He considers the darkened screen’s question without any signs of shame or remorse.
“Are you still watching?”
“Yes,” he replies to no one, with irritation in his tone, and no awareness that his escape has long since become a prison.
Sometimes I think maybe the American Amish were onto something, with respect to deciding when and how some technology is too much. But then I think about churning my own butter and press the button to continue watching.
“He left a note.”
“What does it say?”
“It says, ‘They’re gonna tell you that they found me, and that I am dead, but don’t believe them, even if they show you a body.’”
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If you’ve spent any amount of time talking to me, (and I mean any amount – I open conversations with strangers by bringing this up) you know that I’m pretty obsessed with the hyper-realistic face mask technology utilized by the CIA.
I’m also pretty sure this is where George R.R. Martin got his inspiration for ASoIaF’s “Faceless Men.” The thing is, though, this is real and not actually magic. People would be freaked out if the government confirmed the Federal Reserve Bank sent lieutenants out to enforce its will, using face stealing magical murderers, but nobody cares if intel agencies wield a similar but somewhat more mundane version of this ability.
Well… if you acknowledge that this tech exists, then its potential uses are enormous. You could use the masks for the purposes for which the CIA openly admits to using them – namely to allow spies to hide when cornered in a tight spot. But a little creative thinking opens up other possible uses, too. If you’re thinking altruistically, you could give burn victims their old face back – in a manner of speaking, anyway. You could use them to create a wider range of body double options for famous people. A nefarious group could use a person’s face, on someone else, to outright replace that person if he/she is becoming inconvenient. (I assume this is cheaper and more effective than cloning people.) You could put one of these masks on a dead body and convince even a person’s loved ones that he/she died, when in reality they just buried a mask of their loved one’s face on some other person’s body. (Maybe in that scenario their loved one is permanently off the grid of society now, for one reason or another.)
We know this technology exists. Yet almost nobody builds the knowledge into how they view what might be happening around them, in the world. Maybe it’s just easier to take what we see at face value, even if we know that it might be false. You probably can’t convince your friends and loved ones to switch from handshakes and hugs to pulling on each other’s noses, as a greeting, to make sure nobody is someone else in disguise.
The electricity has been off for nearly two and a half weeks and I must either join and likely die in the food riots outside or starve alone.
Someday my nameless forgotten skeleton will be discovered in a house filled with gold, silver, and jewels, or I must resign myself to being killed and having my house looted when someone finds out.
I never imagined, when blowing out the birthday candles, that having the most money in the world might have these unintended consequences.
I always like the idea of there being unintended consequences for self-gratification. I mean, if you had all of the money in the world, that would mean someone else doesn’t have it anymore, right? Society would fall apart pretty quickly. There’s something inherently “ill-gotten” about wished for riches, fame, etc. They weren’t earned so someone, somewhere, must pay a price for them.
As the gif might indicate, this story idea exists already and was done very well in a short horror story called “The Monkey’s Paw.”
I tried to think through what I might do if I found my house flooded with treasure. I’d be afraid to tell anyone. Maybe the smart thing to do would be to immediately tell the authorities… but that would absolutely bring in the media and the attention of those who were robbed via magic. You’d be afraid to turn on your car engine for the rest of your life. Society can’t have someone who has wishes like that granted, ever making similar wishes again.
If you tried to give it away, even covertly, it would eventually get traced back to you and the same thing would happen.
Your best bet might be to take a small amount of the treasure, change your name and effectively disappear. When your house and the loot is eventually discovered, hopefully you’re well hidden enough by then to stay that way. But that would be hard to pull off. So far, my best case scenario is that the granted wish would send one into something akin to a self-imposed witness protection.
Maybe wealth like that is limited to banks and dragons for a reason.
Despite the late hour, but just as he expected, Josh hears a light knock on his front door. When he opens the door, he sees a strikingly beautiful woman who smiles familiarly, before asking if she can come inside.
Months of preparation and training had not prepared him for the unnatural pounding of his heart in his chest, as he invites the vampire inside.
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When I was a kid, old people (the old people of those days, anyway) used to say that “nothing good happens after midnight.” Now that I am an old person of this present era, I think the phrase is more accurate than not.
One of the things that I like about writing in the super-short story format is that it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Is this woman a literal vampire? Does she just look like one? Is this a metaphor for inviting trouble into your house? What did he mean by training? Is the POV character an insane person about to do harm to someone? Is he a sane person about to try doing harm to someone supernatural? Does he mean no harm at all and he in fact trained for, uh, something else. You can kind of choose your own adventure.
The culture had a big vampire phase, a few years back. I still see it in some of the book smut (no offense) that some of my fellow bloggers review, but it does feel as though we hit peak vampire around the time that Twilight had them glittering in sunlight and it’s been a return to the blood-drinking mean since.
The vampire lore always seems to evolve to meet the needs or demands of the present-day culture. Depending on when you lived, throughout history, they were ugly and terrifying, or they were attractive and seductive. Sometimes male, sometimes female. It’s a very versatile baddie, to tell you the truth. One bit of lore that usually transfers and holds, with the changing of the times, is that you have to invite a vampire inside your home before it will enter. There’s something metaphorical or spiritual about that. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, though, unless some even higher power is allowing the vampire to roam, but limiting their terror to that condition.
There does seem to be a permanent anxiety in humanity toward this type of supernatural enemy – as if we have some kind of shared ancestral memory giving us warnings. Or maybe it’s just practical wisdom, collected over eons of human behavior. You probably don’t have to find out if vampires are real things to worry abut, though, provided that you don’t go looking for trouble, and you don’t invite it in.
