Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 16

Theme 422: Religion

An octogenarian woman named Hosia, who had gnarled joints and bulging eyes, hunched up on the public bus benchseat behind the driver. She was clutching a pouch filled with acorns, strung from her neck. She reasoned that because acorns protected against lightning strikes, they would also protect against bus-related mishaps—given that, as she understood it, buses were powered by lightning.

As she rolled the acorns between her thumb and forefinger through the suede of the pouch in order to verify that there were still seven, the bus slowed and swung to the side of the road to permit a howling ambulance to sail by. Upon witnessing this, Hosia hastened to grasp her nose in a pinch. She began scanning through the window opposite for a brown dog. Fortunately, she soon spotted a man walking his chestnut Labrador, which allowed her to release her nose without risk of ill health caused by the passing ambulance.

At the next stop, a woman visibly in the third trimester of her pregnancy waddled onto the bus and slumped down on the bench beside Hosia. After noticing the woman’s abdomen, Hosia started rummaging through her bag of gimcracks, baubles, and charms. She took out a gold wedding band tied to a length of red thread. She dangled the wedding band over the woman’s gestating fetus and watched how it swung.   

“Excuse me, what are you doing?” the pregnant woman asked.

“Mmm-hmm-mmm,” Hosia hummed to herself. The ring resolved to swing in a straight line. “There. Would you like to know if you’re going to have a boy or a girl? I know.”

“I know too. We had an ultrasound done. It’s a girl,” the pregnant woman explained.

“No, it’s a boy. In all my years, the ring-swing’s never proven wrong,” Hosia warned.

“Well it’s wrong this time. We could see the baby on the ultrasound. You know, like with x-rays? Except—”

“Hmph, hex-rays! Hex-rays are the devil’s doing,” Hosia sneered, crossing herself three times.

The pregnant woman tilted her head and looked at Hosia askance, narrowing her eyes. When the bus stopped for a red light, the woman left her seat beside Hosia and lumbered to the back of the bus to find a new seat. Hosia shook her head dismissively and returned to counting her acorns.

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 15

Theme 335: Isolation

Fritz led the pinball machine repairwoman, who had introduced herself as “Tracy Truepenny” when she arrived at the pizzeria, to the alcove behind the last booths and pointed out the game that the management had been receiving complaints for, the Abracadabra. Tracy’s face lit up when she came closer to it. In astonishment, she declared it to be “an original electromechanical!” Fritz nodded but was more astonished by Tracy herself.

Fritz now felt glad that his uncle, who owned this pizzeria, had asked him to stay late past closing to watch and assist this repairwoman, though at the time he had chaffed at the request. Tracy was twenty seven and therefore Fritz’s senior by a decade, but Fritz could not keep his eyes off of her flirty red pageboy, her ample red lips, or her pale red freckles.

For her part, Tracy could not keep her eyes off of the red spiral lanes, spinners, and switches on the Abracadabra’s playfield, the red lights behind the eyes of the lurid magician illustrated on the backglass, or the red mechanical wheels of the scorekeeper embedded in the backbox. She fingered the deactivated flipper buttons and asked, “So, what seems to be the problem?”

“Uh, people say they lose their ball for no reason—like it acts like it went past the flippers when it didn’t,” Fritz tried to explain, leaning over the glass so as to watch Tracy watching him. “There aren’t any balls missing, though. I couldn’t get it to do it, but enough people have complained, I guess they aren’t lying.”

“Hm, this game doesn’t have a gobble hole, so … Let’s see if I can reproduce the problem,” Tracy decided. She tore off the “OUT OF ORDER” sign taped to the glass and went behind the machine and plugged it in. LED lights behind the letters of the word Abracadabra twinkled in a rolling wave. As the magician’s red eyes flashed, a reverberating voice intoned, “Abracadabra! Muhhahahaha!” The lightning yellow and red lights on the playboard also lit up in strobing chains. Tracy held out her hand, her thumb brushing Fritz’s chest. “Quarter.”

“Sure!” Fritz frantically dug through his pocket until he found a quarter to place in the Tracy’s waiting palm. “Here you go.”

