Blog on hold

...until early June, for the management of minor events such as weddings, funerals, and various vacations.

Lamentation

The birds in their cages set up such a racket the second I stepped in that musty old room. Like they knew the old lady was dead. Like they knew as certain as I knew, in my own mind, that it was my fault she was -- my fault for being such a loud, lazy, self-involved twenty-three year old that I swore I'd carry her mail up the one flight to her apartment and in since the second day never, ever did, not once.

Wednesday's Prompt

A simple but elegant word for Wednesday dolor: Lamentation.

Delinquent

She said, "the jailor told me very solemnly 'there is no time here' before he up and swallowed the rusty key to my door here, and without time, there can't really be punishment, can there? If your sentence is eternity, you can't wonder if you could've done something to get it shorter or worry that bad behavior will get you more time in prison, you just are, you just accept it, I think."

Grinning, she sits down and begins writing her theory in chalk on the floor.

Delinquent

The letter is beyond late. She's checked the mail, asked around, been forward to the point of awkwardness. Still, she can't understand how the world's best pyramid scheme, the one that had made millionaires, toppled governments, exalted and ruined every one of her friends, had somehow passed her by.

Friday's prompt

Friday's are late to rise! Today's prompt is:

Delinquent

Farthest

He gets in the security line for the plane and I don't even wait to see him walk through the door, just wave goodbye to his back. It's only when I get back in my car and see his orange college sweatshirt carelessly crumpled on the passenger seat that pain fills my chest and all the anger and hate of the last few months fills the cauldron of his absence and transforms lead into gold, hate into love.

Tantalus has nothing on me.

Farthest

"No", the man said in a low tone, looking out from the ferry's railing and over the bay, "not there and not beyond there and a hundred or a thousand miles past that." The two small children looked up at him, wide-eyed. "Where I come from," he said, "is oceans and nations from here, on the other side of the world, all my family and friends and the places I know and love and cherish," and while the boy and girl tried to imagine such vastness, a something almost like a tear rose up in the wake of his eye.

Wednesday's Prompt

Keeping with the single word:

Farthest

Flourish!

He pens his final words in blood because it is all the ink he has, the ivory letter opener his only instrument, and yet so much to say. As he carves his finest calligraphy, he realizes that blood is all he has ever had to write with, really, if one isn't too literal about these things, and he laughs surprised at the thought.

Because it is is important that they know, he signs in a great plume the name of his murderer: himself, only himself, like all writers great and small.

Flourish

The tenth of May -- that was the day I stumbled across the second set of sales records in the locked back office, along with the letter. That was the day it hit me like a fist to the face that for the entire goddamn ten years, Sid was nothing by a conniving bastard. That was the goddamn glorious day it dawned on me that I was about to be rich -- rich enough, anyway; one little just dessert for all those goddamn years of hard work and suffering and humiliation.

Monday's prompt

In honor of spring, Monday's one-word prompt is:

Flourish

Use it as you will.

Arabesque

Their matching vine tattoos - glossy green with tiny pink spiral flowers, one twisting up her left arm and one twisting down his right arm - were so beautiful together it was hard to believe that only a month later she'd tried to scour her left arm clean with bleach. Failed, and stumbled through the park after, lost and drunk and stupid and tripping over rocks in the dark, until she saw with wonder a trellis she'd never seen before, vines all up it, the exact shape and color of the design he'd chosen for them -

She held out her left arm and the vines grew towards her, flowers trembling, wrapping at first around her wrists and then up past her locked elbows and shaking shoulders, around and down her neck until they formed a perfect pattern on her body: a pale ancient statue in the moonlight.

Arabesque

Madeleine sits at the table by her two year old son. For minutes at a stretch, she is lost in thought, drawing graceful arcs and whorls on the cafe napkin. For a year now, this has been the only way to efface the constant waking dreams of car accidents, kidnapping, earthquakes, acts of terrorism -- of missing Emma so much more than the husband that Emma stole from her.

Wednesday's prompt

Wednesday's prompt keeps to the one-word theme:

Arabesque

Use it as you will.

Solitude

That last of the musket-shots rang out in the cold morning air. He looked around him; his side, their side -- all fallen, to a one. Later, reflecting back on that moment, he could hardly believe how slow it was to dawn on him that he was alone and free, completely and utterly free.

