Facebook Status Updates Sept - October 2016

Sept 2016

I wait for you like the iceburg waited for the Titanic.

“There are times when there is no difference between a push and a pull.“

The bargain was simple. I’d learned enough to make it as basic as I could.

The demon ate my soul.

And I waited to feel any different at all. And I waited. And I waited.

He thumps into the bed and just tries to sleep in the manner of a drowning victim swimming towards the shore.

“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “I don’t have this many shoes because I like wearing them at all.”

“Then why?” he demanded, waving the credit card statement like a blade.

“Shhh,” she said and he was so shocked he said nothing.

And heard the patter of hundreds of tiny feet.

I keep trying to find that moment as if the world only offered one. I am drowning in being parched, we are treading water in the clouds. I dis, to associate. We are the un in the undone: that our sacred hum. I am your sacred whisper and you my baited breath. I offer words without meaning because tears are only salt and we cannot drown. Sometimes everything we share is only things and nothing real.

The bomb threats were the story everyone knew about, but it wasn’t really what got Kelly out of being homeschooled. It was entering the makeshift classroom their mom had made and threatening both mom and brother with a gun and a demand to be enrolled in the proper high school or else that got the authorities properly involved. The Donald family isn’t rich, but someone kept it out of the local paper probably because the town would have been swarmed with reporters for years. Shootings at regular schools are almost common; the idea of a mass shooting at a homeschool isn’t even a blip on the radar and everyone wanted it kept that way if possible.

The time loop didn’t work as intended. Each loop reset Greg’s body as he retained his memories of each loop. Or so he thought, until he began to realize he was a little taller than before, that he was ageing in real time during each loop.

And he had no idea how long it would take others to notice this at all.

They said nobility could only be measured by sacrifice and were entirely wrong in this. Service to others was not a sacrifice and that was the height of any noble calling.

“Excuse me? Hurry? That is what servant are for,” Lord Milquetoast snapped, finally frazzled at yet another interruption to his plans for the day.

“I believe,” Death replied after a bemused moment, “that you are in error concerning the nature of our relationship.”

“This story has too many moving parts. That’s the problem with stories. Too many characters, and never enough pages for them all to breathe.”

This post is a shorthand for a longer narrative intended to subvert itself.

On my way to be a poem I lost my way in prose: trying to twist time, to find a way in rhyme I ransacked a thesaurus searching for words porous but had naught to show as no poem would grow.

I keep telling you I am sorry every time we sleep together. I refuse to tell you why though you always think I’m talking to you.

I am sorry.

“It’s not that I never wanted to fall in love, but I think part of me believes I didn’t deserve it. The loving or the being loved. Sometimes, when you do terrible and important things, there is a cost that comes due only with the fullness of time. And I thought that was part of mine.”

They say nostalgia is a liar but too often the future makes promises it cannot deliver.

“It really is that simple. You are not worth hating at all. Hate is never worth what it costs.

"Not even if you become the president.”

Be my profanity that I may be your filter.

“Nothing turns a good person into a monster quite like desperation,” she murmurs. “And a desperate person can justify anything in their own mind if they try hard enough.”

“This is not my world, I am not you. But I have met Toshi, and doubt the healer would ever approve what you plan to use your sacrifice for, I am afraid. No matter what it might cost him. Heroes are often far stupider than other people, but that is partly what makes them heroic.”

They said it was the end of the world. There was wailing in the streets, gnashing of teeth and people screaming to their gods for answers or looking around in desperation for wild sexual thrills to make everything seem as though it had had meaning. Me? I was just relieved to avoid my credit card debt.

The doctors asked me what happened at the clinic. They did the usual blood work, the tests, the police asked all their questions. None of them understood. I told them I was poor, a college student, and I thought grindr could save me.

But I didn’t get a sugar daddy. I got a spice daddy.

And they are something else entirely.

“You think I would not trust you? I am a healer. What healer does not give as many chances as others need in order to heal?”

All I know of sorrow is that we live in a world where it is possible to forget that we are jaysome.

“I am staging a protest.”

“A protest.”

“You heard me. Consider this my hunger strike, my Waterloo, my -.”

“Refusing to post to tumblr because a poem you wrote ‘did not get enough notes’ is not a hunger strike!”

