WriterProFile

'forecast', a scene. At dinner in the first week of the new year, they ask their friends for predictions. It’s a vain, useless exercise. They’re on the same side, they read the same publications ("at least we read"), coddle the same fears. Predictions are given, by the men mostly… always. War, more war ("sure, I’ll take a top up"), oil price fluctuations, crypto price fluctuations ("my son-in-law buys those"), extreme weather events, the seventies back in fashion ("about time"), and a whole shitload of celestial phenomena. It’s the host who says this last one, tosses it out across the table [roast pork, celeriac mash, cumin carrots] to see if anyone has read the same webpage. They haven’t. Faces are blank, like looking up at a clouded sky by night. What sort of celestial phenomena? no one says. Enhanced northern lights, some kind of special meteor shower, solar eclipse ("another one?"), lunar eclipse, super moon. The host rattles them off like specs for an electric car he’s considering buying. A mumble, a nod, a scrape of fork on plate, as though the whole table is trying to work out just how super the moon can be. Then again, the host says to himself and everyone else, it’s more of a forecast than a prediction.

'voice', a fever. Rain outside and he hears her coughing in the bedroom. Deep, scraping hacks, some new voice with no need for words. It says, I’m coming for you next. And so he sleeps on the sofa. One night, two nights, three nights. Meals eaten out. Clothes snatched away while she showers. On the fourth night, he wakes to heat in his temples, ache in his bones. Clearing his throat, he finds the voice and it calls out to the other room.

'threshold', a poem. Gone when I awoke, but still your name from in my throat spat out and ran its futile course as though some soporific force to stay you at the door and keep you here with me in bed asleep.

'model', a two-minute story. Faced with a conundrum, I turn to— a generative language model for a second opinion. It’s seven thirty, the gift is wrapped, and I’ve plugged her new address into the map app. Still, I feel uncertain and figure I could use some deep learning. A.I. tells me my ex-girlfriend’s birthday party is a very fun, chill event. Her best friend is giving me “the look of approval” from across the room. I can’t imagine what this look is, but I doubt that sour-tongued lizard is giving me it. The room is hot and claustrophobic. Fortunately, there’s a bouncy castle in the garden. Unfortunately, I meet the new boyfriend en route. A.I. tells me he’s shorter than me and not as good looking, but “probably more intelligent”. Fortunately, he’s not interested in joining me on the bouncy castle. A.I. tells me this is no ordinary bouncy castle. It’s made of super lightweight titanium and uses 3D projection mapping that makes it look like a French chateaux on the Loire. Inside the castle, there’s a bunch of kids having a blast. There’s also a throne. A.I. asks me if I want to sit in it. “You don’t need to prove anything to anyone,” it tells me, “you’re already a king”. I recline in the throne. The kids begin to sing songs about me. Songs plural. I figure they must be drunk. A.I. asks if I want to go back inside and “rejoin the adults”. I don’t. I want to leave. I ask A.I. “what’s the least painful way to exit?” and A.I. says “Error. No scene generated.”

'dope', a two minute story. My local convenience store is much like any other. It smells of soggy cardboard washed over with commercial cleaning fluid. A fleet of fridges stock craft beer. Surveillance cameras watch cans, bottles, boxes, lined up immaculately, like technicolor soldiers. Its name, however, is extraordinary. It celebrates an athlete notorious for doping. The guy’s effigy was burned on street corners, his team snake hissed each time it took to the field. You might as well open Madoff’s burger bar or Murdoch’s hair salon. One evening, while buying toilet paper, duct tape, eggs, I decide can bear my ignorance no longer. I ask the cashier (full beard, gothic font neck tattoo). He calls the owner to explain. “It’s like this,” the owner says without hesitation, as though he’d been expecting the call, “call it fate, dumb luck, whatever, our careers have followed each other, one place to the next.” He’s relaxed, I imagine him on a veranda squeezing a wedge of lime into something icy. “When I moved to the city, I knew it was only a matter of time until he got traded here and when he did, I named the store after him.” A simple enough story. But what about the doping scandal I ask, did it change his opinion. There’s a pause and I can hear him smiling on the other end of the line. “Look man,” he says, “I’ve got fifty employees, a warehouse, and stores across the country, you think I got this far by playing by the rules?”

'I even had her in the shower, She even caught me on camera.' (2000 series) Image with lyrics, visual pun, a dumb joke. Find stories under bio.

