Monthly Archives: May 2011

liar.

I lied, it will be one more day without trigger fiction. I still feel terrible, and when weighing throwing garbage up versus waiting another day, I decided to wait another day. I can’t wait to get started again though, so I’m excited for tomorrow after another 13 or 14 hours of sleep.

the pot was melting into the soup. [trigger #51]

We all laughed. We made fun of those lunatics, with their rapture predictions. Even the bible says such a prediction is impossible, so it seems odd you’d be able to use that some bible to do some math and pick out when the rapture was going to happen.

We laughed right up until the moment on May 21st when all those people disappeared. Other ideas were suggested. An elaborate hoax. Spontaneous human combustion. Even alien abduction. Still, deep down we all knew. We’d been left behind.

Now, all that was left to do was await the end of the world on October 21.

People chose to wait in a myriad of ways. They joked; they planned ‘end of the world’ parties; they got wasted; they had lots of sex; they committed suicide; they tried illicit drugs; they went to war; they converted and prayed for a second rapture; they started doomsday cults, a few of which even resorted to human sacrifice. Yet, most of these sorts of behaviors were frequently interrupted. It was the great period of tribulation after all. Earthquakes were happening almost daily. Tornadoes, hurricanes, and random storms of locusts were popping up in the most unlikely of places at a remarkably frequent rate. It was hard to plan ahead, even by a few moments.

It was mid-August when Seattle finally went, about half-way through the tribulation. Many predicted Seattle would go earlier than that. The city had really gone to hell since Mark Driscoll had been raptured. There was all the gay marrying; lots of yoga; guys in dresses; dudes weren’t fighting each other for macho dominance; dads were staying at home to take care of their children instead of the moms, all of whom were wearing pants and putting on weight like crazy, turning their husbands into homosexual adulterers; people were even watching Avatar and turning into crazy tree-huggers. It was basically the most terrible environment imaginable. Still, against all odds the city made it to the midway point.

Seattle literally went up in smoke in impressive fashion. On August 16th, 2011, at 1:46pm, the city turned into a volcano. It wasn’t that the nearby volcanic mountains erupted, those had sunk beneath the ground and turned into lakes weeks earlier. No, the city of Seattle itself turned into a volcano.

First, came the heat. It had been growing gradually warmer for days, on August 15th it was 103 degrees.

On the 16th, shit got real.

Scott was in his kitchen when it happened, attempting to carry out an ill-advised plan to make himself some tomato soup and tuna melts before he passed out again from the high temperature. All morning the heat had been rising in earnest, and it picked up pace at 1:30. It didn’t take long for him to realize something was very wrong. The floor became too hot to touch, forcing him to take off his shorts to stand on them to protect his feet. That was about the time his skin started turned red from the heat. Still the temperature rose.

He knew he was about to die. For someone who had always been terrified of death, and who was about as good with pain as a toddler who’d missed his nap, Scott was surprised how calm he was as his skin started to blister from the heat. He looked over at what moments earlier had been intended to be his lunch: the pot was melting into the soup, which in turn was pouring all over stove, bubbling and smoking.

As molten rock started to erupt through the surface of the earth in his backyard, Scott’s last thought was of the irony that the lack of heat and relatively low number of crazy religious fundamentalists had been two of his favorite things about Seattle, and now he was melting in his own kitchen because he hadn’t heeded the warnings of a fundamentalist doomsday preacher.

why do we consistently become less than we want to be? [trigger #50]

As Ed woke up, it quickly dawned on him that today was the day he was free to go. After long years in bondage, today he would finally walk free. He sat up, washed himself up and dressed.

A guard came to his cell door, opened it, and walked inside with breakfast. The guard placed breakfast on the small table to the left of the bed, then briefly and affectionately squeezed Ed’s shoulder before leaving.

Ed picked at this breakfast, and then sat at the edge of his bed and stared at the open cell door for some time. He didn’t know where to begin, how to put one foot in front of the other to leave. Eventually, the same guard came in and left Ed lunch. Ed ate lunch before again sitting on his bed and staring at the cell door. The door to his cell actually led directly outside. He could see the sunshine and clouds outside his door, but instead of making him feel comfort it terrified him. The large world outside was intimidating after the small confinement of his cell.

