who am i?

Sometimes you just want to stick it to The Man. Motivations are unclear, but here we are, dressed in criminal black, holding up the lobby in a posh hotel. I'm not sure who we are. I'm not sure who I am, but I'm there with the best intentions. I want to stick it to The Man.

I step outside and keep walking until I can see the top of the building. The penthouse suite built on stilts seems to hover above the roof of the hotel. I reason that if The Man is anywhere he is in that penthouse. So I grab it. I grab the penthouse with my telekinetic powers and rip it off its stilts. It's too late when I notice the suite is built in the shape of a cruciform. I've already dropped the penthouse, caving in the roof, and the evil that the cross had sealed therewithin the hotel begins to spill out. A hoard of contorted humanoid forms erupt from the torn roof and descend the walls of the glass building like a swarm of spiders.

I run into the lobby of the hotel, and inside it is thick with miasma. The glittering gilt and clean lines are gone, replaced by oil slick swirls of nauseating color. I try to navigate the building that has now lost all sense of spacial reason, where doors lead to rooms with more doors.

I don't know what I'm looking for, but I am stopped when I reach a room where the rest of my team has gathered. Standing in a circle facing the center of the room, no one bats an eyelash when I join. They continue to argue as they had been doing before my arrival. Everyone is shouting irrationally, and it is overwhelming. Through the din I hear strings of coherent words, but the statement "my birthday is June 31st" catches in my mind. Because from what I know about my teammates, all of their birthdays are June 31st, which I just realize is odd and statistically improbable. Heck, even my birthday is June 31st.

But my birthday isn't June 31st: my birthday is July 21st.

My vision frighteningly warps in the nauseating smog of colors to panoramically encompass all the faces of my teammates at once. My mind begins to drown in the cacophonous noise.

"You're not real!" I shout, adding to the noise, trying to maintain my rational mind by giving a voice to my thoughts. There is no such thing as June 31st. "You're not real!" I shout repeatedly. This can't be real.

My perspective nauseously shifts again bringing my point of view outside my own body. I look down on the circle of shouting people from slightly behind and above my own head. I can see the short crop of my mousy brown hair. I can see my body is tense as I continue to try and shout over the others. But that body is that of a thirty-something, handsome, white man. My birthday is July 21st not June 31st. I am a twenty-five-year-old, Asian female. I am not who I am.

"We're not real," I whisper, and the room suddenly becomes quiet as everyone shuts up and snaps their heads. They turn their gazes upon me, upon the spot above my white male corporal form, with wide frightened eyes.

Crane Fly

On a summer night when it's warm enough to keep the windows open, I let the night air waft in from places both near and far: places that I'll probably never have the occasion to visit. Air that's been curling through the apartment of my impossibly handsome next-door neighbor, smelling of tobacco smoke and the heady perfume of his latest sexual conquest, momentarily decorates my chaste apartment with the undertones of a well-enjoyed life.

Through the open window, a particularly playful breeze accentuated by the post-coital chitterings of the couple next-door blows a crane fly into my apartment. Despite its menacing form the crane fly is an innocuous creature made mostly of negative space. The wind tickles the wings of the less than adroit flyer causing the insect to tumble in the air. I wonder how such a beast with such lovely, elegant limbs can be so graceless. When the crane fly escapes the current and regains its bearings, it flutters to the far wall and clings to the uneven paint with with quivering legs.

The cat and I stare at the fly on the wall with differing intentions. Unlike the cat, I know that the crane fly has spent the majority of its life in its formative years as a grotesque grub, a lawn pest gorging itself underground on grass roots, and it emerged fairly recently as this harmlessly delicate creature. I know that it will only live long enough in its adult form to mate, and amidst the subtle scent of sex I wonder if it has done so already. The cat, having stared long enough, leaps up to bat the bug with a swift paw. The crane fly narrowly escapes and takes to the air like a feather on the wind. In a bit of panic, I stand up to rescue it from the cat and certain doom. So with as much dexterity granted to a human female I attempt to capture the fluttering bug between my cupped hands, but my heart sinks when my left meets my right.

My small hands failed to wrap around the entirety of the creature. I see a part of a crumpled wing and the end of a thin leg poking out between the seal of my hands. I open my hands to find the crane fly alive and shuddering, skittering on my open palm. Despite my good intentions the crane fly is as good as dead: some things are just fragile like that. It beats its mangled wings and goes nowhere.