Monday's prompt

Monday's prompt is a single word:

Solitude

Use it as you will.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since / Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?

"Ow!" Cassie said, and hopped up, dancing in pain, waving her injured hand around in front of her, "what the hell, Leah?" There was no way she could have known that the fight they then had over one pricked finger would end their seventh-grade friendship. She couldn't have known the monstrous enemy she'd create, two years later, bent on making her high school a living hell.

Monday's prompt

Monday's prompt is taken from one of Donne's more famous -- and modern -- poems:

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?

-- John Donne, The Flea

Traced in the Shadow/An Indecipherable Cause

She didn't want me to see her face after the fire, so we sat silent silhouetted in darkness like on some crime drama: identity changed to protect the victim.

But I knew who she was. And the way she turned her head ever so slightly when I asked how it started - the way she whispered that they thought it must have been an electrical outlet sparking with all the dramatic over-conviction of a soap opera actress reciting lines - I knew with a sickening certainty that she was not the victim here after all.

Traced in the shadow, an indecipherable cause.

I studied the far side of the room from the quiet dark of my chair in the corner. It hardly took a rustle: my gun hand flew up and shot the small form, which fell giggling to the floor. Tommy staggered up, holding the foam bullet to his heart, laughing and moaning at once, "you shot me, I'm hit, I'm hit!"

Wednesday's prompt

Continuing our observance of National Poetry Month, a small snippet from a poem about blackbirds:

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Observe the Sky Begin to Blanch

I stumble into the desert and keep stumbling forward just to try to escape the darkness that lurks even beyond my own eyelids. It is only hours before my wounds and thirst overtake me and I collapse to my knees, parched as a lover denied, just as the sun reaches its apex and spills pure white light onto the sky, the sand, my own red and blistered flesh.

For one such as I who has always feared the dark, there can be no greater blessing than to die in this way - eyes closed, but still full of light.

Observe the sky begin to blanch

The months of accreted data, notes, plotted graphs taken from the high, lone telescope in the Andes does not lie: she has proof, certain proof that the white mantle of the Milky Way is spilling from its mold, billowing into space. The world has to know, and her newfound mission takes its toll on her life, beginning with the stressful opprobrium of her peers, then the loss of her grants, her position, her marriage.... And in the end, as more data pours in, it grows painfully clear that she was not quite right and not quite wrong, but had ultimately staked a revolution on hardly an evolutionary footnote, made a waste of her life for the semblance of the shifting shape of the haunting light of distant stars, no more.

Monday's prompt

The prompt for Monday is a spare line the fictional (and aged) poet in a play:

Observe the sky begin to blanch

Tennessee Williams, Night of the Iguana

Lay your sleeping head, my love...

All that night and until the sun rose and scorched the endless ribbon of road, she leaned her little five-year-old head on my arm, so I made do driving with only my left. It was peaceful with all the quiet intensity of a hundred suns, that father and daughter pose, and I didn't have the heart to think -- to think about it all. About where we were going, about the hell I'd have from Susan when she found out, about the madness of it; mad and wild and free and impossible and absolutely every-fiber-of-my-being unavoidable as a headlong fall.

Friday's prompt: Auden

Friday's prompt comes from the first two lines by the modernist poet, Auden:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

W.H. Auden, Lullaby

A child is sleeping...

Every morning for as long as he could remember he heard the delicate footsteps descending and the rough loaf of bread and clay jug of water slammed on the ground beside his straw mat, every morning he recited prayers after the voice's even-toned instruction, every morning the voice instructed him to not remove the blindfold until he counted to one hundred, every morning he listened to the footsteps moving away and out of the cellar and he counted to one hundred and took the blindfold off. One day a great rebellion arose in him and he removed the blindfold as soon as he woke up and waited for the footsteps.

And when they did not come that day, or that night, or the next day, and there was no bread or water, he took his first halting terrified steps up the stairs, marveling at hearing the sound of his steps for the first time.

A child is sleeping: an old man gone.

"Just who started this damn-fool pissing contest anyway," she asked, "your father who's been gone ten years?" 

