Facebook Status Updates July - August 2016

July 2016

The monsters were never the problem. Werewolves, ghost,vampires.They might have been an odd kind of normal, but at least we have a better idea where we stand with monsters than we do with aliens.

I can’t be hurt, so it feels like it’s all you can ever do. I can’t protect you, much as I would if I could. Everything is new and it feels like it could fall apart at any moment. You wear wounds openly, but it does not hide the pain I wish to brush away. I wish kisses were brushes, were gentle, were erasers for everything that wounds. I can’t be hurt in the ways that others can, but my heart still aches for you, at the thought of us not being together. We pay so much to be free, but there are chains I would accept for you. So little I would not do for you that it terrifies me to think about it.

I hope the stories are true that first love in the deepest, because I am adrift without you, drowning with you, and I do not know where it will end. Only that I will hold you as long as I can, and wish so many things.

“I’m sorry, Gerald. But we’re staging an intervention. No one should post more than 10 memes in an hour on facebook.”

I can only fall in love with ideals, but people keep failing them one after another.

They said the zucchini came from their garden. And they smiled like the kind of people who have white picket fences to match their teeth. So I thanked them, took it inside. The colour seemed off, but I blamed the kitchen lights.

The taste seemed off, but I blamed the burrito I’d had for lunch.

It wasn’t until the nightmares began that I realized there are many places to have a garden. Too many that never see the sun.And some fertilizers that will never forgive you.

Everyone says we live in a golden age, but Winnie the Pooh still fights bees for honey.

“These aren’t the last words I am going to say.

“They’re just the last I’m going to say to you.”

The wishing of my heart is that you are always free to have wishes and the hope that they can come true will not be a false hope after all.

“I am a protagonist in an urban fantasy novel,” she snapped to her shocked beau. “I have spent my life hunting and destroying monsters, I have a tragic backstory involving my parents, there’s likely a plot twist where I am part monster so, no, you’ll have to forgive me if I know how to stake a vampire but not cook steaks and I have never hard boiled an egg in my life!”

I spent the whole day waiting for you to text me, not knowing my phone had blocked your number.

The wizard said: “You seek to buy things? I have Happy Thoughts for sale,” he said with a smile as he gave his cat Azrael an absent pat. “They are difficult to acquire, being small and blue, but eating one makes me happy for days.”

And Gargamel smiled, and asked how much you wished to pay for his current stock, only accepting gold as payment.

“Some days I think the worst part about being a monster is what you turn everyone else around you into.”

The curse was simple. For abuse of his power, Garry Stewart found himself younger. With brown robes, hair, a wand, and a vein in his forehead that would turn into a scar when he got angry.

And his master smiled at the other wizard. “The more you abuse your power, the more your magic will be tied to your wand, your power only focused through faux latin words. And if you continue your abuses, you will have glasses, a visible scar and get younger.”

“What?” Garry whispered.

“If you reach the stage where you look just like Harry Potter in the first movie, the curse cannot be reversed. Let this be a lesson to you.”

Plot seed

A magical kingdom where guilt and innocence in crime is determined by shoulder angels and devils that interrogate people until arriving at a satisfactory conclusion and sentencing.

I tried to uncomplicate the words I had, but you can’t improve ‘I love you’ with baby speak. Especially not as part of your wedding vows.

“I would have been the next Jack the Ripper,” he said to his biographer. “I had everything planned, every kill mapped out. And Pokemon Go ruined it all.”

“I take your words,” the pain said as it stabbed deep. “That is what real pain does: takes and leaves nothing of understanding afterwards.”

They said the cooking show would be unconventional. And every week the winners cooked and ate the losers in sauces of their devising.

It proved far easier to get by the legal department than anyone thought it would.

You told me that hearts have only secrets even after I showed you the picture in the biology book and you laughed and declared the chambers cages, and says the veins were nothing more than chains. And you got offended after, when I asked if you had confused poetry for truth.