Kylie’s little brother Jacob is an odd boy with a particularly peculiar recent habit, namely that he has been pulling open the manhole cover in their family’s front yard and speaking his thoughts down into the darkness below.
Both curious and disgusted, Kylie finally questions her brother as he is in the act about why he does this, and he answers that “sometimes I get reactions.”
Disturbed and a little nervous, she asks what he means, but as the words leave her lips she sees a small red heart float up out of the dark.
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This is obviously a metaphor for living one’s life online. However, I think it’s also an explanation about why that happens, too. From a distance, talking to strangers online – or to nobody and hoping to find strangers – might seem like a weird or even unhealthy thing to do. But there is something powerfully magical about speaking something personal into an abyss and getting a positive answer.
If little red hearts floated up out of the literal sewers when you talked into them, lots and lots of people would be doing it.
People also tend to be an unfiltered version of themselves (or at least a differently filtered version of themselves) when they’re online. Finding community or at least commonality for the more vulnerable or unhinged parts of yourself is reassuring in a way that filtered life might sometimes fail to be.
HOWEVER… the explanation for why we might stare into a digital abyss is not an argument that the action is healthy. Is it healthy to stick your head over a sewer for hours at a time, every day? Probably not. Same is true with being *too* online. I’m not talking about purposeful internet activity. I mean doom scrolling and constant posting on social media. People need the standard issue traditional relationships humans have always had. If little Jacob from the story chases the little red hearts too much, he eventually starves elsewhere socially. Hopefully his sister pulls him away instead of joining him.
I am reminded of the following quote:
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
This quote from Harry Potter might well apply to its primary readers – the generation of people who grew up with the internet. Let that little red heart reassure you, but then go out and live your life, too.
Ryan Brown’s vibrating cell phone wakes him up with over fifty notifications, all of them asking if he is okay, and nearly all relaying that they saw a story on the news about someone with his name jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge late the previous night.
Ryan is quite shaken, though, and far from “okay.” He distinctly remembers jumping and has no idea how or why he is back in his apartment this morning.
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You sometimes hear people say that it would be fun to attend your own funeral, just to see who shows up, how people react, etc. I guess this story is kind of an adjacent idea.
About 20 years ago, someone who shared my name and age died in a relatively well-publicized car accident just outside of my hometown. Quite a few people reached out both to me and also to my parents. All of that produced a strange mix of emotions, assuring people that I was fine and being touched that they reached out. You don’t always know how many people care about you.
A couple of months ago, I saw a story on the news about a woman who was planning to jump off a bridge, only to be talked back by Jon Bon Jovi. That real story seems almost as incredible as my fake one. I don’t know if there’s a celebrity I’d most want to see in my darkest moment, but it would be hard to top Bon Jovi under those circumstances.
If you ever have self-harming thoughts, please reach out and talk to someone.
Suicide Hotlines in The United States
| Crisis Text Line | Text HOME to 741741 |
| National Suicide Prevention Lifeline | 1-800-273-8255 |
| Trans Lifeline | 1-877-565-8860 (for the transgender community) |
| TrevorLifeline | 1-866-488-7386 (for LGBTQ youth) |
| Veterans Crisis Line | 1-800-273-8255, Press 1 |
After waking up, Brian immediately notices the breakfast scents wafting through his apartment and into his bedroom. In addition to taking in the aroma of bacon and eggs, he hears his pot of drip coffee make a gurgling sound as it finishes brewing.
The trouble is… Brian lives alone.
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Are there any circumstances wherein someone quietly breaking into your apartment to feed you is a good thing in the long run? On the other hand… breakfast food is delicious.
― William Faulkner
Kaitlyn has never cared much for Halloween, but she dutifully leads her son – dressed as “the Hulk” this year – from door to door so that he can collect candy and see his friends in their costumes. As they pass by an eerie-looking scarecrow, set out in front of an expensively decorated yard, she decides that she has had enough candy and creepiness for one night and tells the boy that they are going home.
Watching them set off down the street in the direction of their house, the scarecrow steps down onto the sidewalk and begins to follow.
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When I was a kid, people decorated for Christmas. You’d usually have a couple of houses in the neighborhood that really went all out, but most of it was pretty modest. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation was funny in part because of how over the top the Griswold family decorations were. What was once insane now seems not far from normal. Almost nobody decorated for Halloween.
Now I have neighbors with fake cemeteries in their front yards, giant inflatable ghosts and spiders in and around their house, and I occasionally run into yards that are just a little bit too realistic with their ghoulish decor.
In the event that you walk past one of those “that’s too realistic” houses while you and your offspring are questing for candy, keep your head on a swivel.
Hardly breathing, for fear that the sound might give away her location, Amanda hides as still as a stone behind a long-hanging shirt deep inside her bedroom closet. After a few long moments, her pursuer opens the door, his eyes racing over the small space, finally coming to a triumphant rest in her direction.
“I found you!” shouts the boy, before explaining to his sister that he noticed the toe of her shoe sticking out from beneath the shirt.
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Children’s games like Hide and Seek, or Tag, can feel a lot more intense when described from the child’s perspective. From the perspective of an 8 year old, her 9 year old brother’s pursuit might *feel* like this.
The waves crashed into my legs, almost knocking me over, but I righted myself and continued staring out at the endless blue water. Of all the ways I might have died, doing it alone on an island, thousands of miles from another living soul, was not a fate I had ever contemplated.
“On the bright side,” I thought, turning back toward the island, “I do have all of these dead people to keep me company.”
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Dusty Writes 