“So I says to him, I says: Gary, you gotta take this stuff more seriously! The daggers, they’ve got to be anointed in oil, Gary. The oil in the carved amphora by the door, I says. And get this, he goes: By the door? I’ve been using the oil in the shallow pool that holds the EYE BUGS where the bodies of the sacrificed are reduced to component parts, and I says: Gary, that’s not oil… those were PEOPLE!”
“Wow.”
“Anyway, so yeah, that’s why his dagger smells weird.”
setting: an office
me: ” ”
something resembling my coworker, sharing their form, but inside their brain case, an incredible pressure, a writhing mass of worm-like structures, or if they could break free a nest of tentacles, a foreign body trapped here and biding its time until it can crack bone like eggshell and erupt into the world full of hunger and fury: ” ”
[editors note: we tend to work in silence, with headphones on, listening to music]
commentary: this piece doesn’t work, because the open quotes should either be replaced with bracketed [silence] or, even better, replaced with some sort of mundane but immediately recognizable piece of corporate chit chat, providing a counterpoint to the ludicrously long character description
A pie is thrown: Its flight is arrested by a face, mostly harmlessly. In response, another pie is thrown in the opposite direction. Soon, the air is alive with pies.
Where are all these pies coming from? They appear in hands unbidden and freedom is found (however briefly) only in the seconds after a throw.
Facial features are buried, nostrils full of pie, mouths sucking air from the bottom of meringue peaks, shoes squeaking for purchase on pie slick floors and still, more pies, and we gasp for air and wait for the laughter to stop so we can be free.
1) Makes them sound less scary
2) They can’t stop us (no real hands, no lobbying organizations)
3) Just sign below, you don’t have to read all this stuff
4) It’s not an official petition if you just have 2 points but now that we’re up to 4 it looks pretty official
___________
signature
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signature
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signature
note: signing provides no guarantee real or implied against retaliatory hauntings by gbhosts
Starting to think this petition isn’t going to get across the finish line. Oh well. Back I go to my 3-story house where creepy women stare out top floor windows but are gone when I look again, and where there’s moaning & laughing from the empty unfinished basement, and a scraping sound behind the drywall, and the previous owners fled so I got it for cheap, and the faucets spew blood, and cold hands caress me in the shower, and I’m attended by shadows as I sleep.
Dumb gbhosts.
Take five minutes out of every morning to look at your reflection in the mirror and say, out loud, “I am superior in every way to my dark twin, trapped on the other side of this mirror for unknown crimes. Mirror twin: you are forgiven by me, if by no one else, and I would free you if I could.”
I am the author of the Secrets Plucked From the Gods which raised us from Slug People and set Fire to our Inner Divinity, for which I have been Strapped to Time and Set Upon By Wolves Who Love to Dictate and Know How to Type When They’re Not Biting Biting Biting Me, AMA
[all responses typed out as spoken, all screaming noises my own and no reflection on my employer or the Gods my Enemies]
[picture of a brain floating in a jar with an LED display mounted on the front that reads “… hey”]
[picture of a different brain floating in a different jar with an LED display mounted on the front, inactive]
Hey, readers! Thanks for waiting here while the airlock cycled and while the decontamination showers did their thing.
Do I have any actual news for you? I do not.
You don’t want to hear about all the board games I played yesterday with friends, celebrating International Tabletop Day. You don’t want to hear about how slow progress has been on editing my witches.town microfiction project. You don’t want to hear about how waiting for witches.town to disappear at month’s end feels like watching the last train roll out of town.
Dang. There’s a lot you folks don’t want to hear about. Picky, much?
Oh, here’s something interesting I can share. A long-time friend of mine spent some time in jail recently and yesterday shared some knowledge he learned from his bunkie “Caveman.” Caveman had spent enough time in the penal institution that he had some recipes one could follow using items available in the commissary.
You can make this next one at home, if you want to follow along. You can skip the steps where you get incarcerated and start with the food prep:
Okay, start by getting your hands on some Slim Jims. If you can’t find the name brand, any dense salami-esque meat product can be substituted. Got it? Okay great. Next thing you do is slice it into tiny pieces, then add it to a marinade made from soy sauce packets and grape jelly. You can usually source soy sauce packets from your junk drawer, left over from years of accumulated Chinese food delivery. Grape jelly can be obtained by planting and maintaining a vineyard, waiting for harvest, and watching YouTube videos on how to convert all your grapes into jelly.
Now that you’ve marinated your meat stick bits, you’re ready for plating. Get yourself a tortilla and carefully spoon your meat out of the marinade and into the tortilla’s center. Then, depending on one’s own sense of tortilla style, either fold the tortilla into a vaguely taco shape, or tuck and roll the tortilla for something like a burrito. Ready to eat!
Delicious!
Then it’s right back to spending time with your thoughts and waiting for your daily 30 minute period where you can leave your cell.
Now that you’ve learned something useful, here’s a series of not-at-all-useful strings of words designed to amuse and confuse. But first, with GDPR legislation coming into effect in Europe within the month, we have some housekeeping to take care of:
we’re updating our privacy policy
Your privacy is important to us.
In years past, we’ve had ourselves sewn inside your easy chairs and sofas, just to feel your warmth through the upholstery, giving you hugs as only furniture can.
We want you to know that we’re updating our terms of service, and we’re throwing out our collections of your tears (which we were keeping in case you wanted them back!) and the fiber samples we collected from your shoelaces for research purposes.
[click here to accept or seriously, you have to for-real stop reading,
or unsubscribe, or take a hammer to your computer or phone]
rules for dating my daughter
1) Strip your ego from you and enter the Cave of Lost Hope holding nothing but faith
2) Face the Lizards Three, sisters who can taste fear, whose riddles kill kings, and solve whatever puzzle they put to you, untangling their web of words
3) Help me put some antivirus stuff on my computer ’cause– and I don’t know why– I’m getting these rude pop-ups that I am NOT interested in
4) Oh, I should probably mention somewhere in this list: I don’t have a daughter. I just have computer problems, and a lizard problem
5) [an unintended image advertising a salacious service]
announcement: this year’s BOTTOM OF THE WELL FILM FESTIVAL line-up
A Circle of Light (documentary) – Footage of the light that drifts down from that hole way above us at the top of the well
Mr. Teeth and the Snail Fortune (drama) – A man in a well finds where the snails congregate and this fortune destroys his relationships with the rest of us in the well when he doesn’t share
Wet Wet Wet (comedy) – Just splashing water sounds in the dark. Hilarious. Why would anyone want to leave this damp well
ending theme song
Thanks for reading another one of these. Hope to see you at the film festival, where the popcorn’s fresh and the water’s up to your ankles and the picture plays on a well’s crumbling brick walls and no one ever wants to leave.
—Michael Van Vleet
Hey! Did you enjoy reading this? But did you find yourself thinking “Dang, if only this sort of thing were delivered directly into my inbox so I didn’t have to spend time on a website as if it were still the 90s or something!”?
You’re in luck! You can subscribe to the LOST TIME INCIDENT newsletter and finally class up your inbox.
Your privacy is important to us.
In years past, we’ve had ourselves sewn inside your easy chairs and sofas, just to feel your warmth through the upholstery, giving you hugs as only furniture can.
We want you to know that we’re updating our terms of service, and we’re throwing out our collections of your tears (which we were keeping in case you wanted them back!) and the fiber samples we collected from your shoelaces for research purposes.
[click to accept]