in love. [trigger #126]

Henry Wilcox fell in love for the first time the year he turned 61.

He’d been married for 23 years to a wife who was his best friend, he had four children he’d doted on from the moment they’d entered the world, and he had retired eight months earlier to pursue his love of golf fulltime. Yet, for all the love in his life, he would never have described himself as in love. He didn’t really believe it existed.

Then, he met Rosa. Well, not exactly met. Rosa didn’t know Henry’s name, or anything about him outside of the fact that his face seemed vaguely familiar. Still, despite the fact that he had never had a conversation with her, she had become all he ever thought about. He would sit in the cafe where she wrote, sipping a coffee and reading one of the books he’d put off reading until he retired. By now, even in stolen sideways glances, he had memorized the lines of her face, the nuances of her facial expressions, the many small gestures that filled her repertoire.

He was utterly charmed by her. The jokes she told with baristas and visiting friends, the sound of her laugh, the novels she used for breaks in her writing. He had no intention of of ever speaking to her, but just to be around her a few times a week gave him a feeling in his chest he had never known before.

the fire and the rose are one. [trigger #125]

They war and fight, sworn enemies. Never knowing that the Fire and the Rose are one.

Those who worship the Fire pledge and promise, sacrifice their first born and bathe in the blood of their enemies, never allowing themselves to suspect that the Fire and the Rose are one.

Those who worship the Rose give away all they own for the poor, take on vows of poverty and silence to wage war against the darkness, without ever guessing at the truth that the Fire and the Rose are one.

The Fire. The Rose. Basking in the chaos and adulation of a people who cooperate by using all their creative and rational energies in carefully not seeing, to quote the great poet, the equivocation that lies like truth.

Everything would change, or rather it would become clear that nothing was ever as it seemed if they were to acknowledge the truth. Thus, they never will. The prophets who might utter the unspeakable reality will be destroyed. Children who ask the wrong questions will be disappeared.

No one must ever admit that somewhere deep in their minds hides the terrifying reality that the fire and the rose are one.

wow, that didn’t go so well.

Well, folks, the last ten days of trigger fiction has been a complete failure.

I’m not going to apologize, but I am going to explain. I’ve very nearly spent most of my waking hours as a zombie lately. Any of you who know me and my frustrating struggles with insomnia and depression are aware of what it means when I write that I’ve worked ten straight days in a row, most of which required waking up at 4am, and others in which I closed the shop only to be up at 4 the next morning. When not at work, I’ve tried to get things done, but to no avail. I was quite literally worthless during the afternoon and early evening.

There was even a day I went to Caffe Fiore with my friend Gabs just to write. She got some writing done, I mostly stared at my keyboard wondering if I was going to make it through another day without passing out.

I am now WAAAAAAAY behind, so it is going to take quite a bit of work to catch up. I’m going to try my damnedest to get it done.

pork chops and applesauce, my favorite. [trigger #124]

Things had been getting hard for him lately. She had been growing distant just when they should have been growing closer, and this worried him immensely. He wracked his brain in the attempt to figure out what he might have done to hurt her, but to no avail. He brought her flowers, cooked her favorite dishes, kept the house clean, but nothing worked. She’d been acting stranger and stranger, to the point she practically was a stranger. This didn’t bode well for their marriage. She’d grown short and irritable, then listless and depressed, then downright angry for no good reason.

Then, Thursday night everything got better. She was still distant, but the rage seemed to be gone. It was if she was peaceful, like the tension had gone out of her. She cleaned the whole house, and she never cleaned. She even made him dinner, and she never cooked. It was pork chops and applesauce, his favorite. He even said so. “Pork chops and applesauce, my favorite!”

He drifted off to sleep that night happier than he’d been in weeks. He dreamt happy dreams of the future, until something woke him in the night. It sounded like someone was in the garage. That’s odd. Was he dreaming? The last thing he remembers, he could have sworn he saw his wife, standing beside the bed with a shovel.

she just wished he’d stop snoring. [trigger #123]

The police just needed to understand, but they kept yelling that she had to sign the confession. It can’t be considered murder. That’s preposterous! She had a perfectly good reason to kill him, anyone would have done the same thing in her shoes. Nine long weeks of marriage, and not an ounce of sleep across that time. Not in a fun way, either. That bastard never stopped snoring. It was so very loud. Right next to her. Even when she moved into another room it didn’t help, his snoring shook the walls. It got worse every night. Driving her mad. Not sleeping really wears on a person. As it accumulates, night after night. After a week she became short and irritable. After two she was listless and depressed. By six she was turning into another creature altogether, one of pure rage. Then, week nine is when she couldn’t take it anymore. She walked out to the garage, got a shovel, brought it back into the house, and hit him with it until he was finally silent. The police found her sleeping soundly beside the corpse five days later. She just didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. What else was she supposed to do?

i will never eat that again. [trigger #122]

Against all sound reason, it had become a nightly ritual. We would make the short walk to Golden Chef and get #11, Sweet and Sour Chicken. It was a filthy dive of a place, and why someone would pay for food prepared there is something I can’t explain to you after all these years. Something about it just made it addictive.

As college students, we were young enough to shake off any ill effects of a terrible diet. We were just 19 year olds eating like 19 year olds. However, eventually it came back to exact its vengeance.

While eating, nothing seemed amiss. Just another night eating enjoyably bad food from a grimy restaurant. Until the cramps kicked in. It was a stomach pain unlike any I’ve known, before or since. It was as if the inside of my stomach was at war with itself, as well as the rest of my body.

I longed for any sort of relief. Vomiting, diarrhea… anything would have been welcome if it would have only lessened the discomfort. Instead, there was no relief. I just laid in bed, tossing and groaning, waiting for the minutes to pass by until the night might be over, and my pain might alleviate.