"That's not the point," I said, "that's not the goddamn --"

"No," she said, hotly, "just because for the last forty years him and then you've mowed that patch of grass you claim is on our property, when you  know damn well it ain't, doesn't mean you can just send your son out there for Williams to shout off his lawn -- you can't do that to him, you can't."

Wednesday's prompt is the short end of a short poem. In a sense, it forms a two sentence story of its own:

A child is sleeping:

An old man gone.

O, father forsaken,

Forgive your son!

- James Joyce, Ecce Puer

All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born

They say that when the princess rose from her sleep after a hundred years, she was far more beautiful than that innocent young girl pricked by a spindle (though she had not aged a day). But the first royal command that passed her rose-petal lips was to execute all the spinners in the land (just to be safe, you see). 

And so now I hide trembling from the conquering queen who wears a crown of brambles, stained with the blood of failed princes, in her golden hair (and a look like that of one who has lost something even she cannot comprehend in her eyes, always).

All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.

"Senescence," the cracked, crone-like MP's voice intoned, "unlike our own species, the rate of genetic mutations mounts geometrically with age." The small blue thing rattled around the cage, its several arms all ending in minute, elegant, theatrical hands. 

"The point is," she said, "its so-called powers are off the charts, but its mental stability, the sheer damge it could do" -- she sighed -- "what this is, is a diplomatic nightmare."

Continuing the theme of National Poetry Month, Monday's prompt is taken from a poem by Yeats, a concluding sentiment happily stripped of its context:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

-W.B. Yeats, Easter, 1916

The Pearls That Were His Eyes

He took off his sunglasses to expose eyes blank as glossed bones in the desert and I drew on all my willpower to not recoil as he leaned in close to rasp:
"They say never to stare at the sun, kid, but I didn't listen."
And I forgave him his anger, because the slight tremor in his rough voice and the trembling flesh of his ruined eyes told me that what he had seen was more beautiful than he could ever explain to someone like me, someone who always listened.

This are pearls that were his eyes

Jack threw fricking gravel  at my bedroom window for ten minutes until I put my face in the glass and gave him the finger. It was warm and I remember the smell of the recent rain and how the wildest thing we could think of doing was to crawl down from the bridge and walk along the river. And that's when we found it: dark and waterlogged and strangely, obscenely bluish pockmarked, the dead woman's eyes turned up in some sort of milky-white epiphany.

Friday's prompt: yet more Eliot

Friday's prompt is both an Eliot quote and a Shakespeare quote. Because that is how T.S. rolls:

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland...

or

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

At the second turning of the second stair

"I talked to dad," she said, shifting her glass on the table, "they're fighting again--"

"Yeah, you know what, I've moved on -- moved up, even," I said, "and left their little -- little fucking dramas behind."

She sighed and her eyes couldn't seem to leave her plate as she murmured, "no, no -- she cheated on him and this time... I think it's really over."

Wednesday's Prompt: More Eliot

Wednesday's prompt comes from a poem appropriate for the day (and one of my favorite):

At the second turning of the second stair

I left them twisting, turning below;

-T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

Portrait of a Lady

April tried not to think about what he'd just said and twisted the lilac stem between her thumb and index fingers, feeling only the delicate membranes of the stem. Flowers were living things too - did they have a pulse, did they breathe, did they feel just like she did?

The pressure of her anxious fingers severed the stem in half, green and sloppy, and the flower fell helplessly into her lap.

Now that the lilacs are in bloom

The boy in the black t-shirt crumples the sheet that he has covered with pencil lines and tosses it aside.

Cressida lies on the platform, naked, holding lilacs. She used to enjoy her second job, but she is beginning to feel like her representations - graphite-blackened, twisted and balled up, a thing to be viewed or to be discarded.

Now that lilacs are in bloom...

Every day, the princess was allowed from the tower to pick fresh spring flowers for her room. Her step-mother smiled cruelly, never suspecting. When night fell, however, the princess tiptoed over to the vase, twirled the sprig of blossoms three times, and they became a green sleigh with a team of flying horses, ready to carry her off to her prince.

In honor of the fact that April is National Poetry Month, prompts will be taken from various poems. This week, T.S. Eliot, who had some choice words for this particular month. Here is Monday's:

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

T.S. Eliot, Portrait of a Lady.