The cat looks up at me with wide eyes of approval and gently paws my knee expectantly. I drop the crane fly, and it floats down to meet its swift deliverance. I watch as the cat snacks on the delicate morsel, and when I start to hear the escalating sounds of round two from next-door, I close the window.

i dream in technicolor

I ride in the backseat of a vintage car with creme leather interior and an exterior painted in the most retro powder blue imaginable. It's a blue so dated that it feels like we could just disappear into the spotless sky on the horizon as we drive down this stretch of long flat desert road. With the windows open, the dry air whips my long black hair as we tear through the rising heat of the pavement.

We pull into the parking lot of a brick motel. The red "MOTEL" sign juts up into the sky like a beacon.

14. 20120727: rumor, medicine, stars

Rumor spread like wildfire saying that you had let the devil possess you, and that's why you could never, and would never, come back. But I waited for you every night under the oak tree. I knew you'd come back to take your buried treasure: a lunch pail filled with decaying clippings from forbidden publications, a collection of snail shells and pebbles, an old medicine bottle filled with sand, and an indecent photograph of your mother wearing almost nothing, laughing.

And when you came to claim your treasure I could see that your dark eyes that had once sparkled like stars burned with hellfire.

Then you said, "I've seen it, John. The ocean. The water is so cool, and the sun is so bright. Did you know the sun is just another star, but closer? Imagine, John, all those stars, burning."

To the list of other pieces inspired by random words.

13. 20120726: dragon, word, toilet paper

Word on the street was that Mr. Li had called the cops on Ronny Hooser's party. So they, the young, the fearless, and the righteous, had silently gathered in his yard to TP his home.

As if, despite the muffled shuffles of their feet and the hushed tones of their words, the energy of their quiet concentration blared on an alternate level, Li stirred from his sleep to see toilet paper streaming across his bedroom window.

Thin paper, backlit by the soft exterior lights of his house, danced like a dragon ascending, rising up towards the heavens. So with awe Mr. Li witnessed the beauty of youth's fearsome vindictive spirit.

To the list of other pieces inspired by random words.

12. 20120725: old man, hammer, forest

After Mom died it was just me and Pops, Mom's old man. She died when I was eight. I never knew my father. He knocked her up and died in the war before I was born. At least I had Pops.

The night after Mom's funeral I couldn't sleep. A lot of things kept me from sleeping, but there was only one thing that night that kept me awake.

From the woods behind our house I heard violent sounds of a beast unlike that I had ever heard before. Howling. Thrashing. Thumping. Crashing. Crying. It sounded like someone, or something, was being attacked. Dying.

8. 20120623: carousel, fatigue, tartan, wheelchair, news, hand, scallop, door

All those years together I thought that you couldn't make my heart beat faster than you did when you kissed me on the carousel on our first date, my hair catching on the button of your hideous tartan jacket.

But then there was that accident.

6. 20120620: robot, aid

A sexdroid. I got her used, an older model that had not yet escaped the uncanny valley. Her female form is fleshier than the current trends advocate. Huge titties. Her coiffed platinum blonde hair and red-painted lips evoke a far bygone era.

It's not really to my tastes, but it was the best I could afford with the all the money I had left.

She came dressed in a five-piece naughty nurse outfit: crop top, micro mini, right shoe, left shoe, and cap. No bra. No panties.

5. 20120619: spar, sole

He liked hiking. Alone. It was about the only thing that kept him sane, grounded, and sociable in the meantime. Recently, it seemed she had become the sole reason he had to trek up that mountain.

So when she asked if she could join him the next time, all he said was "no." But his sparse reply put her in a sparring mood and sparked a venomous response, which he endured through gritted teeth.

At the end of it she packed her bags; he went hiking.

With her gone his steps were light. Overlooking the city from higher than he had ever been since before he had met her, he wondered when it was that she had become the sole reason he had to come down from that mountain.

He continued, still skyward, the veins of feldspar under the soles of his hiking boots sparkling like the tears that had run down her cheeks.

To the list of other pieces inspired by random words.

A Story in 420 Characters (or less including spaces)

On a morning so cold that even the air has frozen in place, I and a portly stranger, for a moment, share a square of sidewalk. In his hands is a to-go cup from which he sips and exhales deeply. Seeming more bizarrely intimate than that goodbye kiss, I hesitate to inhale his breath that lingers in the frigid air. The chilled breath, a taste like chocolate milk, assuages the bitter tang of breakup over morning coffee.