tooth soup

photo credit: Sam Ili?

nebulous/tenacity/birthplace

from Steph’s prompt

The road trip down to the farm started out awkward. The radio tuner on my ute doesn’t work and my sister has always had a bit of trouble with silence, so she determinedly filled the air up with stories about her job in the city, and kept filling it up until I had to wind down the window just to get a breath. At that point she looked at me sideways and apologised. She didn’t say anything for a while and and neither did I, though I knew it killed her. Just when I knew she was about to burst from the fidget of her hands, I asked her about someone or other that she’d been gossiping about before the silence, and she picked it up just as if she’d never stopped, smiling gratefully at the chance to talk.

We were making the trip because we hadn’t in a while. That was it, really. My father and mother were still in good health, and the farm was still doing okay though they had a lot more farmhands than they used to, to make up for the creaking of bones. The reason for our visit was simply the fact that it had been almost a year since we had; our family, while small, wasn’t particularly close knit. Thanks to my sister’s water-cooler tirade, I now knew more about her co-workers than I did about her.

This fact brought me up short. I took my hand from where it guarded the gear stick and rested it on her shoulder. She quieted. “Sis, that’s great and all, but how are you?”

I learned more about my sister on the rest of that trip than I ever knew before.

photo credit: freefotouk

falling man/closed room/two-heads

from Amber’s prompt

“This,” the detective-inspector said, with as much gravity as he could muster, “is what’s called a `closed room’ mystery.” He paced the perimeter of the crime scene, a basement in the suburbs. “A door that can only be locked, and formidably so, from the inside. A head like a punctured melon, decapitated from a body like a piece of beef jerky.”

“It certainly looks grim, sir,” offered one of the constables.

“Of course it looks bloody grim! No way in or out, no murder weapon. I mean, just look at his face; except you can’t because he doesn’t have one any more!” The D-I spun on his heel and approached the body. “Yes, definitely signs of a struggle, though I dare say he was surprised by the attacker. Just look, there’s barely any evidence of defensive tactics. No knife wounds on the forearms, only the body. How much would you say the victim weighs, constable?”

“Oh, I don’t know. One-ten, one-twenty kilograms, sir?”

“I’d say closer to one-forty, but right you are. He’s a big lad, and built too, not just flabby. Yes, you’d expect he’d have had a good go at any unknown assailant. Which means this must have been someone he knew, or at least trusted enough not to suspect an attack.”

“What are you think, sir?”

“I’m thinking…” the D-I sat down on his haunches behind the constables turned back and took out a small metal object. “I’m thinking that the victim’s future-nemesis came through a time portal around about here, stabbed him to death with an electrical whip dagger of some kind, then used a remote wormhole generator to escape.”

The constable blinked and turned around. “Sorry, just what did you say your division–?”

But the D-I had disappeared.

Stress is a

funny thing. It’s a fact of modern times that our lives have become more stressful. I’ve had due course to experience my fair share of stresses during my educational career: assignment deadlines, public speaking, and, of course, examinations. But as I approach the end of my Ph.D. stress has become a kind of background noise. Much like a high-pitched hum in your ear is a sign that you will soon never hear that particular tone again, this constant buzz of stress has become the indicator that soon, on the other side of submitting my Thesis, I will never have to be this hung up on a deadline ever again.

Consequently, I’ve started going a bit mental.

For a start, there’s the more-than-usually obsessive behaviour concerning blogs that I visit. If yours is one of the blogs I comment on and you’ve seen a general trend towards higher pageviews per week, that’s probably me. What used to be an during-coffee-breaks activity has become a between-thought-processes one. I write a sentence, whoop, how’d Firefox get up there? Well, better go look at a couple of blogs quickly while it is. Aaand back to work. Next sentence, rinse, repeat. It’s like I’m some kind of hyperactive social networking Jack-fucking-Russell.

Secondly, there’s the increasingly short fuse I have towards people asking me when my thesis is going to be due/how I’m going on my thesis. This can be usefully illustrated with the below graph:

It’s insane. And these are people I generally like. Heaven forbid a friend gets a new boy/girlfriend who sweetly asks what I’m studying and how long I’ve got left to go. I’ll be picking their flesh from between my teeth for weeks.

But the worst thing is how my brain keeps coming up with ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with my Thesis and finishing it off. The prime offender being stories (or exercises for me to post up on my blog so that I can write stories, bravo self), but also ideas for websites, workshops, places I can go on holiday, things I want to do for Lou, all sorts! It’s as if my right brain is tired of my left brain going on and on and has thrown manners out the window and taken to just butting in whenever it bloody well feels like. Working on a chapter for molecular mechanics and out of the blue, a potential story for the Twelfth Planet Press `Speakeasy’ anthology leaps to mind. Or an idea for a pitch to the Voiceworks folk. Or a stupid blog post explaining all this. Gah! Brain!