I had two and a half more years of late night dinners in college after that night, but not a single one of them was spend at Golden Chef.

butterfly of the beautiful. [trigger #121]

While his name cannot be written with the letters of any earthly alphabet, when very loosely translated to English, his name means Butterfly of the Beautiful. This is just another of the grotesque ironies of his existence. There is nothing beautiful about him, in appearance or character. The only thing about him remotely similar to a butterfly is that he has wings, which are massively swollen and distended, like the wings of a deformed bat having a terrible allergic reaction.

Many have argued that the key to beauty is symmetry, and there is nothing symmetrical about Butterfly of the Beautiful. His shoulders are slanted and misshapen, his teeth so long that they pierce his cheeks and protrude into the open air at odd angles. His left ear is that of a cancerous sow, his right that of a leprous pygmy elephant. He has two eyes, but the left is hidden behind folds of loose skin that hang from his forehead, his right is the eye of a large cat, but is red in place of yellow. Where his nose should be is two skeletal holes, but what cartilage is left is swollen and raw. His torso is covered with massive tumors, bruised where they aren’t necrotic. An open wound in his side is perpetually oozing blood and pus.

Perhaps something could be said for his name, if he were beautiful in person where he was terrible in appearance. Yet, his appearance pales in comparison to the ugliness of his soul. He savors nothing more than the suffering of others. He is slothful in all things but cruelty. His apetite for the flesh of sentient beings is gluttonous, matched only by his desire to cause slow and tortuous pain wherever he can. He has ended entire civilizations, brought entire planets to their doom, murdered some of the best and brightest the universe had to offer with sickening joy.

And now, he arrives on our planet, in our dimension, prepared to make an enjoyable weekend of the world as we know it.

pioneer square at midnight. [trigger #120]

There is a rite in Seattle that goes back before Seattle was its name. Before the man whose name the city honors, before the whites built an ill-advised town in the mud, before the first peoples deemed the land unlivable, before there were first peoples; before all of these things, this rite was practiced as one of the most holy the universe has known.

On the seventh night of every new moon, at midnight in what is now known as Pioneer Square, a deep old magic is called forth from the mysterious depths of the farthest reaches of the vaguest and most distant dimension yet discovered.

This rite has never been forgotten. It has been guarded by secret religions and societies. Wars have paused, dead have been resurrected, individuals have traded everything and everyone they loved, just to be sure that this rite continues.

If this magic; personified in the minds of many, but beyond personhood in truth; were not called across the far-flung depths of space, time, and dimensionality, all would be lost. Were even a single rite missed, the fabric of existence would slowly begin to unravel, until all things unbecame until it was as if they never were.

This is why, as he sprints across the rooftops and leaps between the buildings of downtown Seattle, Karasu Haruko is alarmed to see that he is still running very, very late.

the slopes of everest is littered with corpses. [trigger #119]

You may not know this, but the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses. When an adventurous climber perishes on that famous mountain, retrieval of the body is made impossible by the terrible conditions, making an odd graveyard of frozen bodies. Brave folks, who had approached that mountain full of excitement and hope, were snuffed from existence by one of the harshest climates our planet has to offer.

Well, if the slopes of Everest are in fact littered with corpses, the space around Lacie Fitzsimmons locker is littered with broken hearts. In much the same way that adventurers have dared an attempt to scale Everest, romantic adventurers have dared to ask out the hottest, most elusive girl in school. Just like Everest, many have approached locker 239 full of excitement and hope, certain that they’d gotten some look, some hint, some flirtatious body language that indicated to them that they could scale the Everest of Lacie Fitzsimmon’s affections. Sadly, the climate of Lacie’s rejection is just as harsh as the wind and cold of the world’s most famous mountain.

Scientists would tell you that out of Lacie’s locker, and Mount Everest, only one is truly deadly. I, however, beg to differ. One may not lose their physical life. Still, many a young man has seen the hope of ever loving again in high school dead of exposure in the frostbitten graveyard on the floor before Lacie Fitzsimmons’ perfect feet.

what dogs think about people. [trigger #118]

Hi family,

It’s me, Baxter.

I’m dictating this letter to you through the cat. You don’t know this, but apparently, before ending up at the shelter where you rescued her, she made a living in a circus, where she’d been trained to use a pen with her ass. So, she is writing down my words since I lack the ability to write myself. Also, I’d think twice before using the pens in the house if I were you.

Anyway, I’m writing this to you because there are some things I need to get off my chest.

First, thanks a lot for a place to live. In case my hyperactively wagging tail and lolling tongue don’t make it clear, I’m really grateful, and I love you.

With that said, I’ve made some observations lately that I wanted to share with you, for your own good.

You all need to treat each other better. You live in the house together, but you rarely even see each other. Even when you are in the same room, you often don’t even seem to notice. You go about your lives separately, and that’s just not how a pack is supposed to be. I have the genetic memory to tell you what happens to loners. They go mad and feral, they’re starved and angry. We’re a pack for a reason, we need to act like it. When you all live next to each other instead of with each other, it makes me anxious, and when I get anxious I start nervously chewing my own ass… then nobody wins.

Also, you all watch too much television. Don’t get me wrong, I love laying on the couch with all of you. Still, enough is enough. Go outside once in a while. Also, we should go on more walks. It’s healthy for all parties, and I for one have evolved over millions of years to walk every day. Just saying.

Anyway, that’s all for now. We’ll see how you guys take this letter and then maybe I’ll share some more of my thoughts. For example, we should probably discuss how much bacon is in my diet, in that I’m not getting nearly enough.

Thanks, you faithful companion,

Baxter