August 5-12, 2023

August 5

Noun: Version, Genre/Style: Prose, Character: Femme Fatale

Is this the version of herself she had to be? Not the girl who stargazed and believed in impossible heights. Not the woman, disillusioned, who only tries to keep to herself. No, she was not left to her own devices, even when that was all she wanted. They called her a monster, so she painted on the most beautiful smile a person could conceive. Red lips and bright eyes and bone white teeth. Monster, they said, so she donned jewels and high fashion and carried herself so seductively. Monster, they no longer said, but whispers follow her now. Not from the voices that once accused, because there is no more breath to support those words. Now, the monsters are dead, and all they have left is her, with those whispers following every sweep of her dress. They warn about a monster, but, she knows, the evil is not in any body, any physical form. The monster is all around her. And so, did she become the monster like they thought? Or merely a being capable of surviving them?

August 6

Noun: Failure, Genre/Style: Isekai, Character: Genius Detective

“Tell me another one, Daddy,” I plead, pulling up the covers of my bed up to my chin and wriggling until my pillow is comfortable under me. Daddy laughs, head thrown back and mouth wide, and I smile back at him. 

He reaches down to the pointed tips of my ears and gives them a tiny flick. “Now, little one, I said only one more two stories ago. It’s time for you to go to bed.” 

“Please?” I bat my eyes up at him, pouting just a little. Just in the way I know gets me cookies and extra time at the park--and more bedtime stories.

Daddy sighs, but he’s still smiling. “Alright, alright,” he says, adjusting himself on the chair at my bedside until he finds a spot he’s comfortable in, too. And then, he begins, and it’s like a book but better. Every word draws me in like the reel of an expert fisherman, painting a world so different from the one I know. One where the people have rounded ears and drive things that smoke and run faster than any horse and live in great big buildings taller than a hundred fae. 

And I get to see that world through Daddy’s eyes. He went there, he tells me. Spent years there helping the round-ear people with all sorts of things. Finding lost items, discovering secrets buried in important texts, piecing together clues strewn about a room as easily as a seamstress running cloth under a sewing machine. He helped lots of the round-ears. And then, he came home.

It wasn’t until I was older that I thought to wonder how he got there. And, more importantly, why he came back. 

He doesn’t tell me about it, but Daddy is a detective and I want to be just like him. So when he’s away, I sneak into his study with a magnifying glass pilfered from his bedroom and root through his notes and baubles and pictures, imagining that there was some great mystery to uncover. And there was, but I didn’t piece it together until many years--and many bedtime stories--later. 

That world, the one he went to--he said he can never go back. Says he doesn’t want to. He says it with a smile most of the time, smoothing my hair back and promising me he’d rather stay by my side. But sometimes, though he smiles, his eyes pinch and his voice doesn’t sound quite right. 

The people there loved science, he said. They made great big contraptions and the most amazing technology--and I begin to gather up the pieces. I might not be a genius like him, but even I know where there is innovation, there is destruction. People who take something innocuous or brilliant and turn it into something to hurt. Sometimes, they don’t even mean to.

And then, there is the picture. The one he keeps in his study in the bottom drawer of his desk between the last of E and beginning of F in the dictionary. A pointed thing, like a pencil, but much bigger and rounder, with strange fins on one end. Pointed toward a blue sky, like it might fly there. 

When I am older and braver, I work up the courage to confront him about it. I show him the picture and my nerves turn the words into a demand. 

“It’s a bomb,” he says. That’s all he says on the matter.

I don’t ask after that what happened to the world I loved in my childhood. My father is here, and I am here, and nothing else from that world is. 

I’ll never ask him, but I wonder if that’s why he kept the picture where it was. E, for end, and F, for failure.

August 7

Noun: Addition, Genre/Style: Drama, Character: Sickly

Addition:

They fell in love, despite the circumstances. Their families, their careers, her health. They ran away together to a far off place, away from those who would keep them apart, and nourished each other like sunflowers finding light in one another. They wed, and it should have been happily ever after.

Multiplication:

Once, they fell in love. Then, they loved. And from that came something that would fill their hearts to the absolute brim: children. One, two, three, four. But each of them carried a seed inside them, a curse inherited, a scorn without intention.

Division:

They’re falling apart. He never says it, but he blames her. For what is happening to their children, to their marriage. Until, one day, he cannot take it anymore. The papers are issued, and the woman is left with the children he couldn’t bear to bury.

Subtraction:

Down they go, one by one by one. Fallen to curses and scorn that came from nothing, and yet, came from her. Is she to blame? he wonders. As he stands above four graves and tears trail down his face, he wonders, who is to blame?