Also the title is a reference to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World which you should all go and see immediately. Brilliant, funny, technically accomplished. 4.5 stars from me.

photo credit: L.Brumm Photography

Tunguska/detrimental/vacillate

from Todd’s prompt

When a novice astronomer comes to our organisation and claims to have spotted an Earth-destroying meteor with his backyard telescope, it’s usually a quick and easy procedure to prove them wrong. But when a professional such as myself, working in one of the largest facilities for scanning the near-space of Earth, finds the very same thing? It’s kind of a big deal.

Or at least it would be, if I had told anybody about it yet.

Despite the Hollywood cliche, the best method is still to nuke the meteor at regular intervals in order to push them off course. I’ve done my own calculations and if they’re at all correct, this big boy would require a joint effort of just about every single nuke that’s officially stored around the world to knock it out of our ballpark. I also know that unless those nukes are launched by next Sunday, we’re pretty screwed.

So I figure I’ll let them know this coming Monday. Or Maybe Tuesday, I’m not sure yet. I think of it as a test. If the human race can stop bickering enough to get this thing sorted in the space of a week, we’ve earned our right to survive. If not, well, at least we’ll leave a bunch of nice bones for our followers to puzzle over.

photo credit: Smithsonian Institution

silver/scarecrow/eat

from Lucy’s prompt

All in all, the yield from this asteroid cluster had been a good one for the Allegreta family. For twenty years they had chipped, crushed, and exploded the `roids for the precious metals and organics that sat patiently within their porous structure. The tiny pod enclosure that had been their house had grown as the credits they received from sending their crop off to market rolled in. First a refinement plant, then a nursery, and finally a complete renovation to include the rooms necessary for their growing dynasty. The Allegreta family had profited modestly well from the space mining business.

There were precautions to be made, of course. A great deal of these dealt with the prospect of bandits. Groups of ships that would fly into a successful miner’s stake and spirit away an asteroid or two with explosive hooks or—in the slicker operations—tractor beams. The Allegreta family dealt with this in two ways. The first was to have one of the older generation on standby in a scout fighter equipped with a boomstick; a giant ship-mounted laser that could peel the hull of a bandit’s ship with a single shot. The other way was devised by an ingenious cousin one day when looking at all the waste material, mostly non-precious metals, that was produced as a byproduct of the refinement process.

“Can’t we do anything with this stuff, Papa?” he asked Jakob, the operations manager of the time. Jakob shook his head, but the little cousin frowned and kept thinking on it. Eventually, after much concern by his parents over his obsession, he came up with the idea of a dummy fleet. A set of huge, metal sculptures placed at the corners of their fields with enough electronics in them to give them the resemblance of possessing a boomstick each. Needless to say, he was the first Allegreta in 20 years to be sent away to university.

photo credit: Pro-Zak

potential/consider/light

from Jaime’s prompt

The day was so sunny and warm that Carl had decided to sit outside to eat his ham and salad sandwich. As he relaxed his buttocks into the grooves in the park bench and took great, cheek-stuffing bites of his sandwich, he closed his eyes and considered himself completely at peace. That peace was interrupted some seconds later as a short, sharp crack to the side of his head rammed his eyelids open and caused him to swear bits of lettuce onto the path.

Carl looked down and saw that a tiny chunk of light had landed in his lap. It squirmed there, alternating between its wave and particle natures, before settling into a half-state akin to that of a glow worm. Carl set his sandwich aside and picked up the light delicately between thumb and forefinger and placing it on his palm. `Poor little guy,’ he murmured. `Can’t decide what you want to be, eh? Never mind, we’ve all been there.’ The chunk of light continued to roll around miserably. Carl sighed. `Listen, you just need to take stock of your options and make your decision to the best of your knowledge. And keep in mind that making these decisions doesn’t necessarily close the door on anything you might want to do in the future.’ The light paused mid-wriggle. `In fact,’ continued Carl, `quite often you’ll open doors to places you might never have considered. Probably the worst thing you can do is not make a decision.’

The light stayed stationary for a moment, and then rolled onto its side and thinned out, becoming a two-dimensional wavelet and scooting off into the air. Carl waved and sat back on the bench to continue his moment of sandwich. It really was about time he handed in his notice.

photo credit: SpirosK

Byzantine/refrigerator/alley*

from Matt’s prompt

The lights of Vegas dribbled across the alley, reflected as they were in the oily juice that seeped out of garbage bins and assorted boxes lining the walls. Sifting through this detritus were two men engaged in a constant chatter as they wrecked fingernails prying open tin cans in search for items of some vague value.