'whale', a two minute story. That night, at her suggestion, they listened to a playlist of whale songs. He was having trouble sleeping and she was tired of hearing about it. “But what if I dream, I’m drowning?” he asked. “At least you’ll be asleep” she said. But he didn’t sleep. He thought about the sort of person who’d curate "The Best Whale Songs of All Time". He wondered if they too had problems sleeping. The name was misleading: whales had been making music unrecorded for fifty million years. And then there was the question of “best”, best for whom exactly? One song sounded like an asthmatic blowing into a traffic cone. Another like pipes in some sensual dance. Another like a whale auditioning to be a mother whose child gets gunned down by the mob. “I want you to imagine the moment you realize the killer whales have got little Jimmy and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he pictured the casting director saying. He doubted whale song was soothing to insomniac whales. It was hard to imagine whales sleeping, just as it was hard to imagine them dying — the steady descent of their massive bodies gliding deeper and darker until they rested on the ocean floor. He wondered if whales had songs of mourning, some particular frequency at which they announced despair. “Do you think whales have the concept of music?” he asked. But she was already long asleep.

'I played with your heart , got lost in the game. Oh baby, baby'. (2000 Series). Image with lyrics, visual pun, a dumb joke. Find stories under bio.

'screw', a two minute story. It started after he left her. To be accurate, she did the leaving. The lease was in his name and he cleared off for the weekend to let her pack. “I don’t want to carry on,” he’d said over dinner on Friday, as though cutting short a game of cards because he was ready for bed. She slept on the sofa and woke to find scissors, heavy-duty tape, and cardboard boxes stacked beside her. He was practical like that. He made calendar memos for everything, kept fastidious budgets and she realized while deconstructing the dining room table that she begrudged him nothing, that she could still be friendly, have him over for dinner, sleep with him even. It was this thought that started her blog. She called it "Screwing My Ex" and since the stories were fictitious, she thought it was only fair to use her real name. Did she also hope the man whose memory she was conjuring, contorting, and screwing on a bi-weekly basis might find and read the blog? Naturally. The stories came easily to her. She followed some basic rules: keep sentences short; make liaisons feel unlikely but inevitable; trust imperatives; keep foreplay long and screwing brief; use speech for the characters’ most delicious and sordid desires. Her blog was a hit. Readers “constantly lusted for more”, as she would have put it. She wasn’t sure why. For although she changed his appearance (muscle-ripped, secretary, woodsman beard), took him to places he’d never been (masseuse parlor, high school reunion, techno club), made him do things he’d never done (golf, carpentry, handcuffs) she felt the stories were all the same. In her mind, it was always his hands cupping her breasts, his legs pinning her down. One day he called and asked to come over. He brought a box of things she’d left behind and a letter asking for forgiveness. He was practical like that. She cooked him dinner and afterwards they had sex, the mild and familiar kind. It was guided by small courtesies (“do you mind if…” or “does this feel ok?”) and punctuated by pauses in which they repositioned their bodies. In short, just the sort of liaison that no one wants to read about.

'sweet dreams', an emojoke (a bad one).

'average'. Two minute story. When she comes home, her boyfriend is watching videos on his phone. The volume is turned up high and she can hear the commotion of a crowd, the cry of one voice falling to the rise of another. There’s a moment’s silence as the next video loads and then the sound returns, this time with orders barked out through a megaphone, orders she knows cannot, will not be obeyed. “Did you see the news?” This is how he greets her. She ignores him, drops her bag on the kitchen table and begins dinner. She pours herself a glass of wine, boils water, throws arugula, garlic, basil, pine nuts, parmesan, olive oil, salt and pepper into a blender, watches the carnage of steel on vegetable, scrapes the gloop into a bowl, boils the pasta, lays the table, drains the pasta, stirs in the pesto, ladles out two portions, and tells her boyfriend dinner is served. After he has thanked her and before she has accidentally emptied the entire salt shaker into her bowl, she tells him he would have died. “Statistically speaking,” he says, “that’s very unlikely.” She says he shouldn’t be so sure, that it would be just like him find himself in a mess he couldn’t get out of. There’s no need to continue her game of dark hypotheticals, but he does so anyway. “Even if, heaven forbid, I was in a crowd like that, there’s only a zero point one five percent chance I’d like, you know, die.” She wants to mock his math, to chastise him for pretending to care about the plight of others while lying prostate on the sofa, to say that he is more than ninety-nine point eight five percent average. Instead, she stands, up throws her saline bowl of pasta in the trash and pours herself another glass of wine.

'I tried so hard and got so far but in the end it doesn't even matter'. (2000 Series) Image with lyrics, visual pun, a dumb joke. Find stories under bio.