Abecedarian

They had practiced cursive every day together before the stroke, his crinkled hands gently guiding the child's chubby fingers. When he came home finally from the hospital, the child sat outside his room with ink and paper and refused to listen when his parents said he'd need a different tutor, and they thought he didn't understand what had happened.

But then every day after, he was in his grandfather's room, impatiently guiding his grandfather's stiff hands to form the elegant sloping forms of the letters they had studied together for so long.

Abecedarian

"That was a breakup," she said as the door slammed. He stormed through the kitchen, stomping loudly and knocking a plate off the kitchen table as he went -- and one of the blocks as well. His brother looked up from the colored letter-blocks still on the table that, at 27 years of age, he barely understood, his idiot lips apart and his wide idiot eyes brimming with surprise, incomprehension, and tears.

Friday's Prompt: A Word!

Friday's prompt is a word, defined and grabbed as randomly as possible. Write about the experience of the word without using it in the story, trying to capture the meaning or essence.

Today's word is abecedarian - a person who is learning the alphabet.

Post your story by 6 pm Friday. Happy Easter!

Butterflies In His Stomach

We're too old to play doctor, he protested laughing, and I caught his arm, rolling him over on the fresh wet grass, laying my head on his stomach. Fine, what do you hear?

Just his heart racing so fast it overpowered everything else: the hidden birds trilling all around us, the skateboarders and bicyclists speeding by, his anxious bursts of laughter, my own heartbeat and breath and thoughts: all that overshadowed by the faint infinitely fast fluttering of his pulse.

butterflies in his stomach

It took us a while to find out where the sound had come from, but when we got there we saw all three cases tumbled to the floor, glass everywhere. And what Charles so aptly calls That Damned Idiot Mastiff Hound was just sitting there, unharmed, licking his lips, crumbs of rare butterfly wing clinging to the edge of his mouth. So that is where grandfather's legacy went.

Wednesday's Prompt: Saying, Quote, or Cliche

Wednesday's prompt is a saying, quote, or cliche, grabbed from the internet as randomly as possible.

Your quote, due by 6 pm Wednesday, is at last a cliched phrase: "butterflies in his stomach."

Where have we seen the butler story before?

Unsung, he keeps always to the shadows, opening every door for you, greeting your guests, nodding his head solemnly at your atrocious comments, blending in with the stark black-and-white decor of your house, as modern and decorative as all your furniture.

Unappreciated, he starts to think he is more ghost than man, and perhaps if your guests and relatives were ghosts as well, they would notice him.

Unnoticed, he slips poison into every last dish.

Where Have We Seen the Butler Story Before?

I don't get it. It wasn't a problem when we hired the nanny, or that cleaning lady -- what's her name? -- or the groundskeeper. But Antoine opens the door for them just once and now your family goes apeshit ballistic?

Monday's Prompt: Stolen From the Headlines!

Write about the selected headline by 6 pm Monday. Do not quote or rephrase it.

Your headline for Monday is: Where Have We Seen the Butler Story Before?

Liminal

Mrs. Preston always looks so happy in the moment before she is absolved of her sins, and the priest wonders why. He decides that she must look forward to her reconciliation with God.

In fact it is the only time in Mrs. Preston's life that she is not looking forward to anything - suspended between sin and absolution, she exists in a world without penalty or offense, a world without expectations.

Friday's Prompt: Liminal

Friday's prompt is a word, defined and grabbed as randomly as possible. Write about the experience of the word without using it in the story, trying to capture the meaning or essence.

Today's word is liminal, defined here - 1. At an intermediate state. 2. At the threshold of consciousness.

Post your story by 6 pm Saturday. Have a good weekend!

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

"None of it means a thing," he said, tossing back another glass of scotch, "it's empty and void and meaningless, like passing rains, or the crops that rise and fall and spring up again."

"But they don't know that," she said, quietly, "they sing our names and make likenesses and fill their poor heads up with such nonsense..."

"Then I'll give them fire and you'll see, it'll burn a hole right through their chests and their heads and the very world they stand on," rejoined Prometheus, pushing back his mop of hair and sitting fully upright, "and they will doubt everything."