A different guard brought dinner, again without a word being said.

Ed ate his dinner, and afterward decided to lie down for a bit. After a few hours, a guard came and closed the door to his cell. Soon, it was totally dark.

As Ed drifted off to sleep, his last thought was that tomorrow would finally be the day he was free to go.

“Make sure you look both ways,” he said… [trigger #49]

“Make sure you look both ways,” he said. So I slammed the car door and jogged across the street without looking.

Who does he think he is anyway?

I mean, first off, I’m nine years old. I know that you’re supposed to look both ways before you cross the street. Plus, he’s not my dad. Just because my mom invites him over for dinner and lets him spend the night for like, sleepovers, or whatever, doesn’t mean he can tell me what to do! I’m practically an adult, I definitely don’t need a new dad. I was getting along just fine without him around giving advice about street crossing and whatever else he decides to warn me about.

Maybe he should look both ways, so he’ll see it coming when I punch him in his stupid face.

guerilla warfare on Mars. [trigger #48]

Gorilla Wars actually began as a misunderstanding. President and CEO of the multiplanetary corporation-state DisPep, Martina Vazquez, was worried about some of the moves that Jason Takamura and Walmart/Coke Corp. were making on Mars. Thus, he asked one of his assistants to check into the cost of training for guerilla warfare on Mars, thinking there might be another corporate hot war. His assistant, who was new and didn’t last very long, thought that President Vazquez had asked him to look at the cost of training for gorilla warfare on Mars, as in training gorillas to fight on Mars for entertainment purposes. Not wanting to waste the money that had been used training gorillas in the test phases before the misunderstanding came to light, the company decided to start Gorilla Wars, which is now the most popular television show on Mars, and the most popular martian based reality program throughout the galaxy.

futuristic bounty hunter. [trigger #47]

Imagination is the only thing that gets Jim through the day. He’s a server. Not the waiter kind, the subpoena kind. He tracks people down, does what he needs to do to get close to them, and then tricks them into admitting their identity so he can serve them with legal documents. Often they are aware of the coming documents, and they are trying desperately to avoid them, making Jim’s job even more difficult.

No one is ever happy to have met Jim. He’s never giving away money, its never good news. You don’t hire someone to track someone else down to give them good news, you track them down yourself for that. If Jim is involved, it’s usually because the shit is about to hit the fan in someone else’s life. The angry yelling recipients of Jim’s servers are the easy ones to deal with. It’s the quiet, dejected ones that break Jim’s heart and make him wish he could just throw away the summons, or the divorce papers, or whatever else he might be delivering.

It’s not a fun job.

That’s where Jim’s imagination comes in. Without it, he would have quit long ago. Jim has to imagine different scenarios other than the reality of what he is doing to keep himself sane.

He pretends to be a time-traveler from the future, delivering important information to someone they’ll need down the line. He pretends to be a ninja, training for an assassination that will subvert an evil political structure.

His favorite thing to pretend is that he is a futuristic bounty hunter, tracking down and killing the most evil people in the universe. He has to get close, confirm their identity, and take them down. It makes it easier to serve papers to a sad single mom if she isn’t a single mom at all, but is instead the leader of a huge intergalactic human trafficking ring. It takes a little effort to keep his imagined scenario in place when all he does is hand them an envelope and say, “You’ve been served,” as opposed to shooting them with a blaster or something. Still, Jim’s been at this a long time, so he’s an old pro at filling in the gaps and keeping his mental adventure airtight.

Melting snowmen had that effect on her. [trigger #46]

She stopped in her tracks, pausing to look over her neighbors lawn with a feeling of sadness, or at least melancholy. Her halt was involuntary, but not surprising; melting snowmen always had that effect on her.

