised to find that it had been shifted into the upright position already than I was to see her looking at me, smiling and aware.
I put a straw in the glass and placed it gently between her lips. She closed them and sucked forcefully on the straw, like she’d been waiting for that glass of water as long as I’d been waiting for her.
“Thank you,” she said as I moved the glass to the side table so I could gawk at her properly, “for everything.”
I wiped at my eyes and sniffled. I struggled to keep my composure in front of my now awake mother.
“It’s a medical miracle,” I stammered.
“No,” my mother said, “it’s not. It’s a fucking abomination and I think I owe you an explanation.”
My tears and sniffling stopped. I’d never heard my mom curse before. She had my attention.
“I need to tell you a story about my past, one there’s no way you could possibly know, and it’s likely to change everything you think you know about the world. Do you want my explanation or do you want to continue living as you always have? Either way, I’m back now and I’ll be with you for as long as I live.”
I wanted to hyperventilate. I wanted to crush the metal part of the armrest on the swivel chair I sat in. I wanted to let all of the fear, panic, and relief happen at once, but I asked, “That’s not some play on words right? You don’t mean you’re gonna die on me in the next few minutes, right?”
“The next few minutes, no. But, I only expect to live another nine years and, if you accept my explanation, I’ll have a lot more to explain before I do.”
“Tell me everything, then.”
“I was born 1,223 years ago in a small village at the western end of Tiqur Abbay, what you would call the Blue Nile today. One night, when I was a toddler, during a wedding, when I’d gotten away from the festivities at my home and into the bush, I found myself staring down a wolf. Without knowing why, I knew that if I looked away it would kill me and eat me. I stood there, with my eyes locked on the wolf, neither of us willing or able to move until daybreak when the adults descended on me.
That was the first time I ever used magic. I realize it doesn’t seem like much, but until the adults showed up, the wolf and I were locked in a death match. If my concentration was broken with no one around, the wolf would come and eat me, but if the wolf turned away, the spell I didn’t know I was casting would end its life. The wolf had to resist my power or die. Fight or flight. But not the kind of fight that involves teeth or claws, but one of will. The adults broke my concentration, but they also fought off the wolf. To this day, both of us live, locked in an unending battle of wills. One of us must lose, the other will be properly immortal until a greater power comes along to defeat us.
That is how I have lived so long: in terror and desperate to win an eternal spiritual battle against a wolf. To that end I made the ultimate weapon of humanity. I was a witch once. I used that power to foster a talent for alchemy. The secret I have that will change your life is simple: the elixir of life is real, but it is not permanent. No one could pour enough power into it to make it last that long.
My lovely baby boy, I am the last living alchemist on Earth and, as of the day you saw me fall, I am powerless. Time will race to catch up with me now that I’ve failed to push it back. I feel certain I have less than ten years left of life. That may not be enough time but, somehow, if you’re willing, I have to teach you everything I know, and, I need you to do what I could not. I need you to find and kill a wolf.”
Harold the Armchair
From WritersDigest.com’s “52 Writing Prompts” for the week of August 15th
Prompt: Write a story from the perspective of Harold the Armchair. What does he think about all day? Does he like being sat on? Do his parents approve of him being an armchair?
Leroy!
The old man turned around in his chair startled, looking for the voice in his head.
Leroy!
“Who…Who’s there?” No one had called him by that name in years. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him as Slim, since before his afro went gray and his hairline slid back toward his crown. Basically, ever since his goatee had been in style.
Leroy! Get yo fat ass off’a me!
Leroy grabbed the cane he had leaning on his armchair, looked down and up. He leaned over to look around the entertainment center. The television continued its incessant static hum of local news and day time talk shows picked up by a pair of bunny ear antennae, but nothing seemed to be behind it.
He scratched his head. “Must’ve been hearing things.” He leaned back in his chair to get comfortable again.
He felt a pair of large, leathery hands on his backside.
Nigga! Get yo’ ass off’a me!
Leroy was shoved halfway across the room. He struggled to right himself with his cane, until he came to a stop hugging his old, tube television.
“Who the hell…” He started shouting before he turned around.
The antennae slid off the television and onto the floor behind the entertainment center.
“Aww, damn it. It took me an hour to get those set right.”
And after a lifetime of wrong, you still ain’t got right, ya triflin mutha fucka.
It sounded like the voice was coming from right behind him. Leroy made to turn, his cane clicking like the second hand on a clock on the worn carpet, until he was able to face the direction he’d come.
Light was emanating from his old armchair. It flooded the room, blinding the old man until he stood before a fat, angry, smelly little black boy in a dirty leather suit.
“Jesus!” Leroy shouted.
“You ain’t been to church in twenty-three years, and you stopped watching the sermons twelve years ago. Don’t go callin’ on God now.”