Tracy dropped the quarter into the slot and rammed the ball into play with the plunger. With her knee, she lifted up the entire cabinet from the front, tilting it to make the ball roll back and forth through the playfield, probing every bumper, target, and lane. Finally, Fritz heard a clunk followed by a series of knocks as the ball rolled back into the trough at the front of the cabinet. “There,” Tracy announced, pointing. “I’ve isolated the problem. There’s a dead bumper here, and the ball landing on it instead of being kicked back has opened up a seam—where it just so happens to drop down into a basket to the ball trough. Ha!”  

In a matter of minutes, Tracy had pulled off the front coin door; popped the glass up and slipped it out; propped up the whole playfield to reveal its mystifying underbelly of servos, junctions, and wires; soldered new wires into the malfunctioning bumper; and glued a thin strip of wood in behind the playboard, closing the seam. Fritz sat next to Tracy’s toolbox and handed her the soldering gun, the Phillips-head, and the multimeter as she asked for them. Finally, Tracy replaced the glass and the coin door and tested the machine again with a retrieved quarter. It checked out.

Tracy handed Fritz a business card with the words “Truepenny & Daughter Pinball Repair” printed under a smiling cartoon pinball machine. “Please call me if it breaks again,” she said. “I’d be happy to work on it.”

“D-do you mind if I call you if it doesn’t break?” Fritz asked, his stomach knotting.

Tracy gave him a funny look. “You could do that too,” she said smirking, tilting her head while picking up her tool box. “But it wouldn’t do you any good.” She patted Fritz on the shoulder. “Stick to girls your own age.”

Tracy turned to look at the Abracadabra machine a last time and sighed. “It really is a beautiful machine. We’ll send an invoice for the work.” She left though the jingling front door, swinging her clattering tool box.

Fritz watched her leave the yellow street light through the blinds. He stood alone in the dining area, fondling the card she had given him.

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 14

Theme 494: Waste

No one was watching fourth-grader Catherine La Grande pace through the sere outfield of Hippias Elementary’s baseball diamond, where half of the fourth period PE class had gathered to play with mismatched gloves and bats from Coach Wheeler’s equipment bucket. But if someone had been watching, the guess might have been that Catherine was imagining herself to be an orator to an audience of woodland creatures or fairies, as her hand was slicing through the air and her brow was furrowed as she clutched her catcher’s mitt to her heart and mouthed rhetorical phrases. That someone would be mistaken, however. 

Completely disinterested in the events taking place past the grassline two hundred and thirty feet away, or in any of the other activities of fourth period PE, Catherine was picturing herself as the self-appointed Empress of North America, who had seized power through her dauntless cunning and the will of her millions of adoring followers.

In her vision, Empress Catherine stood before the representatives and interpreters for the one hundred and ninety three member states in the United Nations General Assembly. She was outlining her bold, bracing plan to confront the apodictically primary existential crisis of her Empire and of the world: the ever-growing population of stupid and worthless people. Many of the Permanent Representatives, including the irascible François Delattre of France and the stoic Liú Jié of China, nodded and groaned in recognition of the gravity of this problem, especially when the Empress reminded the Assembly of the waste of space, time, snacks, and other essential resources by the stupid and worthless—not to mention their proclivity for annoying and abusing the more intelligent and worthwhile sort of people (thereby distracting them from completing their intelligent and worthwhile deeds). Empress Catherine grew vituperative in her scorn of the burden created by the millions of worthless idiots, and the entire Assembly erupted in applause at her courage for saying so.

The Assembly soon grew hush with anticipation, though, when the Empress pivoted to explain her brilliant plan for getting rid of the problem population. You see, she noted, because these people were so stupid, they would be easily tricked by a simple ploy: they would be told they had all won luxurious cruise vacations! Then when they arrived to claim their prizes, they would be herded onto old garbage scows disguised as cruise ships. These ships would then be sunk in the middle of the ocean, allowing great white sharks and giant octopi to feast on the imbeciles’ remains!