“You cannot invalidate my experiences by shouting. My truth is not your truth, my way is not your way.”

“That’s because yours is asinine.”

You are here, but I no longer am and we are but mirages passing each other in the night mistaking it for day.

I rubbed the lamp in the shop as a joke, never expecting the genie to appear.

“Hello,” a spectral voice said. “You are Wisher number 4351. Your Wish is very important to us. If you desire for your Wish to be granted, please continue rubbing the lamp until the next genie is free to serve you.”

I am down to 4312 now. I haven’t left my apartment in weeks. But the Wish will fix everything. It has to fix everything.

I tried to explain to you that my kiss was a +1 weapon but you said it didn’t change your feelings at all.

Character Concept

Telepathic power. But it makes use of auto-correct.

I tried to tell you the truth but I couldn’t lie well enough to make you believe me.

The house continued to haunt the ghost no matter where they tried to flee. It was revenge, the house explained, for the purple wallpaper in 1972.

After the breakup I threatened to write you into my novel. Half-pleading seeking to keep you in a way that won us nothing. You put me into your web comic, the one I’ve seen a dozen times this week alone as it spreads like wildfire. You changed my name, pretending that would be a kindness. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but it wounds like thousands more

The genie said he could make any wish come true. But even he could not remove all the videos of me on YouTube.

“Sometimes one can be more than one is by virtue of being less: it is a strange lesson to learn.”

I deleted your name from my memory when we broke up. I just wish if had been an uncommon one. And that my sister had another name.

I said I had committed the perfect crime. You disagreed with my definition of love.

I moved halfway across the world in search of a different life. But I brought me along and found everything tinged with my life.

Oct 2016

“It’s okay.”

“The story wasn’t meant to end up like this!”

“I know. I know. But it will be something different.”

“I was meant to be better.”

I say nothing. Better for the narrator is not always the same as better for the main character in the story. I just give the narrator a pat on the back and wait for him to recover.

“Sometimes I think we desire healthy too much as a goal in itself. How much of a healthy relationship is hiding how sick we sometimes are from each other? How much of what goes wrong is rooted in the oldest lie we tell ourselves?”

Once upon a time there was a star that wished upon a person and had no wish come true at all.

All stories are jaysome because they are stories!

— @randomlyjay

I looked for you as if love could find a way, as if the law was only a lie designed to hide us from truth, as though our eyes contained secrets only the truths of our hearts could know. But you said the restraining order still mattered.

This is not the post I promised you.

Once upon a time, there was a dead princess everyone said was only sleeping to make the queen feel better. The prince who came to wake her with a kiss never knew this, and committed suicide after the third ballad the bards wrote about him.

After the explosion in the test kitchen, Chef Tyler was never the same again. The scars meant he no longer got work on the TV, the damage to his reputation from the Network meant that no kitchen would hire him. But he gained powers over kitchens, and slowly but surely he murdered every person who had slighted him because kitchens were more dangerous than people liked to admit.

And no one could eat out forever.

Oscar knew that, if he had not been such a grouch, his parents would have never lost their apartment due to his crying incessantly as a child. Living among the trash was the only form of penance he knew.

Before the accident, you always said that life was like a stage. After, in your new apartment, I repeated the phrase with the ease of words between friends.

You turned slowly to face me. “How dare you,” you said. “How dare you say that now?”

I stepped back, half-shocked, fumbling between moments for a bridge between the present and the past. “It’s still true,” I said finally. “The world is a stage. You just fell through a trap door.”

There was a silence, and then you let out a small, disbelieving laugh. And I think it might turn out okay. Just maybe.

“Sometimes the world feels like it is made of souffles always in danger of deflating.”

He wanted to be a bard. But the bardo had other ideas.

We generated stories as if a bill would never come due. But nothing was free. Not time nor energy. Even so we argued with the judgement.

Payment for the stories, yes, but certainly not, we reasoned, for the fanfics.

“They’d call what I did cheating, when there’s only winning and losing in any real battle.“

Sometimes when I talk to Siri, I pretend you are the one replying.

It’s not as easy as it used to be, finding the way into stories. There was a road once but these days it is a small path half-seen. The kind of path taken by prey. Desire routes to avoid predators instead of the wide open roads people make. I have to hunt stories that once leapt into my hands.

I never had to shoot them before.

