Author: M Van Vleet

Looking forward to the holidays and baking my classic Hand Squash. It’s easy: wash the skin, put in the oven whole at 350 for 40 min. Then when it’s cool enough to touch, cut it open at the table to reveal a human hand inside, palm up.

Everyone at the feast gets to compare prints and palm lines to find out whose hand it matches and in the coming year, they will be Chosen By The Fields. But the real secret ingredient is to melt on more butter than feels safe, plus some cinnamon.

1. Picking a server
Whichever one you pick is wrong, so just… rip off the band-aid. Get it out of the way.

2. Finding people to follow
Don’t follow anyone. It’s a sign of weakness. As soon as you follow someone, they’ll fall on you like starving animals. An isolated account is a safe account.

3. Hashtags
I don’t know what those are and I refuse to learn.

4. The Reckoning
When the sun dims to a sickly orange and every living thing retreats into the mud, log off.

Imagine being born in a time when you can take advantage of a post-war economy and just buy your own island, name it after you, and start making animal-hybrid chimeras.

While I pay rent on a small apartment and can only afford to superglue my hands before I pet a dog.

Kids this year have wild costumes. One of ’em looked just like my landlord. His pals were sheriffs and they took all my stuff, dumped it on the sidewalk. Changed all the locks.

I gave ’em all full-size Snickers for the effort. Think the rest of the candy I’ll need as a makeshift blanket. Cold out.

I don’t check my kids candy. I don’t check anything they eat. Had a guy holding a butterfly net tell me one of ’em ate a whole zoo, including the enclosures and the ticket stands. All the animals, gone down the gullet.

Said he was hoping I’d let him past the door, maybe he could at least scoop back an emu or something from the kid— hence the net— and I said “buddy, that’s between you and the emu.”

oh no, dracula watched all the kung fu movies

he’s lived so long he could watch them all

and he’s kicking down the cobwebs

and he’s chopping at the coffin lid but

it won’t break

like in the movies

but keep trying dracula

you’ve got so much time left to make

your hands into weapons

Had a plumber in today who kept referring to the sink as the Well of Souls and put a ring of candles all along the counter alongside one of those really curvy knives… do they have a name? The curvy ones that wiggle like a… they look like a snake in motion?

Maybe I should have DIY-ed it ’cause they were meant to look at the heater, but so far all they’ve done is summoned three tar-black gremlins from the garbage disposal who are dancing around and cursing my bloodline, which… c’mon.