Mentally, Catherine was basking in the thunderous standing ovation the entire U.N. General Assembly gave in response her proposal when something thudded and rolled off near her feet. She shielded her eyes from the early afternoon rays lancing across the foul line to look up at the kids screaming at her from first and second base. “Oh,” she said and searched around in the withered grass at her feet for the ball. She found it and hurled it at the boy on second base. It thudded back to earth about a dozen yards short of the boy’s waiting mitt.  

“You throw like a girl!” the second base-boy yelled as he ran forward to retrieve the ball. The hitter was now rounding third and heading toward home.

“I am a girl!” Catherine yelled back.

“What a waste she turned out to be,” the girl on the pitcher’s mound sneered.

“This game is a waste!” Catherine declared, throwing her mitt on the ground. She stalked off the field, her cheeks red and her eyes watering. When she pictured all of her classmates’ faces pressed in terror against the portholes of a sinking garbage scow, though, she managed a smirk.

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 13

Theme 743: Pockets

Somehow I had wandered a good distance off from the rest of the county fair and into a tent where a small crowd had gathered to watch a “prematurely aged boy, wise beyond his years” (according to the placard outside) perform feats of hypnosis, clairvoyance, and mind reading. The boy’s name had slipped my attention.

This boy, who appeared to be afflicted with progeria, performed a number of clever mind reading tricks—“Think of a card …,” “Think of number …,” that sort of thing. His assistant, a woman with raven hair wearing a bow tie, thigh-high fishnet stockings, a long tuxedo coat, and nothing else, then tapped me on the shoulder and told the crowd that the boy would reveal my most shameful secret. The wizened boy climbed up on a stool in front of us and tipped his stovepipe hat at me.

Under a foreign compulsion, I left my seat and stood before the boy magician. I muttered, as if the words had been put in my mouth, in preemptive awe, “How could you know?”

The soothing voice of the young mind reader began: “You watched as your sister choked and twisted in the waves crashing over her, and you panicked. Instead of going for help, you tore off down the beach until you couldn’t see the bluffs in the distance any more.” The boy went on, “Quiet your mind now as we leave that time long ago on the sand.”

I stammered, dizzily, “You haven’t explain how you knew though …”

“Each of your heads is a pocket where you keep the scraps and keys of your memories,” the progeric boy, his face gray and deeply lined, told the crowd in an oracular voice from up on his stool. He returned his stovepipe hat to its perch atop his bulbous dome and continued, “As soon as your focus shifts, I simply reach in and snatch what I want!”

“That still doesn’t explain how you could’ve seen …” I repeated, trailing off.

“Now silence your thoughts as we return to that far away day on the beach,” the anodyne voice of the boy hypnotist droned. “You saw your little sister thrashing in the surf, but instead of calling for help, you ran up the shingle in a nervous fit; you ran and you ran until it was dark and you were alone miles away down the coast.”

A final time I asked, lost in a whirling daze, no longer looking for an answer, “How did you know?” Like an automaton, I took my seat.

The wannish boy dipped his theatrical hat in my direction once more. His alluring assistant, with darkly fluttering eyes and luxuriant black ribbons of hair whisking about her neck, heartily clapped as if to congratulate me on the exposure of my trauma. The boy, with a slight tremble owing to his condition, went on to entertain us with another series of the usual “telepathy” tricks of the sort I had seen many times in such shows.

Afterward, as I left the tent with the dispersing crowd, I glanced a second time at the placard outside: the words “prematurely aged boy, wise beyond his years” were printed over a list of his wonders of mind reading, clairvoyance, and hypnosis. I wondered, seemingly trapped in a loop, how I happened into that little tent in the first place. I never did succeed in learning what the boy was called.

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 12

Theme 385: Opportunity

“You’re early,” a man’s voiced barked through the crackling intercom at the gate to Oneida Reserve, a community enclosed by a ten-foot curtain wall and ensconced in deep forest. The gate appeared to be a standing iron plate that moved on rails.

“Sorry. I’ve never been here before. It’s my first day,” Ruby Jīhuì shouted at the intercom from the window of her dilapidated Mazda 616. She resumed furiously tapping at a device in her palm. She tossed the device into the passenger seat with a huff when she realized she had entered a dead zone.

