[Editor's note: this is a work-in-progress. It began with a writing prompt and a single sentence. From then, it snowballed and the below is the "beginning avalanche".]
Continue reading[Editor's note: work in progress, not sure where - if anywhere - it's going.]
"A 'genie' genie?" I asked. Air-quotes accompanied my question and confused look.
"Quite right. Three wishes, no more, no less. And no malarkey!"
"Only if that's a two-way street, genie. How about this, I won't ask for infinite wishes - or infinite lamps! - and you don't twist my wishes around."
The genie was visible concerned: his hands were rubbing each other, like he was nervously washing up but forgot the soap.
I looked down at the old barnacle-covered vessel that I'd just moments ago pulled from the ocean. The hook was embedded deep in some crevasse, the line looped around a few times and caught on itself. I raised the lamp, rocked it from side to side. Water dribbled out of a dozen random spots.
[Editor's note: this week, the writer has been writing code. It's good mental exercise, which will hopefully lead to writing non-code soon!
The code for the game is here: https://gitlab.com/fuzzy-rp/tetris-app
Tetris clone after the jump.
NB: You'll need a keyboard to play, completely forgot that tablets/phones are a thing, sorry.]
Continue reading[Editor's note: This is an exercise at writing dialogs. This time, I chose to do a scene from the graphic novel Preacher. Obviously, this means that this post contains spoilers.]
Continue reading[Editor's note: this is a work in progress, there will be part 2.]
Princess Salina walked out onto her balcony and shuddered as the cold night air bit at her ankles, forearms, and face. She was clothed in dark-blue dress, a lamb-skin jacket on top of this. A pair of boots and an eared hat, made from the same material, completed her ensemble. On her back was a black leather satchel.
She walked across the spacious balcony to its edge, where a thigh-high barrier separated her from a drop of several hundred feet down to the river and the falls below. A nearby fire illuminated her face. Tears sparkled in the darkness for a moment, before she wiped them away.
A locket hung around Salina's neck, a silver and gold beetle adorned with a few small rubies. She opened the locket and looked at the half-dozen small rough pebbles inside it. She picked up two pebbles and dropped them into the fire. In moments the small stones began to sputter and emitted a pungent and very purple smoke. Salina watched as the column of it rose in the night's quiet air.
A soft, familiar clatter of keratin-on-rock came as Kim the royal pet sauntered over.
"Hey old girl," the princess welcomed her old friend and ran a hand through the leopard's mane. "Not long now. We're going our separate ways, and where I go, you cannot follow."
"I'll miss you," purred Kim.
Continue readingMy work is about a two mile walk from our house, so most non-rainy days I enjoy a brisk walk back home and ponder on the day's events.
Some days, like today, we have happy hour at work and I get a bit tipsy. You know how it is: get a couple of sampler-size portions in you, a beer or two - or three high-alcohol stouts - and suddenly I'm very social and happy and smiling and patting every "buddy" on the back.
I'm walking back through the nearly dark streets when my phone rings. It's Lauren!
Continue reading[Editor's note: this is fiction.]
The sky is the color of steel, the cold gray of the coffin. She would have loved it. The sun of the south was too violent, and the Pacific Northwest cloudy weather matched her soul. She would have loved attending her own funeral. A light drizzle came and went right in the middle. The flowers fell on damp earth. None of us brought umbrellas, she would think it's sacrilegious. We cried and mourned. I left early.
I went to the south, down to my pier, got in my boat and set off. It was early afternoon. The sky grew cloudier and darker by the minute, the wind sang louder.
It was cold, the drizzle a persistent beat on every surface of the world, but the sea was calm, and I pushed out into the sound.
Continue readingA few months back, I started hearing voices. Not God or Satan, nothing like that. I heard my parents. They're still alive and live a couple of thousand miles away, so I knew it wasn't really them. And they weren't saying anything, not really.
I heard phrases that they'd said often in the past, shit like "...brush your teeth?", "wear sweater", bits and fragments of full sentences. But these were just phrases. They "came in" right where some other sound stopped. A perfect blend from a coin drop to my father's voice asking about summer vacation. Shit that I'd heard countless times in the past was now swimming up, maybe from the subconscious, and pulling up with it an audio memory.
I went to the doctor, he said it's perfectly normal to hear the voices of our loved ones. Especially if I knew, in my heart, that this was a memory and I wasn't actually hearing voices. Yeah, that's what it was.
Back home, when I was a kid, dinosaurs roamed the hills behind our house. The Experiment opened up a couple of portals and dinosaurs in Helsinki was one of the strange occurrences.
They spooked easily and typically stayed away from humans like the plague. Some of the theories said that this was a portal to a dinosaur-and-human world. Like, the dinos stayed clear of us because they'd learned a long time ago that humans were bad news. Seemed plausible, I suppose.
Whatever it was, an airhorn was typically enough to scare away a whole herd, so there were two on every shirt and pair of pants I wore. Lots of kids were dressed like that by our moms. The dads shook their collective heads, though quickly stopped when the glares shot in their direction.
The woman from the video is named Sarah Shinpei. She lives alone.
She wakes up to a soft alarm that goes off at 6:45am. Sarah picks up her phone, slides a finger across its face and silences the ringing.
The sun shines in through the floor to ceiling windows. The blinds are set to open at the same time as the alarm, and they rise slowly and fill the room with a bright yellow light. Sarah is surprised at the sun, but pleasantly so. She's always pleasantly surprised by sunlight, which makes her a battle-scarred Seattleite.
She stretches and half-falls, half-crawls out of the bed, playfully stomps along to the bathroom and begins her morning routine.
Speakers mounted into the ceiling and clothed in faux book bindings on the shelf start to play old rock that Sarah picked up a passion for recently. The shelf is full of books and CDs and takes up one long wall of the bedroom. The wall opposite is glass windows. The bathroom is at one end, the bed at the other. The bed looks over the city.
