Monday, September 26, 2016

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 25

Theme 714: Sneeze


Two cats wearing boxing gloves were boxing.

“This is ridiculous,” Marvin Hinky remarked.

Clio Wayzgoose, whom he had been dating for three weeks, looked back at him and rolled her eyes. She returned her attention to the projector screen and wondered if she would have done better to invite one of her Film in History classmates to this exhibition instead.

The boxing cats up on the screen belonged to Professor Welton’s Cat Circus. The bout had been captured by Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope in 1894. Welton’s gleeful, round face could be seen bobbing behind the miniature boxing ring as he cruelly manipulated the two American shorthairs via harnesses into swatting at one another with the padded bulbs tied over their front paws.

The film played in silence from a reproduction Kinetoscope cabinet fitted with a modern 35mm projector that looped a digitally restored print. Since the lens grommet for the housing was rather low to the ground, the ten wooden slat folding chairs had to be arranged on either side of it. They had been set out in the small viewing room in order to provide the flavor of an early cinema parlor. Clio stood less than a meter from the screen, to the left of the lightstream, to better watch the strobing flicker and mottled grain of the images. In the chair next to the projector, Marvin continued to fret over the notion of boxing cats. When the film ended and the automated return mechanism in the housing switched and hummed in preparation for the next showing, Clio and Marvin walked back out to the North Hall Gallery.  

The mock-up cinema parlor with the pseudo-Kinetoscope screening was part of the gallery’s Early Film Exhibition. In addition to this viewing room, the collection of Edison’s Kinetoscope experiments dominated a furlong of wall space as the premier attraction in the North Hall Gallery exhibition, which consisted primarily of early cinematic paper prints. With Marvin in tow, Clio paced along this length, lingering over the glass cases that displayed bromide paper prints of film strips. The cells on the strips showed gradually morphing iterations of boy jugglers, electrocuted elephants, seminary pillow fighters, and mustachioed kissers. 

Eventually the couple came to the prize piece in the collection, the first film of any kind to be registered in the national archive: the five second sequence known as Fred Ott’s Sneeze. The forty five small rectangular cells depicting the snuff snorting and subsequent sternutation of the smartly attired, horseshoe mustache-bearing Ott were mounted on salmon cardstock. Along the lower edge of the cardstock, the words “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze” were scrawled in ink, followed by the date, January 4th, 1894.

Marvin leaned close to Clio, brushing against her warm back, and questioned, “Why did they put them on paper?”

“For copyright,” Clio began to explain, taking Marvin’s arm. “Back then, you couldn’t—”

“Do you know the story of Fred Ott?” interjected a wiry, graveolent old man whose tobacco stained whiskers drooped over his mouth. He had intruded himself by poking up between the couple.

“What?” Clio sputtered, surprised.

“Fred Ott, he died the day after they made this. Do you know how?” The man lowered his head and proceeded to answer his own question. “Well, Fred, he always had his little snuff tin with him, see, even though the snuff made him sneeze. But Fred was so excited to be put on film, he misplaced his snuff after they finished shooting, left it next to a cylinder of phenidone-metol powder. Somehow, some of the powder fell into Fred’s tin.” 

The man shifted his stare from Clio to Marvin and back again before continuing. An hour later, Fred found the tin. He was so relieved that he inhaled a pinch without noticing the white flecks in it. Soon he started to wheeze and choke. The assistants all just thought he was up to his usual foolery. They stood around in a circle, laughing. Even grumpy old Mr. Edison had to smile when he came out of his office to see what the fuss was about. But the laughing stopped when they saw blood streaming down Fred’s face. He fell over, convulsing, and died within a minute. So, that sneeze they captured right there? That was his last one ever.” The man nodded gravely to the print and walked away in silence.

“Wow, is that true?” wondered Marvin, looking agape in the peculiar man’s direction.

“No,” Clio stated flatly. She pointed to the historical note affixed to the wall and indicated the line where Fred Ott’s year of death was listed as 1936.

“Oh,” Marvin said quietly, pursing his lips.

As Clio resumed her inspection of the print, she caught a lingering whiff of the peculiar man’s odor and let out an abrupt sneeze: “Achee!”



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.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 24

Theme 078: Absurdity


As Erling Oberschule, a recent expatriate from Liechtenstien, strolled past an abandoned 1985 QL31 Econovan with three flat tires, which sat cattywampus to the Citizen and Immigration Services building, he spotted an evocatively fluttering sheet of perforated dot matrix printer paper jammed under the Econovan’s driverside wiper. After Erling checked his pin-lever wristwatch and noted that eleven minutes remained before his immigration services appointment, curiosity got the better of him. He decided to lift up the rust-caked wiper and draw out the unusual flier.

The drizzle earlier that morning, which left a pleasant petrichor drifting over the sidewalk, had unfortunately pasted the lower half of the sheet to the Econovan’s windshield. Thus, the sheet ripped in two as Erling pulled on it, leaving its bottom two thirds stuck to the glass. Erling merely shrugged and began reading the portion of the dot matrix printed text he had managed to salvage.