“Wait by the visitors center until nightfall. Someone will find you,” the voice barked. A piercing buzz followed, and an automated mechanism released the gate’s lock with a heavy crack. The metal on metal of the gate’s lip against the railing screeched as the gate opened. Ruby’s foot released the brake, and she rolled past the gate. The gate screeched close again and cracked its lock in place as soon as her car was inside.

Inside Ruby saw, not the gleaming office park and dormitory buildings depicted on Oneida’s website, but instead something like one of the abandoned mill towns she had once toured with her parents as a child. Worker cottages and boarding houses skirted a main street with empty storefronts running up the community’s center. In the distance, an old tannery building glowered over all the other structures, its smoke stack cutting into the fading dusk. As Ruby drove forward along the unpopulated main street and looked at the weeds growing up between rotting boards and the broken and boarded up windows, ice filled her stomach. 

Ruby saw that she had been seriously misled by the online interview she had done with a sanguine, bespectacled project manager for the JumprCabL coding position she was to take. The manager had noted that this would be a great opportunity to master new skills and had congratulated her on joining their team. Clearly that would not be happening here.

Unable to find anything resembling a visitors center, Ruby parked outside the only establishment with intact windows, the Blind Huntsman Tavern. The strange wording of her instructions, “until nightfall,” echoed in Ruby’s mind, and she grew impatient waiting in her car. She got out, walked up to the tavern door, knocked, and tried the wrought iron handle. It fell apart in her hand and clattered against the sagging floorboards, leaving the tavern door to swing open.

A smell of death overwhelmed Ruby as she peeked inside, such that she had to hold her hand over her nose and mouth to keep from gagging. The dining area was filled with bluebottle flies that coated the tables and slowly looped through the mephitic air. 

Ruby looked to the bar and gasped. On the wall mirror were scratched in huge block letters, apparently by human fingernails, the words “THEY COME AT NIGHT.” As the last rays of daylight left the tops of the curtain walls, Ruby heard a chorus of howls boom across Oneida Reserve.   

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 11

Theme 222: Chess

On the far western edge of the town square, which is an empty expanse of sixty-four by sixty-four meters paved with travertine blocks, Detective Sergeant Elsa König of the Petty Larceny Squad has perched herself at the top of a curved amphitheater, dead center. Opposite her, on the far eastern edge of the square, the portly, middle-aged Lawrence Sovrano, wearing a black silk shirt and a diamond pinky ring, sits at the central table of an outdoor café, sipping a frullato di frutta and fiddling with the handle of a curious valise at his side. After a rash of pickpocketing incidents in the town square, König has made it her mission to catch Sovrano in the act of spiriting away stolen goods in that valise of his, as Sovrano is the suspected majordomo of the young pickpockets responsible for the thefts. Sovrano, for his part, wishes to embarrass König by pinning her with another spate of unsolved pickpocketing incidents, this time occurring right under her proverbial nose.

The subjects of prospective thefts whom König has vowed to protect, and whom Sovrano is set on victimizing, are the shoppers, tourists, and other patrons of the town’s establishments. They take congenial strolls in straight, plodding lines through the square, looking directly before themselves to the left or right, but otherwise remaining oblivious to surrounding threats. Mixed among these well-heeled folk are tatterdemalions and other misfits who also move in plodding lines, and whom Sovrano depends on as obstructions to the eagle eye of his opponent.

At König’s disposal in her task are: in the far northwest and southwest corners of the square, two patrol officers mounted on bicycles poised to race down orthogonal lines; two more patrol officers on foot who move along sweeping diagonal routes through the square; and König’s partner, an athletic junior detective who is able to sprint in any direction to pounce on culprits he or König spots.