Alternate-world travel where the characters arrive into a world boasting ‘Elect President Trump’ posters, then realize that Sarah Palin was the previous president ….

YA story idea

Modern dystopia fun: after hackers almost cause world war 3, government crackdown on the Internet, tech etc. creating a war between the generations. There are cameras everywhere, all weapons outlawed [including the one between the ears via poor education]. It’s a world where only the United Forces - what the U.N. became - have weapons so the battle is to find a way back to freedom, however glorious and messy it is.

I tried to cook a meal to win your love but the food poisoned you as a testament to a future neither of us yet knew.

There are ways to make sure your parents never speak to you again. Certain political views, religious ones, sexual ideologies. Mine was sharing the wrong video from the mesopelagic zone of deep youtube by accident.

They thought I liked it. They thought was a cartoon because of the thumbnail. They clicked it, and watched it. Like a trainwreck, only far worse. So much worse than a toothbrush.

They blocked my number and won’t talk to me at all. I tried to call on a friend’s phone, and at my voice my mother just started crying. Deep, ugly sobs until she hung up. I have not tried to call back since.

“But what if it’s true? Imagine what we could be then.”

“Imagine what we are now.”

We smiled. It wasn’t enough, but neither of us had the courage for it to be more.

My favourite dance is ours alone. My life meant never learning things humans take for granted; yours had dancing taken from you. But the bed is ours, arms wrapped about waists, voices soft laughers, our foxtrot the movement of lips, eyes as tango and other terms I know only as words without meaning. You provide meaning with your hands, breath, heart, the dance aching in your face as open as honest as any movement upon a stage. Your legs feel nothing from my touch and there must be ghosts behind me but you pretend not to see them and we dance in a private way entirely alone and almost free.

There are, indeed, dwarves. Seven in fact, and marching down the hill, singing … and pausing, staring at the strangers. There is a whispered consultation among them as they stare, and then one dwarf edges forward, eyes Quentin, then studies Trudy hopefully. “Are you a princess?”

Trudy opens her mouth, closes it, then: “… no.”

The dwarves groan. “Oh. We need a new one because ours is asleep and no one has been able to wake her.”

“And that means you need a new princess? Is she dead?”

“Oh, no!” The dwarf draws himself up to his full height, almost even when Quentin. “She’s twenty-one. And we can’t find a kiss to free her and we’re not allowed to, so if we get another princess we can end our quest and go back home.”

Trudy is just relieved they’re not after Quentin’s chair. “Well, I’m not a princess and - wait, why can’t you kiss her?”

“She’s of age, and we’re miners.”

The bus had priority seating for ghosts and no one batted an eye.

The dating site asked for people to list their favourite animal so other people could get to know me. Almost everyone put dog or cat - one did a typo with rat, I believe - and I skimmed the requisite Garfield jokes, considered options. I wanted to be out there, but not put down barracuda. So I wrote ‘you’ and meant the person I would date.

I received a dozen hate messages informing me that humans were mammals, not animals.

I could only think of one way to save you. There are those would try and raise you from the dead. I deleted your browsing history to save your memory.

It wasn’t that the dead called her that worried Gwen. It was that they called collect and her phone company kept trying to bill her for the charges.

“When we married, I swore I’d make an honest woman out of you. Which means you can’t ever tell a lie again, you understand?”

And then he smiled gently. “For better or for worse,” he said, and grabbed her tongue with the pliers.

I held onto my hate in a world that offered hope, knowing hope to be a more damning weapon by far.

I loved you until I discovered that you were real.

There is one contact on your phone you never added. No one answers the number if you call. There is just a sound that isn’t enough like a fax to be one, and strange dreams after that never quite make sense.

They were brave as only the foolish can be brave.

I tried to hold onto my darkness pretending it could lead me to the light

“I swear I used to be jaysome.”

There are too many truths I am too scared to own.

I rent when I can.