August 8

Noun: Potato, Genre/Style: Horror, Character: Martyr

The flies refuse to abate. They swarm about the dining table and its occupied chairs. It would be better, you think, if the occupants were dead. These people with their knives and wicked grins. The flies crawl on their exposed teeth, their too-wide eyes, buzz around their dirty, mangy hair. Their leader continues to speak, to thank their god for the meal and the banishment of a heretic such as the likes of you. When they begin to carve into your flesh, your blood mingling with the dirt coating your skin, you will not be dead. You will scream and writhe and fight, but they will hold you down with their bony hands and bite into you, moaning at the flavor of your body. You will not be dead when they do this, but when you do die, their moans will turn to screams. For you were the sacrifice to kill these people, your flesh tainted with poison. You only hope you don’t turn them into martyrs.

August 9

Noun: Business, Genre/Style: Poetry, Character: Childhood Friend

What does it mean for two people to be reunited?

After so much time and so much distance

Can they be called the same people they once were?

Can it really be called a reunion

When there is nothing but warped pieces

Trying to slot back together?

They seem like they were friends once

The women I see embracing outside the airport gate

I read the lips of the tall one

In a suit with her hair in a bun and impeccable makeup

She says, It’s been so long

And the other woman

Short, in tattered jeans and a ratty shirt

Tattoos up her arms and piercings peppered on her face

Gives a belated smile

Were they expecting each other,

Or were they looking for a person they lost

And now, perhaps, have found again?

If a rock is dropped in a river

And smoothed and rounded by the current

Is it the same rock that began the journey

Or does it only become the river stone washed on the shore?

But then, the short woman’s smile grows

And she says, It’s good to see you

Maybe the pieces won’t always fit back together

But, at least in this instance, two strangers 

Are simply two childhood friends

Reuniting

August 10

Noun: Childhood, Genre/Style: Sci-Fi, Character: Criminal

How does a broken thing return home? How does a soldier return from the battlefield or a criminal free themselves from prison--even long after they have left the physical institute? He wasn’t sure he even had a home, some place he could go and feel welcomed or loved. He was not created for such things. Constructed from metal and wire and circuitry, a weapon placed in his clicking appendages, so different from human hands, and told to fight and fight and fight. And so he fought and fought and lost--lost his friends, lost his creator, lost his meaning. But they won, the generals say. The war is over, and the soldier can go home. And when the thing made to kill starts to do it again? With no other purpose, what could anyone have expected? He was never a child with innocence to lose, so how could they even call him a criminal? 

Perhaps it’s all he ever was.

August 11

Noun: Life, Genre/Style: Historical fiction, Character: Workaholic

It was the empty space that eventually brought her undoing.

She’d wanted it. More than anything, she’d wanted her child to be chosen. It was her whole life, this cycle of death to fuel life, and she’d desired more than anything for her child to be part of it. It was her duty as a priestess to preside over the ceremony to Tlaloc, and every year, she would pretend that the child she was dressing in papers was them. Every year, she would imagine she was planting the seeds in her child’s face and eyes, a plead for life; she would imagine she was painting their forehead blue, begging for rain. She would wrap a digging stick in the body’s tiny, limp fingers, and hope that one day it would be her own child.

And then, finally, her child was chosen, and it was their body that she adorned for the ceremony. She’d cried that day. Not of anguish, but overcome with joy.

It came later, when she went home. When she continued to perform her duties as priestess and wife--but no longer mother. Holding their lifeless body had not done it, but day after passing day without them built up something within her, and despite the necessity of it all, for the first time, she wished--privately, selfishly--that life did not have to come from death.

August 12

Noun: Art, Genre/Style: Cyberpunk, Character: Experiment Gone Wrong

The metal of the augmentations used to be cool under his skin, an intrusion in his body that took a while to get used to, but once he did, was a comfort and source of confidence. He’d been stronger, more agile, deadly as a predator should be, with a soft step--every bit the prowling panther. 

But it hadn’t been enough. There was a study being conducted, the person said. All in hushed tones, with dark glasses over their eyes and a hood up against the dripping water from the lip of the roof high above them. They had some type of augmentation to their throat, the faint lines etched into the skin making him think they could change their voice, too.

He had gone based on nothing but the promise that he could be more than he already was. 

The metal of the augmentations burned now, burned him from the inside out. They locked his limbs in place or made them twist to their extremes, all while the hooded figure watched, a piece of charcoal in one hand and the back of a canvas obscuring their body. 

You will be studied, the person said, after the supposed upgrades had been made. He could no longer move his arms to attack, or even his lips to scream. 

They said, you will be art.