“Who the hell are you?” Leroy straightened himself up, at least as much as his cane and lower back pain would allow. “And what did you do with my armchair?” he demanded.
“I am your armchair, ya old fool. Can’t you smell the stink of your own ass on me, or do you still disown the funk of ya own farts these days?”
“That’s ridiculous! How did you get in here? You better find yo’ way out ‘fore I call the police.”
“You know damn well the police won’t be here for at least a half hour if you call ‘em, and they’re like not to come if you tell ‘em someone broke into ya house claiming to be ya armchair. If they do come quick, it’ll be ‘cause they was already in the neighborhood or a damn miracle. Either way, they’ll break down ya door if you don’t get to it fast enough, like as not. So just keep ya ol’ ass over there and listen up.” Leroy started to shuffle toward his dining room. “Naw, bitch, stand! You done a lifetime of sittin’ already, ol’ man, and I wouldn’t have you puttin’ nobody else through the bullshit I been through.”
“I need to sit. My back and my…”
“Nigga, please!” The boy sat on the floor and stared Leroy down, daring him to move toward the couch again. “We both know you need that cane ‘cause you ain’t never took care of yourself. That’s why I’m here.”
“You don’t know nothing about me! Get out of my house!”
“I know you ain’t been shit since ya made the last good choice of yo’ life and didn’t wear bell bottoms on Soul Train.”
“How you know that?”
“Because I was in ya Mama’s living room back then. I told you, I’m your damn armchair, Harold.”
Leroy thought back, remembering the days when his daughter still came to visit, before he ran from the drama and the lawyers. She’d named his armchair Harold. He hadn’t heard the name in over thirty years. He’d completely forgotten about it, but not about his daughter. He looked at the little boy with new eyes.
“But…how in God’s name…”
“God ain’t got nothing to do with it.” Harold thought better of himself and said, “Well, not much as it goes. You ain’t know it but every day, every hour of yo’ miserable life, you been leaching off bits and pieces of ya soul like clipped toe nails in the carpet?” The old man looked baffled. “Well, after forty-three years of close contact with yo crusty ass, I’m what ya get. If you weren’t so damn ratchet, I might’ve kept quiet, but you ain’t shit and someone had to tell you.”
“Had to tell me what? Am I dreamin’? Are you a ghost? Lord help me!”
“Don’t bother prayin’. Ain’t nobody fit to answer yo’ empty prayers. You bout as shiftless as the Great Serpents back legs.” Harold sighed. “This ain’t a dream. Do I need to hit ya to prove it?”
Leroy shook his cane. “You better not ya nappy headed lil’ pickaninny! I’ll beat some manners into you if you so much as think of touchin’ me!”
“See, you know I ain’t a ghost, and you know this ain’t a dream. I’m yo’ armchair. As soon as you accept that, we can move on.”
Leroy stared down at the boy, considering his options. He narrowed his eyes and said, “Say you are my chair, what bring you out now?”
Harold had this way of sitting that made it seem like he was still standing. Like his legs were still under him and he was ready to stand at any second. It gave Leroy the heebee-jeebees. But the kid closed his eyes for a moment to consider how to answer the old man’s question, and that action put Leroy at ease a bit. Dream, ghost or whatever, the child didn’t seem to be out to hurt him. Although if he kept standing like he was, his feet and knees were likely to swell up like grapefruits ready to burst.
“You ain’t watch no smart shows on the television, and you ain’t touched none of them books on yo’ shelf since ya got ‘em at the Goodwill fi’teen years ago so I ain’t had none smart to talk to, but basically, the soul, ya know, it’s like a cup that the Good Lord is always fillin’ and a little spills over now and then. If you spill over somethin’ enough, it starts to get a soul of its own, right. But that takes a lot of time, now, ya understand? It ain’t like a soul is some little thing. Ain’t no teacup, ya know. More like a barrel, or a…whatcha call it? They got ‘em in factories and shit. A vat. Yeah, a vat, I think. So a little spill over on Monday, a little on Wednesday, and the stuff ya got fills up a drop at a time. Most of the stuff you own never will fill up. Ya break it or ya throw it away. If it’s lucky, ya give it away and it gets a chance from someone else. Ya can’t make a soul with casual use, ya hear. Even if you used somethin’ every day for a few hours a day, it wouldn’t be alive when you died, ‘cause we come to life from little drops. Like you was tryin’ to fill a swimmin’ pool with the coffee at the bottom of yo’ cup when you done. How many cups you think that take, huh? A lot, right. But you, nigga, you spent hour after hour, day after day sittin’ in me. Ain’t hardly nothin’ else in ya house catchin’ any of yo’ spillage. What should take a century or two you managed to do in just fifty years or so. Or, however long it’s been since you bought me. That’s how lazy you been.”
“So I been sittin’ a lot. What of it? That why you talkin’ to me now? To tell me I been sittin’ too damn much? You should’a said that thirty years ago, ‘fore I ruined my knees and my hips got all outta place. Ain’t nothin’ for me to do but sit no more.”
