Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 22

Theme 529: Numbers  

Homunculus, a chubby Scottish fold balled up on the rattan settee’s bolster cushion, squinted at his young associate, a feisty one year old red tabby named Hecuba. She was stalking an ingrailed clay moth across the sun-dappled conservatory. The moth spiraled down haphazardly and came to rest on the peacock tiffany glass shade of a tall floorlamp. Since the moth sat exactly two meters from the quartzite floor tiles, the nearest surface to it that Hecuba could reach was the crest of a Queen Anne chair pushed in under the games table. She jumped up and balanced on the crest, with both her fore and rear paws gripping the arched mahogany, in order to accurately judge the distance. The chair crest, which trembled slightly under the balancing cat, was a meter off the ground and three quarters of a meter laterally distant from the lampshade.

Homunculus lifted his chin and widened his citronette eyes to study the action his associate was contemplating. Judging the proposed deed to be ridiculous, he closed his eyes and turned his head away dismissively. Hecuba, however, remained determined. She began enumerating the relevant factors. 

By the Pythagorean theorem, she calculated the length of the hypotenuse, which was also the distance to the moth, as one and a quarter meters. By inverse cosine three fifths, she found the angle to be approximately fifty three degrees. She knew that the full force of her sprung haunches would propel her from the chair’s crest, after rapid acceleration, at a velocity of five meters per second. Of course downward acceleration due to gravity would remain its usual nine point eight one meters per second squared, while air resistance would be a negligible factor, considering the distance of the leap and the atmospherics of the conservatory. Setting her starting position as zero by zero meters, her target position, where her center of gravity would need to be when she snatched the moth in her front paws, was five eighths by one and one tenth meters. Finally, she calculated the necessary starting angle of her trajectory by plugging the appropriate values into the formula:

Thus completing the above calculations in two seconds, Hecuba confidently contracted her thigh muscles and launched herself from the chair’s crest at a seventy nine degree angle. She reached the target position exactly as planned and caught the moth in her clutches. Unfortunately, the lampshade proved more resistant to the push of her claws than she had anticipated, such that as she swung her paws down to land, they caught the lampshade’s rim. Sadly, this released the moth, allowing it to flutter up to freedom. The weight of Hecuba’s body dragging the lampshade along the forward arc of her trajectory brought the whole floorlamp crashing down to the hard tiles, where the tiffany glass smashed into chips that spread across the conservatory floor. Landing just short of the broken tower, Hecuba raced back behind the settee and poked her head around the corner to survey the destruction site. Clearly she would require more accurate measurements for lampshade inertias in the future.

Homunculus’ whiskers had prickled outward, but he otherwise remained insouciantly curled on his cushion, looking askance at his wayward associate, as if to say, “They’ll know who to blame for this, and it won’t be me.” 

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 21

Theme 004: Book Covers

When the times on the screen above the ticket lobby rolled over to list Cassandra’s train as a late arrival, she decided to wander along the promenade to the narrow bookshop she had seen wedged between a deli and the main concourse. It would be another seven hours altogether before she would arrive in the border town where her grandmother’s funeral was to be held the next day, and though she had plenty of coursework left to do in her satchel, she wanted something more diverting from her mournful thoughts.

The cover of a used copy of Agnes Grey slotted at the top of a carrousel caught Cassandra’s eye immediately upon entering the bookshop. It featured Manet’s Le Chemin de fer, in which a young copper-haired woman sits on the stone curb of an iron fence with a weathered book open in her lap. For some reason, her fingers are stuck in several different sections of this book. A small white and sienna puppy lies asleep on her forearm. She is wearing a black ladies hat affixed with ribbons and flowers, a black choker, and an oxford blue dress with white buttons. To her left, a honey blonde girl, perhaps six or seven years old, wearing a lacy white dress with a blue bow, leans over the curb with her back to the viewer, her bare left arm reaching to grasp one of the bars of the fence. She is looking out over a train yard and station, identified as the Gare Saint-Lazare, down below the fence, where a great plume of white smoke has drifted over the tracks.