You called out from across the road, “Make up your mind,” as if a mind could just snap into judgements, as though choices came easily just because they came at all. I paced my backward, weaving the path through the gardens, tracing mandalas in restless indecision. I knew you didn’t mean what you thought you did, that you were just irate at my disrupting your day by existing, but even so. Even so, I felt things crystallize, calcify. The next one to die would have your hair, the tone of your voice. I make sure each death is based on some random moment every moment, because television has taught me it’s the best way to hide.

And my first husband taught me that a red thumb is as important as a green one.

“When I said it was a trifling matter, what I meant was that I was hungry for a trifle.”

You were the only soundtrack my life ever needed.

“I ran out of truths to tell you, but you swallowed the lies even easier.”

Sometimes it was all too easy to forget that winter was also a state of mind.

It’s not that I was scared. Not of love, not of you. I just knew where it ended. Where it always ends and the broken wreckage that is left behind on the shore every time.

“I love you,” I said.

“Cite your sources,” you replied.

The aliens were so worried they might not make it back home that they took to hanging on street corners, begging for spare change and offering anal probes. Knowing they only needed a few more parts to repair their craft and terrified of going native. So far only two of them wore Hawaiian shirts, but the rest knew it was only a matter of time.

“I never understood just how dangerous love could be; it feels like we have such power to destroy each other even if that would never be the intent.”

History is the blade that informs how deep the wound is.

After the war was over, the members of the Bilderberg Group staggered out of their meeting place at Taschenbergpalais. They had expected hackers, prepared for the crippled remnants of the press or conspiracy nuts. But not a boy named Jay who had hugged them off and offered up a grin that unmade everything about them which was terrible and much that was great as well by consequence.

I made the sacred circle as you described it. Called upon my shadow, recited verses from a dozen holy books to cast my darkness far from me. You said the circle was a sealing, and would mend my heart as well. I made the circle out of lighter fluid and I burned the darkness down to ash.

All their brilliance was technical, devoid of flare at all.

“I think everyone just has a life, myself, and most of them only ever look good from the outside.”

Most governments were left stuck between rocks and hard places, and the desire to preserve their countries as they were led to more stagnation, shortages of supplies and food from around the world as countries engaged in trade battles and petty disputes and eventually the privacy wars entered full swing when some nations began imposing deeper restrictions and limitations on their own citizens to prevent unrest from spreading. Internet personalities and prominent journalists began to vanish in many nations, leading to paranoid ones fanning flames of unrest even more.

The light at the end of the tunnel became a fuse with everyone on all sides rushing to light the match.

August 2016

People are the kind of monsters fairy tales warn you about.

Your hair reminded me of the sun, but then you dyed it and I only see the sky now.

— You asked why I left you

The problem with the pie wasn’t the pastry at all. Jeff just had no idea how to fit in all four and twenty blackbirds. The variant with naughty boys, he reflected, would have been far easier and they were also far more easy to come by.

Love, like bread, is often underproved.

Trudy shrugs and walks forward into the forest. “Eternal life means nothing if you spend the whole time being a coward,” she says scornfully. What was once a wolf barrels out of the forest and slams to a halt in the air in front of her. It has no fur, gleaming like the wet plastic insides of a ruined sex toy.

“Huh. Glad the protection is working properly again,” she remarks to no one at all.

The creature tries to attack again. She sighs. “You want life eternal, believing death cruel and unusual punishment. And that’s understandable. Laudable, even: your methods, on the other hand, are wanting. And you can fling these unloving creatures at us all you want, but it will not change the facts.”

He doesn’t move like he’s bulletproof, but he moves like he knows where the bullets would be.

Once upon a time, there was a king who tried to build a labyrinth below his palace without planning permission or anyone knowing it existed. Even the court jester didn’t have it in his heart to comment.

I told you I was an idealist. I didn’t know you considered that to be a crime.