It wasn’t that she was sad about the approach of spring. She loves spring, and loved every season when it first arrived. Her sadness came from the death of something that had been created in joy and delight. Kids, or a family, or even some lone adults, had built this snowman in a moment of pure playfulness. Now, it grew dirty in the cold rain as it melted from the joyful shape of what it had been into a macabre grotesque. It looked like an actual living thing being corroded by acid rain. The tortured form no longer evoked feelings of joy, but of perverse curiosity.

She knew the children who made the snowman probably weren’t sad about the snowman’s demise. They’d probably forgotten about it, unless they were very young. Yet, that just made it worse. To have once been the object of someone’s delight, and now to slip away in horrible shapes into nothingness with no company to ease the transition.

Poor snowmen. They lead a cruel, short existence. To begin with such attentive promise, but to finish out their existence in such a long, slow, lonely demise.

the door at the end of the hallway. [trigger #45]

There’s a door at the end of the hallway that no one goes through. Its knob is never touched. Its threshold never crossed.

It’s been nine years, but still, no one dares enter that room. The memory is still too painful. There’s almost a superstition that if any of us walks through that door we’ll see her hanging there again.

I suppose it’s true. I would see her hanging there again, if only in my mind’s eye. I still see it all the time.

Bodies don’t swing pendulously like they do in the movies. They would need more slack for that, a much higher ceiling. A body just hangs limp. Like an effigy, it is a terrible mockery of the form you once loved.

I was only eight when it happened. When my sister decided she didn’t want to be here anymore. I went thought the door at the end of the hallway, wanting to ask her to put makeup on my face, or dress me up, or some other random blessing that let me pretend I was older than eight. What I saw instantly made me far older than eight. I would never fully be a child again.

It was the last time I’ve ever walked through the door at the end of the hallway.

I see that image every day. Of my sweet sister in that terrible repose. I know I would see her there if I went through that door again, so I know the door will remain forever closed to me. I’ll pretend it’s not there, block it from my mind as best I can. I’d burn the house down if it were up to me.

I see my sister hanging when I close my eyes to sleep. I see it in my dreams as I’m sleeping. I see it when I let my vigilance slip and begin to daydream. So many times it comes to me when I do things that I have no choice but to do. I do get to choose whether or not I will use the door at the end of the hallway, and so I will use that little choice to keep the memory at bay as best I can.

I’m losing quite a bit in this choice, but that’s the price I pay. There are so many other things that are now locked in that room with the ghost of my sister’s hanging body. There are things that were once precious to my sister and me, now certainly covered in layers of dust and cobwebs. There are photographs and magazines; teddy bears and perfume bottles; makeup and posters and clothes that would fit me now, would help me feel closer to her. But they are forever closed away from me, behind the door at the end of the hallway.

she watched the broken yellow lines fly by. [trigger #44]

It was one of those RVs with a bed above the driver’s seat. It was illegal for children to ride up there while someone was driving. But then, what would the point be if you couldn’t enjoy the bed’s window?

Sally laid in the bed and saw the country fly by.

Her step-dad preferred to drive at night, and that was ok by her, because she loved to lie there and watch their progress. They were on the sort of highway that didn’t just have mile markers, but also had tenth of a mile markers. That was her favorite sort of road.

She watched the broken yellow lines fly by, and she felt safer than she did in any other place. To lie still and yet be moving at 80 miles an hour down the highway. It felt like nothing could touch her, nothing could get to her in these moments. She wished they could just be perpetually on the road. Then again, her step-dad wouldn’t understand the word ‘perpetually’. He didn’t read much. She didn’t mind that though. He was a good man, and he’d taken her in when her mom died, even though he didn’t have to. They loved each other, and it didn’t really matter that he wasn’t her biological dad, or that they hadn’t met until she was eight. He was her father, and that was that.

They were on their way to Six Flags in Dallas, on their never-ending quest to ride every major roller coaster in the country. Every six weeks or so they were back on the road, heading off for some long weekend or week long trip to ride another coaster. He owned a mail-order hobby shop selling collectibles of various kinds, so he could take much of his work with him, and pay college kids to handle the rest when he was out of town.