Today I laid my first trap for one.

(It escaped.)

I used to try to hate you. But that was all you ever wanted from me.

Hi?

I don’t write letters. It’s not something they teach us in school anymore. Not that I’m going to send this; I don’t even know who I’d send it to. But I thought you’d want to know that you saved my life. Nothing is ever quite as terrible as it is when you’re a kid. Four, five, six: you remember everything and it all matters deeply.

It was the ghosts, you see. I didn’t know what to do about them haunting me. My mother got tired of my crying. My dad beat me as if that would stop me from wetting my bed. I was so scared but my older brother sat me down at the TV. Gave me the controller. He told me about you. Everything you were, everything you did. It didn’t take long, but I killed the ghosts. Each one was a victory, and that night I waited up, opened my mouth.

I ate ever single ghost just like you did, Pac-Man. And they never came back, not even the one who claimed to be Grandma

Love,

Kelly.

My GPS fell in love with Dead Man’s Curve despite all my attempts to find another route home each night.

“You don’t understand! I’m not sick. I’ve never been sick in my life.”

“Your house is filled with apples.”

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away. And all the sickness they carry with them.”

“… that’s not how it works.”

“And which one of us have never taken a sick day from work? It is not my fault you can’t see the truth and laughing at me will not help!”

“I am not laughing at you; I merely know that laughter is the best medicine.”

The hardest part of not being dead was the ways in which the dead judged you for it. At least on a Tuesday. The hardest part of Monday was generally that it was a Monday.

“We’re all in the gutter,” Jeff said.

I laughed. “No kidding,” I replied as other leaves drifted in to join us. From tree to roof to rotting. All lives have stages. To bemoan is to misunderstand.

“But some of us are looking at the stars,” Jeff exclaimed.

I was about to point out that we saw the stars every night when Jeff laughed. His laugh was falling from a tree in bliss rather than fear and some of my anger melted away.

“Look, a star,” Jeff cried out and the world became fall again: orange and red and wild fires burning as a star fell among us like a sun.

“Shit,” a voice cried out from far below us as the world became warmth, as we turned to ash in a moment instead of in weeks. “Your cigarette butt set the roof on fire!”

But I pretended not to hear another side to the story as Jeff cried out in vindicated joy and almost I joined him

but it was

too late.

Six-word horror story

“I didn’t vote; it won’t matter.”

Trudy stared down the vampire. “You’re not scary: you’re just a jumped-up little parasite that’s little better than a cat.”

The book claimed that there was a monster at the end if it. It included no mirror on the last page, leaving the reader to discover that they were the monster on their own.

I swore at you until I ran out of words - you just laughed at how few curses I knew.

“What do you mean you won’t kill it? That’s what we hired a dragon slayer for!”

“It has yet to do anything monstrous.”

“It burned down our village, you colossal idiot!”

“Yes. And I would have too if I was a dragon and you called me a flying rodent. There are consequences to all things.”

“Well, we aren’t paying you for this!”

“There are consequences for that, too. Imagine, if you will, what it would take to slay a dragon who can burn down a village. Now imagine having that angry with you as well.”

“….”

Almost went so far. But never far enough in the end.

We plotted a course to the future but made the mistake of using our pasts to guide us.

Everyone stared at him, seeing a ruin when the mirror had once showed him a god. Not that he had ever dared call himself such, but he had a skill and played it with a proficiency no one else had managed. But the world had changed and some days it takes so much effort not to hate it and those like his son who walk it with terrible ease, entirely unaware of what was lost.

“They say that Admin listens with their ears, but it’s really with their eyes. You can hear more with your eyes if you tune them to the right colours.”

We stopped the zombie apocalypse dead in its tracks with our zombie-making weapons. A dozen TV shows, four YouTube channels and two competing cable networks led to massive infighting among the undead as they argued over ratings and their favourite shows and entirely forgot to eat the brains of the living.

“We’re branching out from dinosaurs,” the PR person said with a bright grin. “If we can bring dinosaurs back from the dead, why not minotaurs as well? Besides, the minotaurs just want to make mazes and that’s far better than the dinosaurs constantly breaking free and murdering people in our parks. Minotaur Park will be far better than Jurassic Park ever was. Besides, we can’t get insurance for any of the dinosaur parks anymore.”