Cassandra took down the book to inspect the painting more closely. She conjectured that the young woman was the girl’s mother. She had taken her daughter out for an excursion through the park. Along the way she had purchased a puppy that her daughter had begged for but had since forgotten, thus leaving the mother to swaddle it. The book in the mother’s lap, Cassandra believed, was a romantic novel the mother had picked up to take her mind off of the cares of child-rearing. Without really knowing anything about Anne Brontë’s novel, Cassandra decided to purchase the copy of Agnes Grey with the loose cash left in her pocket.

Two hours later, in a window seat aboard the coach-class car rumbling northward, Cassandra turned Agnes Grey over to look at the reproduction of Le Chemin de fer again. Upon reaching the point at which Agnes is installed in the Wellwood house to work for the Bloomfields, Cassandra came to understand that for the purposes of the cover, the painting was intended to represent a governess and her charge. The governess was resting out of weariness from supervising the girl, who was clearly the spoiled tyro of a wealthy family. It now seemed to Cassandra that the governess was protecting the puppy from the abuse of the tetchy girl by harboring him in her lap. The book she had her fingers in was a textbook full of Latin sententiae and exercises, which she was reviewing to prepare future lessons.

Three days later, Cassandra finished the last page of Agnes Grey as the southbound train swayed into a curve running toward a tunnel, on the far side of which she would see the vacant lots and graffitied warehouses on the outskirts of her home city. She closed the book and examined the cover once more. With the images of the novel’s funerary and marital ceremonies drifting into those of the service she had just attended, she now perceived an entirely different significance in the painting: the book cradled in the woman’s lap was her life journal, consonant with that which made up the text of Agnes Grey. Her fingers holding multiple places represented her premonitions about the future, as she had just reached the threshold of full maturity, and her ruminations on the past, embodied in the living person of little girl—who was in fact the woman herself, at a time when she was still in awe of the powerful engines of society. Both the puppy and the book in the woman’s lap, then, were symbols of life, held for a brief, uncertain moment in one’s ambit.

Cassandra returned Agnes Grey to her satchel and leaned back in her lumpy seat as the train entered the echoing, sightless tunnel.

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 20

Theme 310: Hope

At the table in the atrium, Penia contemplates her wedding plans. She pages through a wedding invitation catalog and places sticky tabs on the pocket-fold designs she prefers. She will have to ask Stanley, her fiancé, for his thoughts before making a decision, though. She turns to the samples of bouquet arrangements and centerpieces the florist gave her. She lingers over the burgundy zinnias and peach peonies, even though she has already committed to white and silver as the chromatic motifs best complimenting the Winter’s Tale theme of the wedding. She pictures white benches adorned with silver streamers and white velveret ribbons, aligned in rows facing the shimmering lake beyond the Wexford Manor garden, the location reserved for the ceremony. This prompts Penia to open the folder with the seating chart so that Stanley can review it as soon as he returns from his council meeting. She looks up at the clock bolted high on the wall. Dissatisfied with the time, she impatiently pushes her hair back in order to scratch the raised parabolic scar running across her left temple.

Beyond the door to the atrium lies a long dim hallway with gentian blue porcelain tiles. Embedded in the junction of the hallway is a nurses station, formed by a low wall mounted with formica counters and affixed with a corner l-desk that houses rows of patient charts and a terminal monitor. The nursing office can be seen through a glass door behind the station. The newly hired nursing assistant, a broad-shouldered man wearing crisp scrubs over his pullover, rests his elbows on the counter and watches Penia through the atrium doorway. Stamped above his scrub-tee’s breast pocket are the words Lakeview Psychiatric Hospital.

“That patient, Penia, she’s always in there with her wedding stuff—is she going to get married soon?” the nursing assistant asks.

In the swivel chair at the terminal next to him, his supervisor, a stocky woman with frizzy red hair who has been working in this psychiatric ward for eleven years, looks down the quiet, freshly mopped hallway and lets out a weary sigh of resignation. At last she replies, “Well, that’s the thing with Penia. She was all set to be married when she and her fiancé got in this horrible wreck. She suffered a severe head injury. Her fiancé was killed. She was brought here after she recovered, physically. At first they thought it was just temporary traumatic stress, causing her to be mentally stuck in the time before the accident. But that was eight years ago.”

The nursing assistant frowns and leans further over the counter to view Penia sitting at the atrium table once more. He sees her still holding the seating chart folder while gazing through the barred window with a faraway smile, brought on by her imagined forthcoming marital bliss.