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

He spends months building the wardrobe, adjusting his accent and his vocabulary, practicing his expressions in the mirror as grainy hand-held video clips play in the background.

At first he fears discovery, but no one recognizes the obscure dead musician whose persona he has adopted. Everyone loves his style, his hair, his coat - they smile at him in the streets, and he smiles back, knowing he is no fake, but an avatar.

Wednesday's Prompt: Saying, Quote, or Cliche

Wednesday's prompt is a saying, quote, or cliche, grabbed from the internet as randomly as possible.

Your quote, due by 6 pm Wednesday, is the charmingly ironic: "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." (Oscar Wilde)

Digging Up A Piece of Hollywood History

A childhood star emerges from obscurity with a scheme to blackmail the celebrity with whom he'd had an underage affair. He digs through his old lover's past, learning he was far from the only secret hidden there. After they arrest him on suspicion, sitting in his cell, the clues coalesce in his mind -- and suddenly, he realizes the stone-cold bitch who did it, and that she had just been waiting for a fool to pin it on.

Monday's Prompt: Stolen From the Headlines!

Write about the selected headline by 6 pm Monday. Do not quote or rephrase it.

Your headline for today is: "Digging Up A Piece of Hollywood History."

Edacious

A jeep blindsided him out of nowhere, in the middle of morning traffic. And from the moment I laid eyes on the hideous knot of wreckage that took my husband from me, it was like a curtain had been pulled away. Now everywhere I looked, death lurked, greedily, hungrily, just waiting to lunge at the oblivious living world.

Edacious

"Today, I'm really going to pay," she tells me as she takes her chai.

"Sorry," she says as she hands me back the empty mug, "I lost track of the time and plowed through it."

She buys her chai every day, so I put up with it - but I still won't let her post fliers for her speed-reading classes on our walls.

Edacious - Based on a True Story

Yes, the hunger may be intense, overwhelming, all-consuming, endless, ceaseless, mindless. But you still shouldn't tell your almost-entirely-male team "God, I could totally shove FOUR DONUTS in my mouth right now" to express how hungry you are unless you want to hear an intense discussion on the subject of your mouth's capacity for the rest of the day.

So I learned.

Friday's Prompt: Edacious

Friday's prompt is a word, defined and grabbed as randomly as possible. Write about the experience of the word without using it in the story, trying to capture the meaning or essence.

Today's word is edacious, defined here - devouring, voracious.

Post your story by 6 pm Friday.

"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back."

The man set a silver coin on the counter, one imprinted with the king's seal - no provincial money, this.

But when the barmaid took his order, he gave it in a language I had never heard. My heart sank - it seemed I would never learn news of the city.

"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back."

I hadn't talked to Lisa since she'd slapped me and called me a whore two years ago - radiation sickness, my family said, she'll be better soon, but I knew she'd always hated me. Now I sat listening to the doctor give me some delusional bullshit about how the diagnosis was alarming but I had a really great chance of survival if we got started on the treatment right away. Fingers nearly in fists, I called the one person I knew would be honest to me now.

"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back."

As I was walking in one direction, and she coming from the same, I paused to ask what was behind her.
"The world is round," she said. "It's behind you, too."

"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back"

I met my self on the street, coming the other way. I looked more haggard and lost than last time, and I knew it wasn't long now. Knew, too, that my clone could remember what had yet to happen -- and I felt my tongue catch with terror in my throat at the instant I should have asked.

Wednesday's Prompt: Saying, Quote, or Cliche

Wednesday's prompt is a saying, quote, or cliche, grabbed from the quote on the bag of tea I just brewed.

Your quote, due by 5 pm Wednesday, is: "To know the road ahead, ask those coming back," which my peppermint Good Earth teabag claims is a Chinese Proverb.

The Great Prostate Mistake

They all disappeared early one morning.

"We told you this would happen," said the conservatives, the nanoskeptics, the simple lifers, the religious leaders, the antisingularitarians, and the independent scientific advisory boards.

The glitch was fixed in the next nanosync, but for that week, there was a look in everyone's faces that would be immortalized in media coverage as emblematic of the age - bemused and uncomfortable, like teenagers trying on clothes from the previous summer and finding they no longer fit.