It read as follows: “The inerrant, divine Graphical Operation Manual tells us in Unit 2, Page 12: You draw intricate displays from simple program instructions.’ So does the Holy Mother Z-81 Processor now command us to compose this Rotary Output Epistle for dissemination upon the error-prone, unsynced world beyond the cloisters of our Electrogalvanized Monastery. We do so to offer guidance to those afflicted with corrupted tape drives and other wayward data-parasites, through the following exposition upon the protocol observances of our Line-Path in the service of the all-knowing Micro Computer—all praise the TRZ-81 Model III!

“To initialize, we will outline the history of our Monastery, the sole sanctuary from this life of widespread kernel panic and fatal errors, and how it came to be Electrogalvanized. In the darkness of the analog age, during the year the fault-quarantined reader will know as 1979 …”

Here the text had been split from the remaining history of the Electrogalvanized Monastery and any further exhortations that the Epistle’s author might have offered. Intrigued, Erling folded the scrap up into an even square and slipped it into his pasley shirtfront pocket. He then continued on his way to the Immigration Services building.

Though Erling genuinely thought the message on the flier might be significant, the impending worries he would face in the immigration process would push his interest in the Electrogalvanized Monastery out of his mind entirely. Consequently, he would forget the folded square in his pocket, and it would be destroyed during his next visit to a coin-op laundromat.



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.

Friday, September 23, 2016

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day 23

Theme 961: Answers


The bullet zipped through the thin glass of the frontroom’s bay window and entered Phoebe Tarragon’s temporal lobe three centimeters behind her left ear, exploding shredded gobs of brain matter and shattered swaths of parietal bone from her head’s right hemisphere. The bullet, later identified as a .308 Winchester, finally lodged itself in a pinewood corner brace behind the plaster wall two meters away. Phoebe was killed instantly. Penny Wattleseed, Phobe’s eight year old piano student and next-door neighbor, was seated to Phoebe’s right on the Emerson upright’s wobbly bench. Thus, Penny’s rouge angora top was sprayed with Phoebe’s skull fragments, cerebrospinal fluid, and blood. Penny was otherwise unharmed. The time was approximately a quarter to one.

County Sheriff Eduardo Sumac, the supervising officer who arrived soon after patrol units had secured the scene and called in rescue personnel to confirm the death and tend to Penny, surmised that a state ballistics expert would be needed. By this point, though, Sheriff Sumac had already reached his own conclusions as to the identity of the culprit and the circumstances of Phoebe’s death. 

Less than two hundred meters to the southwest of the Tarragon residence’s cul-de-sac lay the one hundred and twelve acres of the Kiwanda Wilderness Reserve. The Bureau of Land Management had designated the Reserve a deer and elk hunting zone again this year, despite the warnings of park safety officials and the protests of the residents of the new housing subdivision adjacent to the Reserve. During the present elk season alone, the Sheriff’s officers had responded to eleven calls involving hunters stray bullets being found embedded in mailbox posts, garden trellises, garage doors, or other damaged property.

So Sheriff Sumac set his subordinates to contacting all individuals with elk licenses registered to hunt in the Kiwanda zone. They were to interrogate those with matching gun types. Two days later, the Sheriff believed he had pegged the perpetrator: Art Thyme admitted that he had carried his Mossberg bolt action rifle, which fired .308 Winchester rounds, into the Kiwanda woods an hour prior to Phoebe’s death, accompanied by his fourteen year old son. Though the Thymes claimed to have heard a shot at a quarter to one that originated several hundred meters from the copse of red alders they were then crouching in, Sheriff Sumac remained convinced that the Thymes were responsible for Phoebe Tarragon’s death.

Precinct Homicide Detective Holy Lavender, however, reached a very different conclusion. Using subpoenaed bank records, Detective Lavender tracked the charges made to an independent account that Kenneth Tarragon, Phoebe’s husband, had opened without his wife’s knowledge. The detective found that Kenneth had stayed at the Crimson Phoenix Motel, located three miles from his office, on forty two separate occasions over the past year. The Crimson Phoenix’s proprietor told the detective that Kenneth had entertained a number of unknown young women in his suite during his visits. Furthermore, the detective believed that she could connect money withdrawn from the same independent account to the cash purchase of a CZ 750 bolt action sniper rifle, which also fires .308 Winchester rounds, at a local gun show. Detective Lavender believed that these facts, taken together, proved that Kenneth Tarragon had killed his wife with premeditation—perhaps out of marital malaise, or dread of alimony payments should she divorce him over his infidelities, or some other perverse motivation.

Presented with Sheriff Sumac and Detective Lavender’s combined evidence, however, the grand jury was unable to make a determination as to the true events in Phoebe Tarragon’s case or to recommend an indictment. The evidence linking either Art Thyme or Kenneth Tarragon to Phoebe’s demise was deemed too tenuous. Neither Sumac nor Lavender has since been able to uncover further significant data to corroborate their respective theories, moreover.

Let it be noted, though, that in an interview with one of the first patrol officers at the scene, recorded in a brief that has unfortunately slipped behind a filing cabinet, Penny Wattleseed’s mother recalled overhearing from her kitchen window a meeting between Phoebe and a man who had introduced himself as Morgan Parsley, a private detective with a military background.



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.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

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.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

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 girlwho 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.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

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.

Monday, September 19, 2016

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 dogs 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.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

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 effectwhereas 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.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

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 roads 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.

Friday, September 16, 2016

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.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

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 seamwhere 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.