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 19

Theme 241: Cynicism

The affectionate russet-gold Lancashire Heeler, named Diogenes by his late classics professor master, nuzzled the upheld palms of Enodia, the veterinary intern in the animal shelter’s intake vestibule, upon bounding from the wire trap he had been brought in, once Eugene, the animal control officer, released the trap’s door. Diogenes ducked and laid his head upon Enodia’s lap. She was crouching on the celadon tiles before the swinging aluminum door that lead to Dog Control One and the procedure labs. The gleaming marbles of Diogenes’ eyes looking up into Enodia’s own made her smile, even though the wet bib of his coat had dampened her slacks.

When Enodia noticed that Eugene was staring grimly at the floor, however, leaning against the frame of the roll door opening out onto his truck and thumbing the handle of the taser on his belt, she turned her attention to the clipboard, which held forms to be signed by the lead veterinarian, left atop the trap by Eugene. She immediately saw the words TERMINATE WITHOUT DELAY printed in block letters near the top of the first form.

“What did he do? He seems so friendly,” Enodia inquired, a quiver breaking into her voice. Her smile had vanished, and her face had drained of blood.

“You don’t want to know,” Eugene croaked, planting his stare in the ground, stiffly avoiding glancing in the dog’s direction.

“I don’t?” Enodia asked in a high, precatory tone.

This question triggered a flash of the dreaded image in Eugene’s mind again: after meeting the neighbor who had put in the call outside, Eugene had pushed open the front door of the professor’s condo with his bite stick to reveal Diogenes the dog standing on the arm of the sofa where his owner had died, looking up at Eugene with stringy, moist strips of tendons from his master’s brachioradalis muscle dangling from his chops, greeting him with the same friendly, eager eyes. Diogenes had devoured large chucks of the professor’s right forearm, leaving tooth holes in the tattered skin around the professor’s wrist and drenching the dog’s fury bib and chin with congealing deep crimson blood. Medics later determined that the professor had been dead for less than two hours when Diogenes decided to start eating him.

“His owner—he died of an aneurysm, but the corpse—the arm stripped to the bone—like leg of lamb …” Eugene trailed off and turned away, looking out to his truck and holding his hand over his mouth.

“Oh,” Enodia said. She looked down at Diogenes, and it dawned on her why his coat was wet: he had been hosed down to rinse the human gore from his fur. Growing algid, she pushed Diogenes away slowly, took a leash down from the wall, and carefully attached it to Diogenes’ collar without touching his hide. She took up the clipboard and led Diogenes through the swinging metal door, beyond which he would soon be anesthetized in a procedure lab. Eugene was visibly relieved when the dog left his presence. 

Diogenes, for his part, was still happily wagging his tail and looking all around with his shining eyes, eager to meet new people and make new friends.

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 18

Theme 646: Signs

On the first night, at 1:17 AM, a high screaming whistle blared across the town of Ipswich in four distinct intervals of increasing length, followed by a deep but rapid series of knocks that shook window panes and set off three car alarms. The old widower Elton Dunne’s sheepdog began howling incessantly as a result, while the McCullers’ dobermans barked and yapped themselves into a frenzy. The light on Judge Lear’s porch went on, as did the light on Maggie Carroll of Maggie’s Sweet Treats’ porch across the street, and both Maggie and the Judge emerged from their front doors wearing nightgowns and bearing shotguns. Sheriff Calvino, in response to a deluge of calls from familiar voices, spent the next two hours roaming the perimeter of the roughly four square mile town of 1,717 residents with her fourteen inch Maglite throwing its beam across trim lawns, unlit neon signs, empty lots, and open fields. She found no indication of what had made the noise.