Sovrano, on the other hand, has his own assets to command. First, his two statuesque younger brothers, Bruno and Castello, act as body guards by waiting, respectively, at the café bar on the northeast corner of the square and the barber shop on the southeast corner, ready to switch places with Sovrano at his signal, which will enable him to escape from the square through their protection. Then there is Sovrano’s mistress, a shapely redhead whose long legs take her swiftly to any location in the square, so as to intercept and bewitch male officers before they can discharge their duties. Finally, there are the two teenage expert pickpockets Sovrano has groomed while acting as a go-between with fences (for a large percentage of course). These pickpockets have learned to move in the most devious manner of all the players in the square today, darting forward in short bursts, seemingly toward clear targets, but then swerving away at the last instant to the left or the right in order to stealthily pilfer carelessly dangling chains or loose wallets before it can be determined where they have disappeared to.

Will this be the day D.S. König finally outmaneuvers Sovrano and catches him in the act of placing hot items from the hands of one his pickpockets into his valise? Or will Sovrano escape her again by switching places with one his brothers and leaving the square unseen? Or may it perhaps end in a stalemate when one of the pickpockets under Sovrano’s command is apprehended in the commission of a grab?

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day Ten

Theme 514: Volcano!

At twilight, Procrustes once again knelt by the hole under the basin pipe in the far corner of his cell and rasped into it. “Feculent! Are you there!” he rasped. Soon he heard a familiar creak of bedslats followed by sullen shuffling that signaled his friend in the adjacent cell’s approach to the corresponding hole under his own basin pipe.

Feculent’s voice picked up a metallic ring as it traveled through the wrought iron pipes. “Yeah, I’m here,” the voice said.

“I’ve decided to reveal to you the reason for my current internment! Our alliance has progressed to such a stage, I feel we are ready for this next step, don’t you?” Procrustes queried, straining against the upper limits of susurration with excitement.

“I suppose so,” Feculent replied.

“Good. Now what I’m about to tell you will burden you with forbidden knowledge, which entails an onerous responsibility, so stop me at any time if it becomes too much, if it becomes too frightening or overwhelming.”

“Sure,” was Feculent’s response.

“Good. You see,” Procrustes began his briefing, “it has to do with the Volcano 9000 Mega-Lottery of Washington state, at the time the largest bounty in the country. Now, as you know, I am an unparalleled genius in the fields of numerology, etiology, mental projection, air-loom devices, and advanced ratiocination. This genius allowed me to devise a perfect system for learning in advance the number balls that would be selected by the Volcano 9000, to be erupted up through its cinder cone of molten cash …”

After a pause to catch his breath, Procrustes continued, “My theory of lottery numbers will be too complex for you to fully comprehend, I’m afraid, but suffice to say it involved measuring the precise relationships between factors seldom considered by other lottery theorists, such as the number of days since the last eclipse, fluctuations in the rotation speed of the earth due to irregularities in public transportation, and the number of black birds sitting on a wire outside my apartment window at any given time. Clearly my system could not fail to determine the correct numbers!”  

“Clearly,” Feculent concurred.

“And yet, and yet! When the time for the cash eruption came, the balls produced did not match a single number on my ticket! How could this be? I asked myself. Surely, if my system had needed adjustment, I would have been off by several numbers—but not all! It was then that my mind was struck by a vision of the truth, revealed to me by way of my powers of universal attunement. What I saw was simply this: the Volcano 9000 was no impartial lottery number selector machine, no, but was rather in fact an obfuscation machine!”

“You don’t say,” Feculent commented.

“Yes, it’s true. In fact, the numbers had been fixed long in advance by a cabal as ancient as numbers themselves, whose ambit was the Washington Gaming Commission, in order to influence the fate of humanity by selecting the ‘proper’ winners and matching them with the ‘proper’ numbers, sometimes years, even decades in advance. The name of this group? The Nonagonal Knights of the Volcano Machine! You see, their method is to insinuate the numbers chosen by their inscrutable secret system into the minds of their selected winners-to-be by planting subliminal numerical cues all around them by such means as: specially curating the commercials sent to the subjects’ televisions, altering the phone numbers on the billboards on the subjects’ habitual routes, even controlling the number of black birds sitting outside the subjects’ windows! Then, when the Volcano 9000 picks the number balls, a hidden device in the cinder cone of molten cash overwrites the numbers on those balls with the ‘proper’ numbers implanted in the mind of the selected winner—in the blink of an eye!”