“Do you think perhaps we will uncover the famed secret gold of Lord Ganasse tonight, Roger?” said one, his words slurring together even as his eyes drifted apart.

“I deem it most likely, Damien. Most likely,” the other replied, listing in his stride until he ended up falling sideways into a stack of mouldy newspapers. From his newsworthy recliner, Roger pointed at a rusted refrigerator with its door lolling open. “There, Damien, a cold case for you to open.”

“Right away, sir,” replied Damien, and stumbled towards the fridge. Upon reaching it and yanking it sdoor open, he stood stock still and, in a voice that sounded slightly less like his words were cars in a highway pile-up, said “Roger, my dear fellow, I think you’d better come here.”

After a few failed attempts, Roger gained his feet and wandered over to where Roger stood transfixed. He gasped as he saw what was contained within the whitegoods. A man, dressed in Roman garb, bloodied and broken in as many places as was presumably necessary to fit a six-foot-tall human into a space much less than that.

“Good Lord, I think you’ve stumbled onto something here, Damien. A Byzantinian Emperor, preserved in a freezing box in order to preserve his life until he could reanimate and resurrect his legions of power!” Roger’s voice rose to a shout and he slammed the door shut, grabbed his friend by the hand and fled the imagined wrath of a murdered ex-employee of the Caesar’s Palace casino.

—

*Characters shamelessly based on That Mitchell And Webb Look‘s Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and co.

photo credit: `?ccdoh1?

platypus/starving/vintage

from Irene’s prompt

It’s about ten minutes until my year eleven ball and my mother is coming as close to swearing as I have ever heard her.

`Geoffrey, honest-to-goodness why didn’t you wear the towel while you ate like I said?’ She is bent over the wreckage of my suit, examining it for any salvageable material. ‘The cummerbund and pants are okay, but the rest is ruined. We’re going to have to fix you up with something else.’

That something else emerges from the bags of my Grandpa’s clothing that are still stored in the tops of the hallways cupboards. A faded grey waistcoat and jacket that is completely at odds with my black dress pants. `A shirt,’ says Mum, `we still need a shirt.’

At this point my father steps in, offering a dark blue dress shirt. I take all the clothes and stalk into my room, slamming the door shut in a burst of self-pity. I change into the my new outfit and stand back to admire the damage. I look like some kind of kid-man-grandpa hybrid. A generational griffin. Or a platypus. I am a fucking fashion platypus.

The doorbell rings downstairs. I traipse down to where my date, Lucy, is waiting. Upon seeing her I forget that I look like a complete tool. She’s stunning. Absolutey.

She looks up at me under painted eyelashes and laughs. `Oh my, Geoff. You’re going to be popular.’

I laugh and blush and shuffle down to where she waits. `Yeah, well, so are you. Just for all the right reasons.’ She hooks her arm through mine and we head out towards the limosine; the platypus and the swan.

photo credit: IslesPunkFan

mekons/sunset/pines

from Zak’s prompt

Daniel was scared. His father sat at the dinner table, arms spread out and hands set as if to get up from his seat. But he was frozen, breathing deeply with his eyes downcast at the knotted wooden tabletop. His mother, so relaxed only moments before, was nervously stroking her apron down over the length of her dress. She looked over at Daniel and gave a weak smile, `Go play outside for a moment, honey. Daddy and I have to talk a while.’ Daniel asked his father’s permission to leave the table and was granted it in a gruff whisper. Daniel raced to his bedroom, snatching the comic book he had borrowed from his best friend at school, before running out the back door and towards the tall pine forest that stretched out behind their property.

It took him some time traipsing across the carpet of pine needles to find a seat in the form of a fallen bough. Once there, he stared intently at the cover of the comic book, eyes gliding over the stark red and yellow lettering. `Dan Dare–World’s No.1 Space Hero‘ it said, and `His Most Dangerous Mission Yet: To Infiltrate The Evil Mekon’s Lair On Venus!‘. The bulbous green head of the alien contrasted against the square cut of Dan Dare’s chin. Daniel flipped open the cover and began reading the adventure. When he finished it, he read it through again, and once more before the sun set and there was no longer any light to read by. As he heard the front door slam and his father’s truck grumble into life, Daniel searched the night sky for the bright beacon of Venus, starting at it until his eyes watered and his lips shook.