I opened my eyes. Reluctant. Prodded eyelids with fingers. Pried myself out of bed. Bathroom. On instinct. Lights cheap fluorescent. Makes everything death-white. Diseased. Like dying wallpaper. Last night sitting in the back of my throat. Hangover on my tongue like dead rat had taken a loss and died. Looked into mirror. Didn’t see any reflection.

Went back to bed. Think the sun wants me to sleep.

“In this alone I will break before I bend.”

I worshipped you. It was the only way I had left to denigrate you.

Under grey skies he said to her, “My heart is gray tonight, for you sit in in judgement of my judgment and it is an inflammable thing irregardless.”

If you have necromancers you literally can have wars that never end.

A field of swirling dust that was once bones, still fighting each other in the name of some forgotten empires.

He asked to be a sin eater. But as he sent the request by text, he became the only sine eater the world has ever known.

“I can’t love you. Our BMI’s are too far apart.”

The Treasure Hunt app was invented in secret solely to make children do their chores.

“Sometimes it just happens that way. You turn the page of a book, and you realized - four books into a series, even - you no longer care whether a character lives or dies. So you put it down, and you walk away.”

“We are married. I am not a character in a novel.”

“I know. It will make the chapter breaks more complicated. And perhaps necessitate an epilogue.”

“I know I said I wasn’t an addict. But I’m not sure that what we have is anything else.”

You told me you didn’t love me anymore. And all I felt was shock that you had ever loved me at all.

After she died, everything was different. He’d lived for too much, done too much for her. For all his family, but especially for Amy. He did things after that he had never done before. Oaths were broken, secrets spilled, words said that could not be unsaid. He stood before power to see what he could never unsee, and still moved onward. He threw his trust at strangers to catch, which he would have never done before, but never was .. an Amy ago, and he was a different person now.

“No one cares about your religion; all they care about is Madonna.”

“What?”

“The singer. Singers. Entertainers. Athletes. Celebrities. These are the gods we have, they are the gods we deserve. The Great One Ones come not with a bang, but with a dozen small whimpers one after another.”

“Cthulhu is not a Kardashian!”

“Cthulhu wishes it could be so lucky.”

They said that cleanses were all scams, that the liver was all the body needed. But some things nature doesn’t cleanse entirely, and for that we had bleach.

If it works on brains, I reasoned, it must cleanse my liver as well.

“If there is one thing I know, it’s that no one gets happily ever afters. We have to *make* them. Happiness is never something given. It’s something worked for, cherished, shared, given away. Everyone has dreams and passions. Sometimes we share ours, for a short time. You see his, yes. But I wonder if he sees yours. And even if he does, if his world can support them.”

She begins drying another dish. “I am not trying to hurt you. I have no wish to do so. I have seen things fall apart too often in my time to know that only honesty can hold things together in the face of entropy. And sometimes even it is not enough.”

I invented the time machine to erase your name from every historical record. I burned every painting, pulped every novel. So no one else will ever love you like I have. I am so very glad you died before memes were invented, though.

Ouija keyboard. For when the board isn’t high tech enough.

“I’m afraid you are not going to get the job. We examined your social media accounts in depth.”

“Huh? But I have no photos online and my Facebook is friends-only ….”

“You liked too many posts on Tumblr that the company does not approve of.”

Once upon a time, there was a fairy godmother who refused to wear a dress or even use a wand. And the other fairy godmothers all despaired, because once upon a time was long ago in so many different ways.

I told you a secret.

I think I need it back.

I don’t seen to have any more left.

(without secrets, They can see you.)

Sometimes we are so tangled up in truth that we lose sight of the simple beauty of our lies.

“I’ve never understood why love has to be so limited. You love your family, me, your friends. One does not have to be better than the rest when they’re all different forms of expression. Loving me should not be a straightjacket you have to wear.”

She pauses a beat. “Unless you want to get into that sort of thing, of course?” And raises an eyebrow.

“The future can never be the sameness that people desire.”