“Shocking,” Feculent noted.

“Indeed, my friend!” Procrustes agreed. “And so I was left but with one choice: to take things into my own hands! By relying on my aforementioned genius for esoteric ratiocination, I was able to analyze the profiles of the previous winners and accurately predict who the next person to be selected would be. That was how I discovered that I would need to abduct Mr. Colin Corbin of Wenatchee—”

Procrustes’ narrative was interrupted by rude clattering and jingling noises outside his cell: the dinner cart had arrived. Procrustes heard a sullen shuffling through the basin pipe, indicating he no longer had his friend’s ear. He stood up and scratched the forest of twisted wires springing from his chin. “Had this interruption been precisely staged to prevent Feculent from learning the full truth?” Procrustes wondered amongst the vortex of his other thoughts.



Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day Nine

Theme 712: Animals

At the kitchen table, Eunoia scowled at her brother Fred, and Fred scowled at his ham and Swiss sandwich. Though Eunoia was nine and her brother twenty three, it was she who had been instructed by their mother to watch her brother and ensure he ate his sandwich. You see, Fred was a microcephalic with a flattened melon-shaped skull who tended to erupt violently when things went against his wishes, which is why he was strapped into a massive custom-built high chair with asylum-grade leather.

Eunoia, meanwhile, was an anomaly in the opposite direction, in that she had already attained college level in her mental acuity and knowledge of the physical sciences. Indeed, she had opened in front of her, on a linoleum placemat depicting a rustic mill, Nestor’s Mechanisms of Microbial Disease. She had intended to assimilate the entire text this afternoon before yet again being pinned down to guardianship over her brother.

“Want go zoo,” Fred pouted.

“Do you?” Eunoia asked. “Well, don’t you know that as soon as you eat your sandwich, we are going straight to the zoo?”

Fred’s watery eyes began to glisten. “Go zoo?”

“Yes, certainly. Straight to the zoo,” Eunoia affirmed, nodding vigorously.

“Zoo!” Fred cried. He wolfed down his sandwich at once in excitement, choking himself in the process, which he resolved by letting out a thunderous cough that ejected a substantial gob of bread and ham. The gob splattered on a picture of an Apicomplexa Protist in Eunoia’s book. “Now go zoo! Zoo!” Fred demanded, frantically pounding on the sides of his high chair.

“No. I lied,” Eunoia seethed. She snatched the napkin from Fred’s tray and attempted to salvage her Apicomplexia illustration from Fred’s masticated gob.

“Waaa?” Fred asked, suddenly quiet, his face flushing with blood, his jowls beginning to tremble.

Eunoia knew that look. She became concerned she had gone too far. She looked down at her book. An idea caused a smile to creep into the corners of her diminutive mouth. “No, but you know why? It’s because you are already at the zoo, Fred. You have a zoo inside you.”

“Waaa?” Fred looked down at himself. His face began to change color again, this time to fish-flesh white. “Zoo—zoo?”

“On that piece of cheese you just ate, in your stomach now,” Eunoia explained. “There were thousands and thousands of little creatures on that piece of cheese, and now they are all running around inside you, down your throat and in your belly. There are the Lactococci, which look like squirming little balls. They like to form chains with their friends so they can crawl around like centipedes. Then there are the Lactobacilli, which are like long fingers that grope out all over the place, eating sugar and spitting acid. Oh, and another kind you definitely have in there are the Streptococci. They’re nasty little ring-shaped creatures that sometimes like to eat your flesh. Hopefully yours are feeling nice today.”

As Fred listened to his sister, his moist eyes widened and widened. He looked down at himself again and began furiously clawing at his belly, scratching into his skin with his jagged nails. He bellowed, “Get out! Get out!” Their mother ran into the kitchen. As soon as she saw what Fred was trying to do, she opted to sedate him by sticking him in the neck with a tranquilizer. 

When asked what had happened, Eunoia shrugged. She noted that she had managed to get Fred to eat his sandwich, for what it was worth. With a sigh, she resumed her study of microorganisms. 

