tooth soup

photo credit: Swamibu

purple/apocalyptic/tortoise

from Red’s prompt

On the day the universe was destroyed, Timothy was visiting the zoo. He had just arrived at the reptile enclosure, marching past the various venomous snakes and basking lizards to where his favourite animal of all was crouched in an environment of sand and shrub. As Timothy pressed his palms and nose up against the glass, the tortoise within opened its beaked mouth in an imitation of a yawn. Timothy smiled and stared at the tortoise’s stumpy legs and its patterned shell as it marched off into a corner to munch on a sheaf of lettuce that had been left there.

Approximately eighteen-thousand kilometres away in a lab in North America, a team of scientists had completed the final checks for a machine they believed could lower the temperature of an object to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero. Unfortunately for them they had done their work too well, and upon activating the machine, space-time developed a rip where the object’s temperature had dipped down past zero Kelvin. This rip became a tear, then a hole, and then all at once the universe unfolded like a giant protein chain. It bent and busted and reoriented itself, much like an overweight man trying to find a comfortable position on a bean-bag too small for his frame. Once the universe had found what seemed like a comfortable position, it relaxed and reformed.

All this reordering took only a fraction of a second. Timothy continued to admire the tortoise and the rich, purple mosaic that adorned its carapace. The tortoise itself–completely aware of the cosmic fracturing that had just occurred–observed his change in physiology, let out a small hiss, and went back to munching on its lettuce leaf.

photo credit: zen

slalom/hunchback/periodic

from dan’s prompt

Every two weeks he appears like clockwork. Against the smooth glide of trolley wheels on polished floors, his unnatural gait is a shout that turns the head of all that stalk the aisles. At full stretch he can see the second shelf; any higher and he has to ask a passer-by if he’s close in an awkward game of hotter colder. He dresses formally, even to the supermarket. The reason is obvious: button-up dress shirts and loose-fitting jackets are all that can slide over the volcanic landscape of his upper back.

None can know the adage of putting one foot in front of the other as well as he does. This narrow field of vision results in a daily slalom back and forth as the brightly coloured flags of other people’s feet bend and shudder when he shoulders past them. Apologies grew old as he did, so nowadays he uses a radar of vaguely aggressive mumbling to sound out those in front of him. The checkout girls know him best of all, standing aside as he pays for his meagre groceries. They don’t mind that he never meets their gaze or that the fingers gripping cash sometimes brush against their shoulders.

The walk home is a reminder. The horizon has been sinking slowly over the years, and on the sloping downhill of his street it dips beneath his brow. Once he has unpacked the groceries he will duck out into the backyard where a mattress flattens grass, to lie down and watch the clouds as they pass in paths ordinarily unseen.

No related posts.