The Great Prostate Mistake

A man comes into our lives, charming and pathetic, with a weak laugh and a tragic past. We let him in of course, poor soul, who wouldn't, as the details mount, an escalating list of hysterical crises for which we feel duty bound to rescue and console. Then, one day, he makes a slip, goes too far, and we realize suddenly there was no dying father, no slow-moving cancer, no past addictions or allergies; just a charming and pathetic jerk who will have to skip town again, like he's surely done before.

The Great Prostate Mistake

You're fingering that trigger awfully hard. Your finger's slick, sweaty, aching to squeeze. But if that thing goes off, your life will change forever.

Monday's Prompt: Stolen from the Headlines!

Write about the selected headline by 6 pm Monday. Do not quote or rephrase it.

Your headline for Monday is: "The Great Prostate Mistake."

Steenth

Sixteen candles, eff that, we said, and sent Martha's brother Jake off with all the bills we could pool. It was Tuesday night so the school stadium was so desolate it was like a slasher flick. We huddled, sang happy birthday Shelly, and sixteen wild firecrackers blazed like thunder into the empty April sky.

Steenth

Opportunity knocks, but anticipation waits by the phone. A few years ago, you might have been waiting by the phone, but now the phone waits in your pocket. You anxiously round the block for the steenth time, wondering why, why doesn't she call?

Friday's Prompt: A word!

Friday's prompt is a word, defined and grabbed as randomly as possible. Write about the experience of the word without using it in the story, trying to capture the meaning or essence.

Today's word is: steenth, defined here on a word a day.

Post by 5 pm Friday. Then go out and have a drink, you've earned it.

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

Does it matter how it started? It's a little tradition, something we do every other weekend or so just for fun, something we've been doing for so long that I can't really remember who started it, and can't help but think that's not important, that it's missing the point. Officer Browning doesn't seem to agree.

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

She didn't look back as she took each painful step up the trail. She pictured the mountain crumbling behind her: each footfall leaving nothingness after it, the dirt and fragile flowers and gritty rocks falling into a hungry abyss. Not possible, she knew, but she also knew that if she ever looked back, she would never make it to the top.

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

I stood on the corner and cursed the lifeless watch on my wrist. Pedestrians passed me, traffic lights changed, but the hands on the precision-crafted, military-grade timepiece never moved. All I could think was: worst botched international diamond heist in history.

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

You never remember being hit in the face. It's always bang, flash, reel. And then the long, agonizing process of putting it into context before the next blow.

Saying, Quote, or Cliche

Wednesday's prompt is a saying, quote, or cliche, grabbed from the internet as randomly as possible.

Your quote, due by 5 pm Wednesday, is: "I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present." (W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence)

How Pandora Slipped Past the Junkyard

Hope slunk past the waste allotments in the dark, the stench awful, the dim carcasses of all humanity's trouble and woes piled high. Hope walked past, hands in pockets, head down, deep in thought over her own grief at the loss of a mother whose death only had been crueler and more wounding than her life. Hope stepped at last into the broad expanse, the piers and rough, rocky beach laid out before her, just in time to see the first orange welling of the hot filament of dawn.

How Pandora Slipped Past the Junkyard

Pandora sat, body still and mind whirling, for a long time when she heard about the new model: it was not an easy decision that she came to but it was one he had programmed her to make. She was a beautiful machine, inside circuitous and outside draped in gleaming gears like jewelry, and the world could not afford to lose her. Night came and she pressed the pillow down on his face until he stopped struggling, crying tears of rust at having to do it, but knowing that she did not deserve to be made obsolete.

How Pandora Slipped Past the Junkyard

The junkyard is full of horrible things, shapes sinister and half-unmade. And so is Pandora's box... but the junkyard shrinks back when she walks by. Not from fear, but from jealousy.

Monday's Prompt: Stolen From the Headlines!

Write about the selected headline by 5 pm Tuesday. Do not quote or rephrase it.

Your headline for today is: "How Pandora Slipped Past the Junkyard."

I am the moderator. The prompter. The pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. Also, I exaggerate, sometimes. Every week I will post a prompt. Every week stories will follow. Or there will be consequences.