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day Eight

Theme 856: Recent Dreams

Following are scenes from a fragment of a mysterious cult film called “Marginalia.” The film is both incomplete and ever-expanding, as new VHS tapes with hitherto unseen footage, some of dubious authenticity, keep appearing in unlikely locations around the world. Some believe that the film’s footage is a product of an experimental process wherein the film maker, an individual known only as “Thurmer,” is able to translate images from his own dreams directly onto celluloid. The fragment described here is a secondary, alternative narrative set in the early 1900s that runs parallel, in a somewhat ambiguous fashion, to the main narrative of the film set in present day.

1.   The main character, a nondescript man (who may or may not be played by Thurmer himself) known only as “the Participant,” disembarks from a steam train in a small southwestern town. The year is 1903. The town is mostly deserted, almost a ghost town, and is everywhere covered with yellow dust. The Participant is anxious, as if he is afraid he is being pursued, but we see no one else get off the train after him.

2.     The Participant soon steps into an inn off the main street, looking for somewhere to stay. The innkeeper, an ancient and very thin woman, is the only person in the place. The inn seems to fall apart as she speaks, as it is revealed to be infested with enormous, ravenous termites that fall from the ceiling with heavy thuds, sometimes rolling off the innkeeper’s bonnet or falling from her unkempt hair. The innkeeper explains that she can no longer put anyone up at the inn, things are too far gone, but she tells the Participant that there is a large manse several leagues beyond where a man of the Participant’s description has long been expected. Intrigued, the Participant leaves and makes his way out of the town to the manse.

3.      [Redacted until further notice]

…

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day Seven

Theme 127: The Rocket Ship

As the elevator had “Under Repair” signs posted warning off employees this morning, Sophia Quincunx took the stairs to the sixth floor. When she came to the sixth landing, she walked to her office door, which was just adjacent to the teasmade cart and a few yards down from the restrooms, grasped its handle, and was instantly teleported to the Horse Head Nebula, or thereabouts.

Sophia found herself in a starship, or rather, she herself was the starship. A tangled array of biosynthetic cords ran into and out of her cerebellum and medulla oblongata, via a pulsing grommet at the base of her spinal column. Her eye sockets now stretched out in a limacine fashion and poked through the ship’s outer hull at their termini. In place of her eyes sat multi-faceted sensor spheres capable of perceiving the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma radiation to radio waves. Her arms split out into thousands of conduits, braces, and furiously working arachnid-like appendages that tapped and twisted buttons, levers, and webbing on the inner surface of the ship. From her pelvis, cosmically shielded skin and cartilage spread forward to form a translucent lotus bud-shaped envelope around the entire craft. Behind this envelope, her legs, also cosmically shielded, opened out into scintillating zero-point energy sails.

As soon as Sophia came to appreciate her new circumstances, she turned herself about, leaving the Horse Head Nebula behind her and pointing herself toward Sol. She decided to put her capabilities to the test. Her sails became radiant as she tore off in the direction of Earth. She was travelling at close to light speed, 290 million miles per second, when her zero-point field engaged and all of space and time became fluidic around her. She pressed herself onward, faster. Every node in her body-craft reached forward to connect to every other point in the galaxy. She mounted the threshold of universal presence …

Sophia awoke slumped against the bars opposite the door to her office. Dazed, she looked up into the face of a stocky electrician who stood fretting over her. The electrician became relieved when he saw that she was conscious, and he quickly assured her that emergency medics were en route. While they waited, he proceeded to explain in a rapid but stuttering fashion that somehow, he didn’t know how, a conduit from the elevator under repair had fallen behind the wall and made contact with the doorframe, so that when Sophia had touched the handle, she had been electrocuted and thrown back against the bars.

Sophia nodded. She could hear the EM’s hustling up the stairwell now. She looked up at the wall and imagined her starship-self contacting every point in the cosmos at once.



Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day Six

Theme 180: First Eye Contact

The old glazier Ichor nursed a vodka tonic at the far end of the bar, furtively watching the door.