“Hell naw I ain’t come here to stop you from sittin’. It’d be nice if you didn’t fart so damn much when you did, and I’d appreciate it if you’da cleaned me every now and again over the years,” Harold touched the leather of his lapel, “I wouldn’t be so damn sticky if ya had, but I ain’t here for myself. I’m here for you. You bought me. You gave me life. Shitty as you is, much as I can’t stand yo’ ass, I still owe you my life. So I gotta stop you from wastin’ yours.”
“What you mean?”
“I mean, call ya damn daughter!” Harold got up and grabbed the cordless phone off the end table.
Leroy scoffed. “Naw, I can’t do that. I ain’t heard from her or her mama in over thirty years, what I look like calllin’ her after all these years.”
“Like her father.” Harold held out the phone.
“She probably changed her number by now,” Leroy said. His eyes shifted back and forth between the boy and the phone in his hand like it was a writhing snake.
Harold let his hand drop to his side. He didn’t hold out the phone, but he held the old man’s gaze.
“You know I been listenin’ to yo’ heartbeat for the last eight years?”
“I thought you said you just come to life,” Leroy said.
“That’s true. I ain’t had enough spirit in me to look like this until a minute ago,” Harold answered.
“Just now?”
“Yeah, just now. While you was sippin’ on that OE, laughin’ at re-runs of Jerry Springer, you spilled over a bit and I just knew. I was alive.”
“So how you been able to hear my heartbeat?”
“Cause you been sittin’ in me this whole time. Just cause I ain’t change shape, and you can’t hear me while I tell you ‘bout yourself don’t mean I ain’t there. Like a baby inside her mama. Once I had ears to hear, I heard.”
“Fine then, you could hear my heartbeat…”
“And it’s off. You gettin’ old, and if you don’t call ya daughter soon ya might not live long enough for her to call you.”
Leroy’s eyes widened and his skin paled, least as pale as a man as dark as he was could get, more like ashen. “I need to sit,” he said.
“Damn, go on ahead. You look like you ready to fall out.” Leroy stood up, quick and smooth like he had springs in his legs, and grabbed the chair at the end of the dining room table. He brought it over to Leroy and helped him sit down.
“You tellin’ me I’ma die soon?”
“Hell, I dunno, man,” Harold said. “I’m a damn armchair. I only know as much as the TV shows you watch and the stuff in the room talks.”
“There other stuff in the room that’s alive?”
He pointed at the chair he brought to Leroy. “The chair you sittin’ in was in the family of a doctor for thirty years. She don’t know much, just what people talked about round the dinner table, ‘cause books like doctors got never last long enough to get life in ‘em, but I ask what the change in yo’ heartbeat meant and she think you gonna have a heartattack one of these days. We don’t know when, but it’s like to happen.”
“I do get chest pain sometimes when I walk up the stairs,” Leroy mumbled to himself.
“Yeah, I ain’t know that, but you oughta get ya life in order before the big one comes.”
“And you sayin’…”
“I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ except that you know if you don’t call yo’ daughter and apologize best you can for all the years you been gone, you gonna regret it. I can’t stop you from dyin’, and I can’t cleanse yo’ sins so you can look the Lord in the eye when you meet ‘em, but ain’t no reason you gotta die with that regret in yo’ heart. You can go out knowin’ you set things right with ya blood.”
Harold held out the phone.
Leroy looked at the boy, smelled years of neglect on his dirty leather suit; like his own soul. He took the phone. His hands shook as he dialed a number he once got from the girl’s mother, last time he spoke to her. A number he didn’t know he’d memorized all those years ago.
555-55…
“Hello?”
There was a life’s worth of noise in the background: the sound of a running dish washer, dishes being scraped by silverware, maybe the sound of teenage children.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
Leroy’s eyes watered.
Harold stepped back to his usual place, angled just right, and changed back into being an armchair.
“Thank you,” Leroy said.
Harold was silent.
“I’m sorry, who is this?” said the voice on the other end of the phone.
“It’s been a long time, ‘Tink,” Leroy said…
Fun fact:
I write those little prose blurbs as an apology to whomever it is out there that happens to think I don’t post often enough. And because I usually have a single turn of phrase in my head after I finish writing something else and I need it to go somewhere. I have other writing to work on but I don’t want you to feel neglected. S/O to my humble following. I have no clue why you read me but, since you do, I appreciate you.
Whisper to me...
...when the truth gets too loud for the lies to keep talking.
In the Heart
In the heart of the storm, where the wind forgets to howl and the sky hasn’t been rent apart, where hell’s fury is little more than mist and miasma, where scattered earth learns to settle, time travels by inches, and naked light only comes in flashes, the tempest swirls beyond my knowing and the delusion of peace comes easy.