On the second night, at exactly 1:17 AM again, the high screaming whistle returned, in the same four intervals, followed by the same resounding series of low knocks, which resembled the cachinnation of a malevolent gibborim. This time, a number of Ipswichians were awake and ready to test out their theories about what the mystery sounds might be. Kenneth Virgil, a journalist and local radio personality, had recording equipment slung around his neck and was holding out a pair of cardioid condenser mics attached to a boom to capture the aural visitation in richer detail; he believed the sounds were caused by low flying secret experimental aircraft, and he wondered if the government could be held accountable for these disruptions. Victoria Ballard, the proprietor of both the Ipswich Cineplex and the Ipswich Pup & Grill on Main Street, had convinced herself, and had half-convinced the circle of friends and neighbors she had invited to listen on the Pup & Grill’s deck, that the phenomenon was a deliberate message of extraterrestrial origin, sent to Ipswich by beings from a distant star, and that it only needed to be properly decoded to be understood. She had even put in a call to an observatory at a university in a neighboring town. The graduate student there assured her that they would look into it. The two longtime friends Dr. Allen Ibsen, a general practitioner at Ipswich Clinic, and Walter Poe, the science teacher at Ipswich High, both believed that the sounds were of much more mundane, terrestrial origin, but they differed vigorously over the exact nature of this origin. Dr. Ibsen believed that the whistles and knocks were coming from malfunctioning equipment at a lumber mill up on a nearby mountain and were carried down through an acoustic resonance effect—whereas Walter Poe reasoned that since the water table had been unusually high that year, the sounds must have been caused by air escaping from previously dry rock formations around Eemian Lake as the water cooled. Walter won the coin toss the friends staged, and so the two spent the night on lawn chairs next to a cooler full of beer on the bank of Eemian Lake to see if Walter’s theory was correct. None of these theories, however, could either be confirmed or discounted definitively by the evidence gathered by the Ipswichians that night.

On the third night, more than half of the town was awake at 1:17 AM, waiting for the return of the whistles and knocks, grouping in their back yards or in the cement lot outside the Pup & Grill or on quilts laid out in Cold Creek Park. One national news outlet had even run a short piece on the event, fueling further speculation. This time, however, 1:17 AM came and went in silence. Nor did the phenomenon return on subsequent nights. And neither the meaning nor the origin of the signals (if that is indeed what they were) has since been discovered.

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 17

Theme 126: Gold

“Why don’t we just kill them all and loot their corpses?” yelled the bandit in the weathered red balaclava, waving the barrel of his Zastava assault rifle at the group of passengers lined up along the side of their motorcoach. By rolling the flaming husk of a pickup from behind a boulder into the motorcoach’s path, the three biker-bandits had easily ambushed this motorcoach on a particularly rugged section of the interstate as it reached the bottom of a hill pinched between two outcrops. Mr. Bentley, a fantods-prone man with a greasy comb-over, stood near the rear engine vent at the end of the line, sweating abundantly. His mouth was tightly closed.

“Naw, if we did that, people might get too scared and stop trying to cross the Badlands by the busload, with all their goodies,” the lead bandit replied. She moved from passenger to passenger, holding out an oil pan for the passengers to deposit their valuables into, thus forming a growing pile of wallets, chains, rings, and watches. She gave each passenger a grin, revealing her chisel-sharpened front teeth. In fact, because there were only three bandits and twelve passengers, plus the driver, the lead bandit feared that the passengers would try to overpower the bandits if they started shooting or molesting one of the women.  

The lead bandit reached Mr. Bentley and held out the bounteous oil pan. Mr. Bentley placed his thin wallet atop the pile. Beads of sweat rolled down onto his sealed lips. The lead bandit thrust her face forward and bore her serrated upper jaw at him with a wheeze. The smell of methyl alcohol and rotten meat caused Mr. Bentley to cough, which allowed the lead bandit to glimpse a flash of gold in his mouth.

“Hey, look at this! Gold teeth! You, hold him. You, find some pliers,” the lead bandit ordered while probing Mr. Bentley’s mouth with her grease-blackened fingers.

“No, no! Please!” Mr. Bentley begged. As soon as he saw the tall bandit to the rear pull a pair of pliers from the side case of one of the parked bikes, he panicked and broke into a wild dash back up the hill. The bandit in the balaclava reflexively unloaded four rounds into Mr. Bentley’s back. Mr. Bentley collapsed in a rut in the road’s shoulder and shortly thereafter stopped breathing. The lead bandit frowned and motioned for the tall bandit to get to work on Mr. Bentley’s mouth with the pliers. She then set the oil pan of loot aside and herded the remaining passengers back onto the motorcoach.

Three minutes later, the motorcoach was underway down the interstate through the Badlands again, and seven bloody teeth capped with gold had been added to the bandits’ oil pan. Mr. Bentley’s body was left in a cloud of dust by the bandit’s motorcycles, left for the gnashing beaks of crows to start cutting into.

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 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.