“Master Ichor! What a rare treat!” exclaimed a thin man who took Ichor by surprise, as he seemed to have materialized instantaneously in the seat beside Ichor. He clapped his hand on Ichor and gripped his arm. He was wearing the unmistakable flannel gray of a Party official.

“I—” Ichor began.

“No, please, no false modesty,” the thin man interrupted. His mannered formality veiled a slight accent. “Though we’ve never met, your hallowed reputation as a master of glassworks proceeds you. I am only too, too honored to speak with you. As it just so happens, I have something with me, or rather two things, I would love for you take a look at and get your expert appraisal of. I know you’ll appreciate them!” The thin man placed a small teak valet on the bar. He unhooked its latch and took out from its padded interior a glass eye, which he held up to Ichor’s face.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” the thin man remarked, turning the eye between his thumb and forefinger through a narrow shaft of daylight that ran across the bar, illuminating the eye’s pale blue iris. “Of course, you’d have to have seen it in its proper setting, its owner’s head, to fully appreciate it. Unfortunately, the owner was a young woman, barely nineteen, who was shot earlier this morning. It seems she was an agent against the Party. Can you believe it? So young, so fresh …”

“You see,” the thin man continued after a pause, “she had managed to get through undetected at the Security Checkpoint—which, as I’m sure you’re aware, is very thorough in its cavity searches. She would have gone unpunished on the other side, too, if I hadn’t personally tracked her down after noticing an odd statistical irregularity: a second person with a glass eye of the same make went through the Checkpoint, on the same day!”

The thin man placed the first eye beside Ichor’s drink and took out a second glass eye from the valet, which he again held up to Ichor’s face. This eye’s iris was deep green. “Equally exquisite, don’t you agree? This one was taken from a young man, also barely nineteen, also shot this morning, under very similar circumstances—though we’re fairly certain these two young people had never met. Sad, isn’t it, that this is the way a young man and woman’s eyes should first meet? Ha!” The thin man took up the eyes and clicked them together to make his point.  

“You say they were killed—for having glass eyes?” Ichor inquired haltingly.

“Oh no, of course not. What a monstrous thought! Though it did turn out that both of these unfortunate young people had suffered ‘accidents’ not a week prior, resulting in a loss of the left eye in both cases. But even such an extreme statistical anomaly would not be cause enough to bring accusations. Herein lies the ingenious point, which, again, I know you will appreciate as a master glassworker. For we never would have noticed that both eyes were from the same craftsman if not for a most incredible maker’s mark they both have.”

The thin man carefully turned one of the eyes to show Ichor its rear portion. “You see, there is a transparent space at the back here. It allows light to come in and then out through the iris on the other side—though the difference between the translucent and opaque parts are imperceptible from the front. Just beautiful! Now watch what it projects when the light comes through.” The thin man moved the blue eye into the sun and adjusted its angle until a bluish hook shape appeared on the surface of the bar. He did the same with the green eye, resulting in the appearance of an identical, except greenish, shape beside the first. “The maker’s mark: the Greek letter, iota!”

“You’re right, this is quite ingenious work. But the young people were killed for this?” Ichor asked.

“No, no. I’m not finished. Watch.” The thin man now slowly turned the eyes toward one another until their lines of sight met and crossed, causing the two maker’s marks to overlap exactly. And here a hidden turquoise image appeared inside the iota symbol. It was an intricate set of patterns that would have to be viewed under a microscope—perhaps they were floorplans or blueprints. A smile broadened across the thin man’s face as he looked from the patterns to Ichor. “Such cleverness, I almost wish I could have let those two go, let them meet for the first time on the other side. Almost. But again we have an instance of the new Party science of statistics outmatching the old arts. So it goes!”

The thin man placed the glass eyes back in the valet, stood up, and put the little valet into his coat pocket. “Now, may I ask you to accompany me to my office, Master Ichor, so that together we may identify the craftsman who made this wonderful, treasonous artifact, the one signified by the iota mark, whoever he may be? You understand the importance of doing so, don’t you?”

“Yes,” croaked Ichor, and he stood and left the bar with his captor.



Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.